Jeanine Pirro dropped the felony vandalism case against David Hearn on Friday and accused Doug Burgum’s Interior Department of hiding evidence from her own prosecutors. Hearn is the 67-year-old former Olympic canoeist who touched the water in the reflecting pool, and for that he got arrested and indicted by a grand jury.

Here’s what Interior had in writing the whole time. May 14, the new sealant failed. June 11, the contractor emailed to say the peeling came from overspray during installation, not knives. The liner failed on its own. On July 1, Interior officials walked Pirro’s prosecutors around that pool and, in her words, “not one of them mentioned it.” Hearn was indicted the next day.

Four days later Burgum went on CNN and said there were box cutters and there was, quote, “no possible way” this was anything but vandalism. So either he never read his own department’s emails, or he read them and went on television and lied. Pick one.

And Trump started all this. He ordered the work in April, said it would take a week, set the deadline at the Fourth of July, and skipped the bidding to hand it to a Virginia company whose qualification was doing the pools at his golf club. First federal job they’d ever had. It’s now over sixteen million dollars. The rush job peeled, and a 67-year-old got the indictment for it.

Then Saturday, after his own U.S. attorney put all of this in writing, Trump posted that he disagrees with Pirro “100%.” He doesn’t care about the evidence, he cares about never being wrong. This is a narcissistic man baby who’s spent his whole life believing that if he says a thing loudly enough it becomes true.

Michael Boren, Trump’s Under Secretary of Agriculture, is fast-tracking a four hundred foot deep radioactive open pit mine in northeastern Wyoming, fourteen air miles from Devils Tower. That’s the rock from Close Encounters. It’s also Bear Lodge, sacred to more than twenty Northern Plains nations, and the first national monument Teddy Roosevelt ever created.

You get thirty days to comment, closing August 28, and that’s it. No draft study. No objections process. Normally you’d read the agency’s findings, argue with them, and formally object, and somebody would have to answer you in writing. Boren is signing this one himself so none of that applies. Fourteen counties and agencies got a formal seat at the review. Not one tribal nation did. Will Pattiz at More Than Just Parks broke this and built the comment tool.

Thirty Minnesota water systems were hit by a cyberattack this week, one of at least seven states the FBI warned about Thursday. Trump, in front of his cabinet: “I would blame it on Minnesota and the governor, the corrupt governor of Minnesota. They like to say, oh, is Iran? Iran should be so lucky.” He didn’t mention the governor of a single one of the other six states. Walz’s response: “Trump can’t beat Iran because he’s too busy waging war with Minnesota.” DOGE also gutted the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, whose entire job is stopping exactly this.

And Todd Blanche still isn’t attorney general. He was supposed to be confirmed this week. He wasn’t, because Senators John Cornyn and Thom Tillis are holding him over the anti-weaponization fund. That’s one point seven seven six billion dollars of your money, set aside to pay people who say they were political targets, and it came out of a settlement of a lawsuit Trump filed against a government he runs. That same settlement permanently barred the IRS from auditing him, his sons, and his companies.

Blanche testified the fund is dead. Cornyn asked him to put it in writing. He won’t, and Friday showed why. Trump appealed the ruling that called the whole lawsuit an attempt “to manipulate the judicial process.” He’ll say the fund is dead all day, but he’s in court fighting to keep the settlement, and the settlement is what keeps the IRS away.

Then Trump posted that he’d happily pull Blanche’s name and put him back once Cornyn and Tillis are gone in January. Blanche runs the department as acting attorney general either way. The only thing two Republican senators can actually withhold from the man is a job title.

Rapid fire. The State Department showed a map at an international AIDS conference in Rio that mislabeled every country on it. Nigeria, which has a coastline, landlocked in the Sahara. Mozambique relocated to the Horn of Africa. Reuters found an AI watermark on it, so a chatbot drew Africa for a room full of African health ministers and nobody at State looked before it went up. The machine that ate the entire internet still can’t find Nigeria. New filings in the James Comey seashell case allege federal officials misled judges and withheld evidence. And the White House ordered 250 Cadillac Escalades because, quote, “we look sharp in those Escalades.”

That’s your week in tyranny. Welcome to the golden age.

Sources:

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/8/1/trump-administration-to-dismiss-reflecting-pool-charges-against-david-hearn

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5932337-lincoln-memorial-reflecting-pool-algae/

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/6002858-trump-blames-minnesota-for-cyberattacks-iran/

https://thehill.com/newsletters/morning-report/5998751-todd-blanche-confirmation-delay-cornyn-tillis-gop-scorn/

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/6003015-trump-appeals-irs-lawsuit-ruling/

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/7/31/us-government-mislabels-countries-on-map-of-africa-at-global-conference

Follow More Than Just Parks and

The Arizona Supreme Court ruled unanimously Thursday that a church, and not a judge, and not a jury, gets to decide what counts as a confession. Which means two Mormon bishops who knew a man was sexually abusing his own daughter will never stand trial for saying nothing. Paul Adams of Bisbee, a Border Patrol agent, told Bishop John Herrod back in 2011. Herrod called the church help line, which is staffed by church lawyers, and the lawyers told him not to call the police. Adams told a second bishop. Then he told an entire disciplinary council, a room full of people who listened to a man describe abusing his child and decided the matter was handled. They excommunicated him. That was it. That was the consequence. He kept his job, his house, and his children, and he abused that daughter for as many as seven more years and then abused her infant sister too. He was arrested in 2017 because cops in New Zealand found the videos he had been posting online. Nobody in that room ever picked up a phone.

On Thursday the court blessed all of it. Vice Chief Justice John Lopez wrote that the First Amendment bars courts from second-guessing how a clergy member applies his own doctrine, so the church defines confession, the church decides whether it has to report, and the court takes the answer on faith. Then the justices volunteered that if Arizona lawmakers ever try to close this loophole, they should expect that law struck down too. Nobody asked them. They just wanted the legislature to know.

Ohio Congressman Max Miller’s ex-wife filed a new restraining order against him Thursday, and Donald Trump has no plans to pull his endorsement. Emily Moreno alleges in court filings and police records that Miller threw hot water on her chest and stomach, held a gun to her head, threw her against a wall hard enough to leave a grab mark, and fractured their two year old daughter’s collarbone. The police report has her recounting that same two year old saying “Daddy kill you.” Mother Jones obtained those records and broke the story. Miller denies all of it, sued her for defamation, filed his own domestic violence charge against her, then dropped it this week. Emily’s father is Bernie Moreno, a sitting Republican senator, and when NOTUS asked him whether his party should take Miller off the ballot, he said, “I don’t know.” My dude. That’s your daughter. Republicans spent months demanding Democrats answer for Graham Platner, their Senate nominee in Maine, and when he was accused of sexual assault his own party had him off the ballot in two days. Republicans have police reports, a toddler with a broken collarbone, a deadline of August 9, and a strategy of standing very still.

And the man they all take their cues from spent this week asking the Supreme Court to throw out E. Jean Carroll’s eighty three million dollar defamation verdict, on the grounds that publicly calling a woman a liar about her own sexual assault was part of his official duties as president. Official duties. He also had his Justice Department petition the Court to swap the United States government in as the defendant, which would erase the case entirely, because federal law does not let anyone sue the government for defamation. The eighty three million disappears, the jury’s verdict disappears with it, and Carroll walks away with nothing. So the sitting President of the United States, found liable for sexually abusing this woman, is asking nine justices to put it in writing that smearing your sexual assault victim is presidential. FML

Elon Musk’s xAI sued Minnesota this week to block a law banning apps that let users generate fake nude images of real people. The law takes effect today, and it fines the company that built the tool five hundred thousand dollars a picture, which is the part Musk cannot live with. His lawyers argue the statute is too broad and sweeps in protected speech, while also stating that xAI already prohibits generating nude images of real people without consent. So he is in federal court fighting for a right his company swears it never uses. The complaint warns exposure could hit fifty billion dollars, a number that only exists if you assume a hundred thousand violations, which means somebody at xAI ran that math on their own product and filed it publicly. Back in March I told you Grok was generating sixty seven hundred sexualized deepfakes an hour and Musk answered with laughing emojis. Governor Tim Walz’s complete public statement was “See you in court, creep.”

Speed round. The Justice Department cut a seven figure check to Paul Vaughn, one of the activists Trump pardoned for blockading an abortion clinic in Tennessee, who then sued the government over his prosecution and won, and his lawyers say the other twenty two pardoned blockaders are lined up for theirs. An Idaho crisis pregnancy center, the anti-abortion storefronts Republicans call a replacement for real clinics, talked a hospital across the state line into lending it an actual OBGYN, then handed him a form requiring him to swear to sexual purity and a heterosexual marriage. He refused, and the hospital canceled the whole arrangement the next day. And Kansas votes on abortion Tuesday, except the ballot does not mention abortion. Four years ago Kansans voted to keep it legal, so this time the question is whether to start electing the state supreme court, which is how you replace the judges instead of asking the voters again.

Stay angry. Stay loud. Under Her Eye.

The pitch is critical minerals and not being dependent on China. The mechanism is the Defense Production Act, the wartime law we used in the pandemic to build ventilators. Today it’s being used to buy stock.

Because on the same day Trump reversed the denial, the federal government bought ten percent of Trilogy. Thirty five million dollars of your money, plus the right to buy more at a penny a share once the road is finished, plus a seat on the board. So the people deciding whether to build the road are holding stock that only pays out if they build it. That isn’t a conflict of interest. That’s a business model. The stock tripled before lunch. The deal closes today.

The feds bought the stock. Alaska pays for the road. The state’s development authority puts that at three hundred fifty million. An independent study in January put it over two billion once you count maintenance and interest, and the state borrows that money by selling bonds. Alaska expects about a billion back in mining taxes. Of course Trump supports an infrastructure plan where the business plan is losing a billion dollars and calling it growth.

The route crosses 2,932 streams and rivers. Not a fun fact. A damage estimate. Interior’s own review said this road would damage critical food sources for Alaska Native communities who have hunted and fished there for thousands of years. Not a hobby. Food. And the caribou herd is already down two thirds, so the fix is tear up the land haul trucks through what’s left.

And the damage can’t be undone. The Bureau of Land Management denied the permit in 2024 for exactly those reasons. The food, the villages, the permafrost. Their scientists, their review, their answer. No. So Trump went looking for a workaround, and Alaska’s delegation had buried one in the 1980 law that created the park, a clause letting you appeal an agency’s no straight to the President. It sat there forty six years like a fire axe behind glass. He broke the glass, and every agency that said no had to turn around and say yes.

The good news is the lawsuits are alive. Tanana Chiefs Conference has been fighting this since 2020, and ten more groups joined in January through Trustees for Alaska, the nonprofit law firm carrying the case. Court is where this road has been stopped before, so if you’ve got twenty bucks, that’s where it does the most good. And follow Will and Jim Pattiz at More Than Just Parks, about the only people still telling you it’s happening.

Because cut that road and the land does not come back. Not in your life, not in your kid’s. Interior said so themselves. There is no putting it back.

Sources:

Follow More Than Just Parks

https://trilogymetals.com/news-and-media/news/trilogy-metals-announces-strategic-investment-by-us-federal-government/

https://alaskapublic.org/programs/alaska-economic-report/2025-12-11/to-ambler-mining-company-u-s-government-is-both-investor-and-regulator

https://www.newsminer.com/news/local_news/report-ambler-road-could-cost-at-least-2-billion/article_2734294c-b052-4203-84b0-0976866ab94e.html

https://alaskawild.org/true-cost-of-ambler-road/

https://biologicaldiversity.org/w/news/press-releases/legal-filing-challenges-trump-approval-of-ambler-mining-road-through-national-preserve-2026-01-23/

https://www.tananachiefs.org/tanana-chiefs-conference-condemns-decision-to-advance-ambler-road/

Congress put an exemption in last year’s big beautiful bullshit bill for people who are medically frail. Cancer, serious mental illness, disability. Oz’s agency took that list and added a second door. You have to be on the list, and prove it stops you from working eighty hours a month. Congratulations on your tumor, please proceed to the paperwork.

This lands on people who already couldn’t get disability. Qualify for Medicaid as disabled and none of this touches you. The expansion population is everybody who didn’t clear that bar, and two thirds of first-time disability claims get denied. Deciding who’s too sick to work is what Social Security does. It takes them medical records, two years, and a judge. Now a Medicaid clerk does it over the phone.

The government explained itself in writing, which was generous of them. Their brief says the exemptions are too broad, then gives an example, direct quote. Do asthmatics and diabetics have a serious or complex disorder if they are not functionally limited. Are you fecking kidding me. Lawyers for the United States filed a document worried that asthmatics might be pulling a fast one.

Every state builds its own list of qualifying diagnoses. Why? The number two at the Center for Medicaid, on her own agency’s podcast. Would it have been great if we could have produced a whole list for them? Sure, that would have taken us a lot longer than the deadline. They were on a schedule. So fifty states get to guess. Nebraska’s guess runs three hundred pages.

Nebraska went early, in May, and starts dropping people this week. Since launch the health department canceled every meeting it held with patient and provider groups. Hospitals asked how many had been denied and got nothing back.

In Louisiana, Kathy Oubre runs the Pontchartrain Cancer Center. Her state won’t tell providers which patients are on expansion Medicaid, so she’s calling all of them. Her words: we are completely flying blind.

The whole thing saves three hundred eighty-five billion dollars over ten years by cutting five million people loose. Except emergency rooms have to treat you anyway, so the bill doesn’t vanish, it moves. Safety net hospitals lose up to two point eight billion, and they run a third of the country’s level one trauma units. The savings go to the tax cuts. The costs go to whoever gets hit by a car.

And diabetes and asthma are exactly the conditions where losing coverage is what makes you functionally limited. The insulin is the reason you can work. The inhaler is the reason you can work. Take the coverage and you manufacture the disability you just finished arguing they didn’t have.

Sources:

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/07/28/trump-dems-court-battle-over-medicaid-work-requirements-01013114

https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/5946392-lawsuit-trump-medicaid-exemptions/

https://www.statnews.com/2026/06/04/medicaid-work-requirements-final-rule-cancer-patients/

https://ccf.georgetown.edu/2026/07/02/medicaid-work-reporting-requirements-states-ask-a-federal-court-to-protect-medically-frail-individuals-from-cms-overreach/

https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/2025/sep/impact-medicaid-work-requirements-hospital-revenues-margins

The rest of the charges are in a 162-page report the White House dropped on the Fourth of July. It objects to the Hamilton costumes. It objects to Mickey Mouse. It objects to P.T. Barnum, to Wild West shows, and, I am not embellishing, to ukuleles. Somewhere in the West Wing a grown adult got handed the ukulele file.

It also flags a magazine cover it calls “nude young women,” filed under material inappropriate for children. That cover is Entertainment Weekly, 2003. It’s the Dixie Chicks, who said they were ashamed the President was from Texas, got run off country radio for it, and posed nude to protest the Iraq War. That’s an Iraq War artifact. I was in Iraq. It belongs in a museum.

On Hamilton, the complaint is that a placard called Alexander Hamilton an “influential and flawed founding father,” which the report says was “likely” because he owned slaves. Likely. They guessed. No citation. A federal report on historical rigor invented somebody’s motive and printed it.

The author is Vince Haley, who runs the Domestic Policy Council. He has never curated anything. He spent twelve years working for Newt Gingrich, helped produce a Gingrich documentary about Ronald Reagan, then wrote campaign speeches for Trump. A man who writes applause lines filed 162 pages of notes on the historians.

His conclusion, quoted in the order itself, is that Smithsonian leadership can’t be trusted to tell America’s story with “honesty and gratitude.” Gratitude. The 1846 act says the place exists for “the increase and diffusion of knowledge.” Gratitude appears nowhere. He invented a job requirement and then failed them on it.

So why signs on a sidewalk. Why not walk in and take the exhibits down.

Because he can’t. Congress handed the Smithsonian to a board of seventeen in 1846, chaired by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. In May of 2025 he announced on Truth Social that he’d fired the director of the National Portrait Gallery, and the Board of Regents had to publicly explain that he cannot do that. He sent JD Vance in to clean out the collections, and Vance found out he holds one vote out of seventeen. My dude. You deployed the Vice President to a board meeting and he came back outvoted sixteen to one.

So the most powerful man on earth is out on the pavement with a sign, like a guy who got banned from a Dairy Queen.

Section three puts Haley in charge of those signs, announcing findings from the report Haley wrote. Section two lets Haley, Interior, OMB and GSA use “any and all available authorities,” naming the lever: “funding or contract conditions.” Two thirds of the Smithsonian’s budget is federal. He wrote the charges, he writes the signs, he holds the money.

The bill goes to Interior. The Park Service is down about four thousand permanent employees since January 2025, a quarter of its workforce, hiring one for every four who leave, carrying a twenty-five billion dollar maintenance backlog, the largest in its history. Washed out trails. Closed bathrooms. Buildings rotting.

Rangers are getting pulled off that to hang placards.

Fifty-six men signed the Declaration of Independence. We are spending Park Service money on a sidewalk pamphlet about them, outside a building this President cannot enter, because a museum called Alexander Hamilton flawed and he took it personally.

Sources:

Jim Pattiz at More More Than Just Parks broke the Park Service angle on this and the staffing and backlog reporting is his.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/07/restoring-trust-in-the-smithsonian-institution-e061/

https://deadline.com/2026/07/trump-smithsonian-history-hamilton-1236974647/

https://www.advocate.com/politics/national/trump-objects-smithsonian-lgbtq-stories

https://www.npr.org/2026/07/09/nx-s1-5887518/smithsonian-chief-lonnie-bunch-white-house-accusations

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5011438-trump-speechwriter-vince-haley-domestic-policy-council-chief/

Trump’s Energy Secretary Chris Wright told a House committee in June why his department killed seven and a half billion dollars in energy grants. Quote. “No decisions were made on politics. I keep hearing that charge. It’s bullshit. We’re going to say it a million times.” Five weeks later his own deputy general counsel filed a document with a federal judge saying the cancellations were, quote, “based solely on the political identity of the grant recipient’s state.” Two hundred eighty four grants, sixteen states, every one of them won by Kamala Harris. His department flagged three hundred forty more in red states and then funded every single one. The criteria was a map. Battery plants, grid upgrades, hydrogen, killed over how the neighbors voted. And when reporters ran it Friday, Energy said the filing was being misrepresented, that the political part referred only to the timing. My dude. You wrote it down and handed it to a judge.

Over at the Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s department admitted this week that nearly a hundred American troops were wounded in two weeks of Iranian strikes. That was news to the Pentagon’s own casualty database, the one it keeps for Congress and the President, which still lists zero Americans wounded in action for the month of July. Nick Turse at The Intercept has been on this alone for months. He documented five hundred twenty injured as of April first, including two hundred sailors treated for smoke inhalation, none of it announced. He watched the official count drop by fifteen with no explanation. A US official gave him the term for it. Casualty cover-up. Leon Panetta, who used to run that building, called the secrecy shameful. Turse is doing the whole job by himself.

Two days earlier that same Secretary of Defense sat in front of Senate Appropriations asking for another sixty seven billion dollars, because the war he keeps winning has cost thirty seven and a half billion so far. Democrats pointed out the Pentagon still has seventy five billion sitting unspent from last year. He wants more anyway, and at the end of this month the Navy and Air Force run out of operations money, so he’s cutting training and maintenance to cover it. Readiness. The thing that keeps troops breathing. And the Pentagon does have a spending problem. Last September alone it spent a hundred thirty nine thousand dollars on doughnuts, five hundred eleven dollars a box, plus fifteen million on ribeyes and ninety eight thousand on a Steinway grand piano for the Air Force chief of staff’s house. Jonathan Larsen at The Fucking News assembled that receipt.

On July twentieth Marco Rubio’s State Department published a hundred page report naming forty three Americans and organizations as agents of Cuban subversion. Amy Goodman. Hasan Piker. The mayors of New York and Los Angeles. Three sitting congresswomen. The founder of the Amazon Labor Union. Ben Cohen, of ice cream. And George Floyd, who has been dead six years and is now on a federal enemies list. The report holds up the McCarthy purges of the fifties as a model that worked. Rubio said the time has come to crush this evil once and for all. The next day the House Ways and Means Committee subpoenaed The People’s Forum in New York for its internal communications and its member records. Twenty four hours from list to subpoena. Ken Klippenstein broke it.

And Monday, roughly three hundred fifty thousand Haitians lose the protected status that has let them live and work here legally, some of them since the earthquake in 2010. The administration has already told Haiti to expect two deportation flights a week. Haiti’s plan for the people getting off those planes is to hand each of them about seventy seven dollars. Over eighty five percent of the capital is under gang control. Homeland Security says conditions have improved enough to send people back. The State Department has Haiti at Level Four, do not travel, its highest warning, for Americans. Too dangerous for you to set foot in. Safe enough to drop three hundred fifty thousand people into. Are you fecking kidding me. The Haitian Times has the flight schedule almost nobody else is printing.

Rapid fire. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy asked Congress to take Penn off Penn Station and put Trump on it. MyPillow’s Mike Lindell is running for governor of Minnesota and he’s registered to vote in Texas. The man who spent five years insisting people vote in states they don’t live in told the Star Tribune he isn’t sure where he’s registered. The Justice Department’s Chicago office has gone one and fifty nine charging people with assaulting immigration agents. A coin would have won them thirty times as many. A judge ruled the BBC can subpoena Trump’s finances and his inner circle inside the defamation case Trump filed himself. Yes please. Let’s all watch how fast he drops it. And the government is draining the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool and repairing the liner while prosecuting a man for damaging it, with the judge warning prosecutors they’re operating at their own peril.

That’s your week in tyranny. Welcome to the golden age.

Sources:

https://www.adn.com/nation-world/2026/07/25/trump-administration-admits-grants-for-clean-energy-were-canceled-only-in-states-won-by-kamala-harris/

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-25/energy-department-says-grants-were-cut-because-states-voted-blue

https://theintercept.com/2026/07/21/iran-war-pentagon-casualties-injuries/

https://www.stripes.com/theaters/us/2026-07-21/caine-hegseth-senate-hearing-iran-war-22330260.html

https://truthout.org/articles/house-republicans-subpoena-left-wing-groups-as-trump-admin-assembles-blacklists/

https://haitiantimes.com/2026/07/21/us-informs-haiti-of-upcoming-deportations/

https://www.npr.org/2026/07/23/nx-s1-5884947/haitians-protected-status-tps

Jonathan Larsen Ken Klippenstein

Starting with a word I’d rather not have learned this week. Gooner. But thanks to an in depth investigation by the guardian, I now know it.

Gooners are men who’ve organized online around compulsive masturbation, which would be nobody’s business except a subset of them decided the hobby needed an audience. So they do it in public, on video, on women who did not agree to any of it, and then post the footage for other men to applaud. They call it sharking. One seller had two hundred of these videos up for twenty-five dollars a pop. There’s a crypto coin. There’s a Pokemon card. It’s an entire economy, and the product is women being humiliated on camera for clout.

Their venue of choice is Dollar Tree. Understaffed, badly lit, aisles stacked with unopened boxes, nobody watching. The same conditions that keep getting the company fined by federal regulators are the conditions that make it convenient to assault someone in the soap aisle.

In December of 2023 a Houston woman the court records call MR was shopping in one. A man followed her through the store describing what he wanted to do to her sexually. She told him he was disgusting. He watched her from the checkout line. And in the parking lot he ejaculated on her, which she felt before she understood what it was.

She went home, got in the shower fully clothed, and washed away the evidence before she’d thought it through. Then she pulled the leggings out of the trash and took them back to the store. The clerk called into the back, “We’ve got another one.”

Another one. So this wasn’t the first time. Or the second time. Dollar Tree’s attorney Wesley Welmaker called what happened to her a one-off event. Liar. Her lawyer had already documented ten assaults at Dollar Trees in eighteen months, six involving ejaculation. A year later the count was sixty-three documented sex crimes. My dude, sixty-three is a lot of one-offs.

The store had cameras. Dollar Tree never produced the footage, and without it the investigation died.

Then MR sued, and the company’s lawyers landed on their defense. She is owed nothing under Texas law, because she suffered no physical harm. That’s the position. A man ejaculated on a woman in their parking lot and a legal department full of grown adults decided the winning move was to argue it didn’t technically hurt. Her lawyers had to go into court and argue, to a judge, in a filing, that being ejaculated on is offensive.

Meanwhile in Knoxville, a Dollar Tree employee got caught on his own store’s cameras masturbating in front of customers. He pleaded guilty. He kept his job. Eight months later police found twenty-five thousand photos of women on his phone, including up the skirt of a sixteen-year-old girl in that same store.

So where does this stand. MR’s assailant was never identified. Her lawsuit is a year and a half old, still stuck in preliminary motions, no trial date, and Dollar Tree’s strategy is to keep every other case out of the courtroom so this one stays a one-off on paper.

As for the government, the only thing that’s ever landed on this company is workplace safety. In 2023 the Biden administration settled with Dollar Tree and Family Dollar over safety violations. They paid one point three five million dollars and admitted nothing. Dollar Tree has nine thousand stores. That was about protecting employees, not customers, and on the women in the parking lot no agency has done anything at all.

Which tells you the math. It’s cheaper to pay the fine than to staff the store. And these go into low-income neighborhoods where there’s nothing else within driving distance, so the women shopping there don’t get the option of somewhere better lit.

Two and a half years later, MR says she feels like crying, and then she gets so fucking angry

Over to Kansas, where the Board of Pharmacy has sent out a cheerful little newsletter reminding everyone who dispenses abortion pills that state law requires them to post a sign telling patients the medication is unsafe and reversible. It is not unsafe. It is not reversible. There is no credible science behind reversal, no reliable study, nothing. Kansas has legally mandated a lie and put pharmacists in charge of printing it.

The outfit pushing it is Heartbeat International, which claims reversal attempts jumped from seventeen hundred in 2021 to twenty-four hundred last year. Heartbeat International is also sitting in an Alameda County courtroom right now, because California’s attorney general took them to trial last month for false advertising and wants nineteen point eight million dollars out of them for saying the exact thing Kansas is making pharmacists say for free. One state is prosecuting it as fraud. The other one is printing it on a poster.

To Live Action, the anti-abortion media operation behind the Baby Olivia cartoon that Republicans keep shoving into public school curricula. They also run a news site, and that site names real women who ended doomed pregnancies and calls them murderers. Thirteen of those women, across seven states, have now sent them a cease and desist.

One of them is Megan Kling. Her fetus was missing vital organs and was never going to survive. She wrote in the Star Tribune that she’d braced herself for the devastation, she just hadn’t braced for a news outlet to call her a killer. She’s in therapy. She’s getting death threats. So a movement that talks about protecting life every waking hour has built a publication whose main product is aiming strangers at a grieving woman.

Finishing in Texas with Attorney General Ken Paxton, currently the Republican nominee for Senate, who has spent a year going after a licensed midwife named Maria Rojas. She ran three clinics serving low-income, mostly Spanish-speaking patients, and she’s the first person criminally charged under the state’s abortion ban.

Paxton got a civil injunction that shut all three clinics. This week an appeals court threw that injunction out, because the entire evidentiary basis was a single anonymous email. One email. The court said the trial judge abused his discretion.

So Rojas can legally reopen, except after a year dark her lawyers say she probably can’t. And the criminal case is a separate case, still live, so she’s still facing felony charges carrying up to life in prison. Paxton is appealing to the Texas Supreme Court. He lost on the evidence and he’d like to run it back.

Speed round. Tennessee state representative Monty Fritts is running for governor on executing women who have abortions, and the Tennessean profiled him as a constitutional hardliner and took twenty-three paragraphs to even mention that he wasn’t to kill women. Students for Life’s Kristan Hawkins wants doctors to know they can treat an ectopic pregnancy, they just can’t call it an abortion, which is convenient, because if it was never abortion then the bans never hurt anybody. And a new study found nurse practitioners provide medication abortion as safely as doctors, which anti-abortion groups have spent years denying, and which matters because nurse practitioners are still working the rural counties the OBGYNs already fled.

Lizz Winstead, who co-created The Daily Show, wrote in Rolling Stone this week that the abortion pill has never abused women. Men do. The same people who’ll tell you all day that guns don’t kill people have decided this one pill acts alone. Kansas is forcing pharmacists to hang a sign warning women about a pill. Nobody is making Dollar Tree hang one about the parking lot.

Stay angry. Stay loud. Under Her Eye.

First Lieutenant Tyler Feehan, twenty-five, of Hawaii. Sergeant Angel Rampersad, twenty-eight, of New York. Private Isabella Gonzales, nineteen, of Texas, who graduated high school last spring. All three killed by Iranian missiles and drones at Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan. And Sergeant Michael Swinton, thirty, of North Carolina, killed in Iraq taking apart an Iranian drone.

Wednesday, the Pentagon’s public casualty page said eighteen Americans had died in this war. Thursday it said fourteen. Three military officials say those four came off the list because they were killed after Trump announced a ceasefire in April.

A ceasefire that stopped nothing, in a war that never stopped, has now retroactively unkilled four soldiers. Iran didn’t get that memo. Neither did the missile. The spreadsheet did.

The Pentagon gave two explanations. Acting press secretary Joel Valdez blamed “temporary data disruptions” and called it a “non-story.” Spokesman Sean Parnell called it “the Fake News media manufacturing lies out of thin air.” Either the site broke or reporters invented it. It cannot be both.

The day before, those four came home to Dover. Six soldiers carry each case off the plane in silence while the family watches. Trump went, and he brought the press.

Standing in front of them, he said this. “We honor our heroes, and they are indeed great heroes. Actually, they said, and all of them said very strongly, we can’t let Iran have a nuclear weapon.”

Actually, they said. Are you actually fecking kidding me!!

He put words in the mouths of four dead Americans and used them to argue for the illegal war that killed them, because the dead can’t call him a liar. Hey Donnie. Do all of us veterans and servicemembers a favor and shut your bloviating fecking pie hole. Your mere presence is an insult to the military. How dare you dishonor the fallen with your political posturing.

Second time he’s claimed the people at one of these ceremonies begged him to keep the war going. April first, primetime, on March’s transfers: “every single one of the people, their loved ones, said, ‘Please, sir, please, finish the job.’”

The night before Dover, he posted a scoreboard. An actual leaderboard of American war dead. Vietnam, fifty-eight thousand two hundred twenty. His own war, eighteen. Caption: “These are the real facts. REPORT THEM!” Eighteen isn’t a score, and Vietnam isn’t a bar to clear. He is grading himself on how many Americans he’s killed in a war Congress never authorized and he swore was over in April. Forty-eight hours later he shaved four off the bottom.

I photographed ramp ceremonies in Iraq. A unit forms up on the flight line, walks their friend onto the plane, and nobody says a word. It is the last thing you get to do for someone, and the whole point is that it isn’t about you. Trump turned the other end of that trip into a press availability.

Congress has never authorized one single day of this war. And now the government has decided four Americans didn’t die in it at all.

Sources:

The New York Times broke this story

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/23/us/politics/iran-troop-deaths.html

https://www.thedailybeast.com/pete-hegseth-strips-fallen-heroes-of-status-as-iran-war-dead/

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/24/pentagon-removed-four-official-iran-war-death-toll.html

https://dcas.dmdc.osd.mil/dcas/conflictCasualties/oefu/deaths

Chaco is a national park in northwestern New Mexico and one of only twenty-six UNESCO World Heritage Sites in this country. Same list as the Pyramids and Stonehenge. Ancestral Pueblo people built stone great houses five stories tall. Pueblo Bonito has more than six hundred rooms. They lined the walls up with the solstices and ran roads straight across open desert. A thousand years later it’s still standing, which is more than anyone will say about anything Doug Burgum has built.

Their descendants are still there. The Pueblo of Acoma is a sovereign nation. Its people live at Sky City, one of the oldest continuously inhabited places in North America. Charles Riley is their governor.

The park is small. About thirty-three thousand acres. The civilization was enormous. Most of what those people left sits outside the park line on BLM land, which is open for business by default. Anyone can lease it unless the government specifically says no. In 2023 the government said no. Ten miles out, twenty years.

Burgum wants that gone. All of it. For fourteen wells.

There are already thirty-seven thousand wells out there. Thirty-seven thousand. Plus fifteen thousand miles of access road, five times the drive from Los Angeles to New York. The flaring is so heavy that NASA found a methane cloud over the Four Corners the size of Delaware, from orbit. And Burgum looked at all that and decided what’s missing is fourteen more.

His own agency’s analysis says less than one percent of that land has any real drilling potential. That number is in the document making the case for drilling it.

“We are being asked to accept the permanent loss of a landscape our ancestors built, walked, and prayed in, in exchange for fourteen wells,” Governor Riley said.

And the assessment promises the archaeological sites stay protected once the ban is lifted. Protected. While you bulldoze pads, cut new roads, truck in rigs and burn flares on ground never surveyed. Most of Chaco is still buried. The Chacoans built roads thirty feet wide, and archaeologists are still finding them. You cannot carefully avoid an ancient road nobody has mapped. And this stuff poisons the air. Seventy-five percent of the people in that county already live within half a mile of it, with the respiratory illness to match. Chaco also has some of the darkest skies left in America. People drive across the country to see the Milky Way there. Flares wash it out.

Approving the protective ring took a year and a half. Six hearings. A hundred and fifty days of comment. A hundred and ten thousand people wrote in. Twenty-four tribal nations at the table. Erasing it gets fourteen days, and in April the first round got seven. Acoma asked Burgum to come see the place. Silence. The BLM’s own log gives them two meetings, both marked “informational,” which is government for leaving a voicemail. Seven of the twenty-four tribes got nothing.

Public comment closes midnight July 29. Thanks to More Than Just Parks for their tireless reporting on these issues. Here’s where to submit:

https://morethanjustparks.com/public-lands-action-network/4294

https://www.blm.gov/press-release/blm-seeks-input-proposed-withdrawal-revocation-near-chaco-culture-national-historical

https://www.cibolacitizen.com/news-news-alert-newsletters/blm-proposes-full-revocation-chaco-protections-opens-14-day-public

The FDA tested a bag of Taylor Farms shredded iceberg lettuce, grown in central Mexico, and it came back positive for cyclospora, the parasite behind the outbreak. That’s the moment you clear every shelf in the country.

Instead, they decided they never found it. No retest, no re-swab. They took the same positive result, squinted at it, and called it a mistake. The FDA’s actual words: it does not represent true amplification. A million dollars is the most amplifying substance known to man. You could squint at a parking ticket long enough to find true amplification if the check clears.

Taylor Farms gave that million to Trump’s super PAC. Founder Bruce Taylor added four hundred grand more to Republican committees. And the company reportedly got a White House sit-down right before the FDA saw the light. Sick people, then a check, then a clean bill of health.

Here’s the second trick: you won’t see the name Taylor Farms on the bag. A lot of it sells as Walmart’s Marketside brand. The name on the check isn’t the name on the salad.

And yes, Taylor Farms recalled the shredded iceberg. Sounds responsible, until you notice a recall is a press release the company wrote itself — and it only covers the shredded iceberg. The salad kits people actually buy were never pulled. A federal positive test is the government’s signature on “this lettuce poisoned people,” the thing thousands of sick plaintiffs hand their lawyers. So they keep the recall that looks responsible, and bury the proof.

Then Taylor Farms bragged that the FDA “has not identified a single positive product test result.” My dude, you weren’t cleared. You watched them shred the receipt in real time and called it a win.

The FDA’s own food chief admits the trail still points at Taylor Farms lettuce. The outbreak’s still spreading. The proof is the only thing that vanished.

The White House calls anyone connecting these dots fake news — a lot of nerve from people who just called a real lab test fake.

And the FDA, whose whole job is catching poisoned food before it eats you, got fed through the DOGE wood chipper last year. Tens of thousands gone, because apparently nobody needs to check whether the lettuce is trying to kill you.

So somebody’s grandmother buys a bag of shredded iceberg this week, trusting that if it were poison the government would say so. The government did say so. Then a donor said please don’t, and the government said never mind. Are you fecking kidding me.

They stopped hiding the corruption years ago. This time it came with a side of explosive diarrhea.

Sources:

Reporting by Keith Edwards and Sarah Jones

https://www.thedailybeast.com/taylor-farms-visited-white-house-before-getting-outbreak-reprieve/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/maryroeloffs/2026/07/20/heres-where-the-cyclosporiasis-outbreak-stands-after-taylor-farms-false-positive/

Three American service members are dead this weekend, two in Jordan and one in Iraq, defending against Iranian missiles and drones, with one still missing. That’s sixteen troops dead now in a war Donald Trump has declared over so many times he’s earned a signing-ceremony punch card. He signed the latest ceasefire last month, held the pen up like he’d cured cancer, told you it was finished, and this week Iran’s Supreme Leader reviewed that signature and called it, “worthless.” Trump spent the week bombing civilian bridges and ports, Iranian missiles are landing on oil fields in Kuwait, and this morning he ordered fresh strikes to “swiftly punish” the country he keeps attacking. Asked about the dead Americans, he said it was “a very sad thing,” the way you’d mention a rained-out barbecue. He keeps announcing peace and ordering airstrikes in the same breath, and it’s other people’s kids who come home in the boxes.

At home, ICE spent the week shooting people. On July 7 in Houston they killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a man they’ve admitted they mistook for someone else. On July 13 in Biddeford, Maine, they killed Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero. And spare me whether they had the right guy, since no name on a warrant turns shooting an unarmed man at a traffic stop into anything but a killing. None of it was on camera, either. Congress gave ICE the money for body cameras and ICE spent it on anything else, a real stroke of luck for the people holding the guns. Trump’s Homeland Security Secretary finally paused most vehicle stops to slow the body count, but that only lasted about a day before the Orange menace overruled his own secretary on Truth Social and posted “keep those Crime Stat Records coming,” about human beings his agents are shooting. Then border czar Tom Homan went on Fox to explain whose fault the killings really are. Not the agents. Not the guns. The people who said the killing was bad. His message to anyone upset that ICE keeps killing civilians was to “shut their mouth” or there’ll be “more bloodshed.” I’m sorry? Are you threatening to unlawfully kill people for speaking out about you unlawfully killing people? What the actual feck?

Then Trump commandeered primetime to whine yet again the 2020 election was stolen by China. a story his own intelligence agencies looked at and threw back. He declassified a fat stack of documents that turned out to be five-year-old news in a fresh binder. He waved around 278,000 noncitizen voters that officials in Nevada and Pennsylvania read once and set on fire. And he slurred through all of it at the speed of a man deflating, ranting about a “shadow government” while attacking CISA, the election-security agency his own administration runs, the one that called 2020 the most secure election in American history. My dude, you keep warning us about the shadow government. You are the shadow government. He’s oh for sixteen in court trying to pry loose the state voter rolls, so now he’s writing the excuse months early, that if Republicans lose the midterms, it was stolen. He’s pre-drafting the tantrum.

On July 15 the Blue Angels screamed over a packed Pensacola Beach so low that lawn chairs took flight and people dove into the sand, a maneuver the military calls reckless and this administration files under content. The Navy opened a safety review. But hairgel hegseth, looked at fighter jets flinging umbrellas across a beach full of families, waved the review off, and asked for an encore. Eric Trump chipped in by calling everyone alarmed by it the “low-T mainstream media,” which is a strange thing to say about people who just don’t want a flying cooler to the skull. This is combat aircraft and taxpayer jet fuel burned to run a monster truck rally over a crowded beach.

And then there’s the senator no one can produce. Mitch McConnell, 84, went into a hospital on June 14 and hasn’t been seen since, while Kentucky’s Democratic governor Andy Beshear says two federal agencies called him to report McConnell had died. So the office released a photo of McConnell holding up a newspaper like a kidnapping victim, to prove he’s alive, and it went so well that his own MAGA base declared it AI-generated and Laura Loomer pronounced him brain dead. Now Beshear is considering appointing the replacement himself and flipping the seat to Democrat. Republicans are racing to sue him under the law they wrote to stop exactly that. Control of a 53-47 Senate now hinges on whether anyone can confirm one man has a pulse.

And in the lightning round. Truth Social announced it’ll sell Wall Street a milliseconds-early peek at Trump’s market-moving posts, so the firms that pay can trade on his next war or tariff before you finish reading it, and since he owns the company, he’s charging admission to front-run his own mouth. Then the White House called his teleprompter operator a disgrace for quietly making six figures betting on Trump’s speeches, the exact hustle Trump just incorporated. And Stephen Miller stood at a State Department podium calling the American left “enemies of civilization” and rolling out a plan to disrupt, defund, debank, and prosecute left-wing groups, which is a lot of verbs for putting the people who protest him on the terror list.

That’s your week in tyranny. Welcome to the golden age.

Sources:

https://www.ms.now/news/us-service-members-killed-missing-jordan-iran-war-centcom

https://www.commondreams.org/news/tom-homan-bloodshed

https://www.democracynow.org/2026/7/17/headlines

https://thehill.com/blogs/in-the-know/5971473-blue-angels-low-flyover-review/

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2026/jul/13/tweets/mitch-mcconnell-rehabilitation-photo-ai-reused/

https://www.jezebel.com/even-republican-senators-think-mitch-mcconnells-proof-of-life-photo-is-fake

https://www.democracynow.org/2026/7/17/headlines/truth_social_plans_to_sell_priority_access_to_trumps_posts

https://truthout.org/articles/miller-labels-leftists-a-cancer-that-world-must-root-out-in-fascistic-speech/

We begin with wonderful news for millions of women: your birth control has been quietly reclassified as abortion. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists is clear that IUDs and the pill prevent fertilization and are not abortifacients. But the movement needs them to be, because once your contraception is legally an abortion, every abortion ban and every mail restriction they’re building can reach it too. So they got to work. The administration rewrote Title X, the national family planning program, to steer women toward natural family planning, which you may know by its stage name, the rhythm method. Then the EPA added birth control to a list of water contaminants, so the pill is now officially pollution. You can’t ban a thing for being an abortion until you first decide it’s an abortion. And they’ve decided.

Now to a movement in mourning. Last year Republicans passed a one-year ban on Planned Parenthood billing Medicaid for the boring stuff, cancer screenings, birth control, STI testing, none of it abortion, which they’re already barred from funding. That ban expired on July fifth, and the anti-abortion crowd assumed Congress would simply renew it in the next big bill. Congress did not. The new ninety-five-billion-dollar package found room for defense, farm aid, and grants to make voting harder, but somehow no room for their one little wish. So on Thursday they gathered at the Capitol in matching Defund Big Abortion shirts, and Senator Josh Hawley took the microphone to describe cancer screenings as the mutilation of our children. Students for Life was so devastated they gave every single member of Congress an F. And here’s the part they left off the shirts: the Congressional Budget Office scored it, and defunding Planned Parenthood would actually raise federal spending by fifty-two million dollars. Their dream money-saving plan costs money. But the base was sad, so the administration sent a little something to cheer them up.

And that little something was Todd Blanche, the acting Attorney General and Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer, which is exactly the background you want hovering near your prescriptions. At his confirmation hearing this week, Senator Ted Cruz asked him to take a fresh look at the Comstock Act, a delightful anti-obscenity law from 1873, a simpler time, when women couldn’t vote but the postal service was already deeply concerned about them. Blanche would like to use it to stop the abortion pill, mifepristone, from traveling through the mail anywhere in the country. And his evidence was airtight. He told the United States Senate that he saw a video. Not where. Not who made it. Just a video, somewhere, of pills that, in his words, come dumped out of a little plastic bag. Case closed. Then Senator Katie Britt made the strongest case of all. She brought up a woman whose partner had drugged her with abortion pills against her will, and arrived at the solution: take abortion pills away from all women. The abuser walks. You lose access. Chivalry lives.

Several states aren’t waiting for the mail ban. They’ve gone straight for the doctors who prescribe abortion pills. Louisiana has an extradition order out for Dr. Margaret Carpenter for the crime of writing a prescription. Texas is chasing another provider for a hundred thousand dollars over pills mailed into the state. California watched all this and wrote a bill to require its future governors to refuse those extradition requests, for doctors who provide abortion pills or gender-affirming care, because right now your doctor’s freedom depends entirely on whether your governor happens to be in a protecting mood. So far, two Democratic governors have refused Louisiana. The rest are a coin flip.

Now an update from the CDC. Every year the agency publishes a report on abortions in America, how many, where, for whom. It’s how the public and the doctors and the researchers actually see what the bans are doing to people. This year, for the first time since 1969, there’s no report, because the administration fired the entire division that writes it. No staff, no report, no evidence. And that’s the tidy part: the same people who stopped publishing the anonymous national tally are drawing up a plan to force every state to report abortions in far more detail, individual detail, with your state’s Medicaid money on the line if they refuse. So the public numbers vanish, and the personal files grow. They’d rather not count how many of you there are. They’d very much like your name.

Time for the speed round. The administration canceled fifty-three of sixty-seven teen pregnancy prevention grants, a bipartisan program that actually reduces teen pregnancy, which one Fox analyst called a problem, because fewer pregnant teenagers is apparently the emergency now. Democracy Forward and Planned Parenthood are suing to put it back. And happy anniversary to Iowa’s six-week ban, which just turned two. To celebrate, the Chicago Abortion Fund reports it has spent seven hundred seventy-four thousand dollars helping Iowans cross the state line into Illinois for care, a hundred and seventy-seven percent jump in Iowans calling for help since the ban took effect.

Stay angry. Stay loud. Under Her Eye.

Sources:

Follow Jessica Valenti

https://www.acog.org/clinical/clinical-guidance/practice-bulletin/articles/2017/11/long-acting-reversible-contraception-implants-and-intrauterine-devices

https://thehill.com/homenews/house/5975417-anti-abortion-activists-planned-parenthood-funding-reconciliation

https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/5970583-blanche-pledged-stop-mail-mifepristone/

https://msmagazine.com/2026/07/17/todd-blanche-abortion-pill-mifepristone-comstock-act/

https://www.kff.org/womens-health-policy/abortion-trends-before-and-after-dobbs/

https://www.guttmacher.org/state-policy/explore/abortion-reporting-requirements

Guerrero was 26 years old. A husband, a father, authorized to work here, and not even the person ICE came for. He was just there.

Here’s what the agency either didn’t find or didn’t care about. Brouillette’s own relatives went to the Associated Press to say he has struggled with serious mental illness since childhood and a long history of violence, and that he should never have been handed a badge and a gun. One woman played the AP a voicemail from last winter where he said someone should slit her throat. His first ex-wife says that while she was pregnant, he threw boiling water on her while she was holding their baby, and her mother says the same. Hundreds of court records in Augusta detail years of alleged abuse of another ex-wife and his own daughters.

Less than a year ago, this man was selling houses. Then ICE gave him a firearm.

His criminal background check came back clean, and I refuse to pretend that’s a defense. His violence lived in family court, in the protective orders and custody files where you learn exactly who a man is when he thinks no one important is watching. An agency arming a man to point a gun at civilians is supposed to look there. ICE built a hiring machine that doesn’t, because Stephen Miller wanted thousands of officers on a quota yesterday, so the standard didn’t drop, it detonated.

Think about what that selects for. The military, for all its failures, has spent decades barring domestic abusers from carrying a weapon, because arming a man who beats his family is a bad idea. ICE looked at that same standard and decided it was optional.

Then there’s the tell. Brouillette’s own 18-year-old daughter told the AP that her father called her and confessed, said flat out that he shot and killed Durán Guerrero. He phoned his kid to tell her he’d killed a man.

And DHS has said nothing. They won’t defend the hire, they won’t explain the vetting, they still haven’t said his name. Their whole public position is the boilerplate, that an officer fired fearing for public safety.

So don’t let anyone shrink this into an immigration story. In January, an ICE officer shot and killed Renée Good in Minneapolis. She was 37, a US citizen, sitting in her own car in her own city, and DHS ran the same “weaponized her vehicle” line they just ran on Guerrero. Good was a citizen. Guerrero wasn’t even the target. The pattern was never about who these men are sent to hunt. It’s that we keep arming men who should never hold a gun, and the bodies are never only the ones they were pointed at. A man who scalds his pregnant wife doesn’t check your passport before he fires. That badge makes him a danger to whoever’s next. That’s you. That’s me. That’s anyone on the wrong corner at the wrong second.

What the actual feck.

UPDATE: ICE claims Brouillette had “nearly a decade of federal law enforcement experience,” but won’t say where or when, and the only recent job the AP could document was real estate. Draw your own conclusions about the vetting. Also worth knowing: per AP, at least 10 people have died in encounters with immigration agents since the crackdown began.

Sources:

https://apnews.com/article/ice-david-brouillette-johan-guerrero-maine-shooting-dbc30d6d59e2a95fb470afc188e125c6

https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/5974608-maine-ice-shooting-officer-dhs-david-brouillette/

The site is the President’s House in Philadelphia, where Washington ran the country in the 1790s. The city built the memorial to honor nine enslaved people, Washington kept inside the house itself, cooking and serving for him while he ran a nation built on liberty. Philly handed the memorial over to the Park Service in 2010 and they decided it now had to go because Trump signed an order telling federal sites to quit “disparaging Americans” and start celebrating the country’s greatness.

They swapped the panels in the dark while the whole city was packed for an All-Star Game thrown for America’s 250th birthday, the big tough America First government skulking around a slavery memorial like a raccoon in your trash. If you’re proud of your work, you do it in broad daylight. You only do it at 2 a.m. because some part of you already knows it’s a lie.

Down came the panel titled “The Dirty Business of Slavery.” Up went one called “Celebrating Independence Throughout the Years.” They walked into a slavery memorial and hung a cruise brochure. They also hauled off the map of the slave trade routes and the timeline of slavery, because you can’t throw an independence party with the receipts on the wall.

Then they rewrote Washington himself. The new panel says he “navigated a nation deeply divided over slavery.” He didn’t navigate it, he profited from it. In 1786 he wrote, “there is not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do to see a plan adopted for the abolition” of slavery. Bold words from a man who cycled his nine household slaves down to Virginia every few months so they’d never hit the six month mark Pennsylvania established that would have required them to be set free. He put it in writing that slavery should end, but personally made sure his enslaved remained chained.

And it wasn’t only the people he owned. He signed the Fugitive Slave Act, the 1793 law that let slaveholders hunt down people who escaped and punished anyone who helped them. The panel notes it passed by a veto-proof majority, like that’s a defense. He was the president. He could have refused. He could have made a statement. He signed.

Erasing nine enslaved people to flatter the man who owned them is the real disparagement. It tells you exactly who Trump counts as an American, and who he doesn’t. The nine didn’t make his list. Neither does anyone descended from them.

Michael Coard, the Philadelphia attorney who spent years getting this memorial built, calls it the Ministry of Truth, the office in Orwell’s 1984 that deleted facts and printed prettier ones.

They tried this once already. Ripped the panels out this winter, a judge ordered them restored, and an appeals court ruled the city lost its say when it handed the site over to the park service. Not that erasing history is legal. Just that the city can’t stop it.

Philadelphia’s asking for another hearing, so this isn’t over. But while the lawyers argue, let me read the nine they keep trying to delete. Oney Judge. Hercules. Austin. Christopher Sheels. Giles. Paris. Moll. Joe. Richmond. Say them in daylight, loud, because Donald Trump is a scared little man who does his bravest work at 2 a.m. with the lights off.

Sources:

https://whyy.org/articles/presidents-house-slavery-trump-exhibit-philadelphia-replaced/

https://www.inquirer.com/news/philadelphia/presidents-house-slavery-exhibits-changed-20260715.html

https://www.mountvernon.org/library/digitalhistory/digital-encyclopedia/article/george-washington-and-slavery

The Secretary of Defense says every service member over thirty now gets an annual testosterone test added to their health screening, with optional hormone therapy at the end. He announced it on his official X account, under a caption that read, his words, The High-T Department of War.

He slapped a sponsor on the Department of Defense like it’s a NASCAR hood. High-T is a testosterone booster they sell at GNC.

Hegseth says this keeps troops on the “leading edge of lethality.” My dude, the leading edge of lethality is a Tomahawk missile, not a testosterone gel. And the irony writes itself: the same man who purged trans troops for needing hormone therapy just put everyone else on it.

And the science? There isn’t any. The FDA only approves this for men with actual low testosterone. This is the crowd that put Dr. Oz over Medicare, rejects vaccines on no data, and thinks we’re drinking abortions in the tap water. Junk science with a flag on it.

Then there’s the faith angle. In April, Hegseth axed the flu-shot mandate on religious grounds. His words: your body, your faith, your convictions, not negotiable. So a flu shot offends God, but boosting your testosterone doesn’t? I went through basic. It’s a Petri dish with bunk beds. Apparently the Lord will let you catch the flu, but low T is where He draws the line.

And too much testosterone does what? Mood swings. Aggression. They want to pump it into the guys we hand live ammo, from a crowd that calls women too emotional to lead. They’ve clearly never met a bodybuilder three weeks into a cycle.

While that circus played out, Hegseth gutted his second Navy promotion list in two months. In June he pulled the one-star list: two women, two Black men, gone. This month, the two-star list: seven struck, five of them women or people of color. Former defense officials call it unprecedented. The rules only let him strike a name for cause. He gave none. And for the first time in over a decade, not one active-duty woman will make admiral in the Navy this year.

One of the women he struck was Rear Admiral Amy Bauernschmidt. First woman ever to command a nuclear aircraft carrier. Thirty years in, three thousand hours in helicopters, five thousand sailors under her, and today she runs a carrier strike group. You don’t erase a résumé like that unless you’re threatened by it. That is the smallest-dick energy this building has ever produced.

That’s the jagoff remaking the military I served in. A part-time major who taught a few classes, never commanded more than forty people, never once ran a ship, and got the job on a single tie-breaking vote from the Vice President. And he’s the one telling officers who commanded warships and led thousands that they don’t make the cut.

So this is the leading edge of lethality. A blood test and a tube of gel.

Sources:

https://apnews.com/article/hegseth-pentagon-testosterone-testing-troops-47333bbf3af9e4cac432722332ff1383

https://thehill.com/policy/defense/5969935-hegseth-testosterone-testing-dod/

https://www.notus.org/defense/testosterone-troops-hegseth-testing

https://www.ms.now/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/hegseth-blocking-promotions-women-military-leadership

https://www.thedailybeast.com/pentagon-pete-takes-aim-at-women-in-secret-crackdown/

I am not making that up. The proclamation says the monument protects, quote, “deep sandstone canyons, broad desert mesas, forested mountaintops dotted with lush meadows.” And then it says, quote, “while scenic, these generic features are not landmarks worthy of protection.” My dude. You just described one of the most beautiful places in North America and then wrote it up like a Zillow listing you are trying to lowball.

It gets dumber. The petroglyphs apparently don’t count either, because petroglyphs are, quote, “found across the American West.” There are a hundred thousand archaeological sites inside Bears Ears. The White House looked at all of it and said, meh, seen it.

Here is the damage. Bears Ears drops from one point three six million acres to a hundred twenty one thousand. Grand Staircase, from one point eight seven million to a hundred eighty two thousand. It is the largest rollback of protected land in American history, breaking the record Trump set in 2017, when he gutted these same monuments and Biden restored them.

He signed it while Bears Ears is on fire. The Babylon Fire has been burning inside the monument since June, and it is the largest wildfire in the country. So there is the president in the Oval Office handing Utah’s Republican governor Spencer Cox a commemorative pen while the ground is still smoking.

Oh and Trump’s public reason for doing this: out there you can’t hunt, you can’t fish, you can, quote, “virtually not even walk.” Steve Bloch of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance confirmed that hunting, fishing and camping are all allowed. The real reason for doing this is in the proclamation, which cites critical minerals, uranium and copper. Under Grand Staircase sits the largest coal field in Utah. Trump says he is giving the land back to the people of Utah. And by “the people” he means Energy Fuels, the mining company sitting on a hundred and seventeen claims inside the old boundary and a uranium mill six miles away.

Seventy one percent of Utah voters want Bears Ears kept, per polling from the Center for Biological Diversity. Utah Center Utah Senator Mike Lee is the architect of this, and he doesn’t just want these two. Last year he tried to force the sale of three million acres of public land across eleven western states. His own party killed it. So he skipped the voting part.

Bears Ears is also the first national monument Indigenous nations ever asked for. Five of them. Hopi, Navajo, Zuni, and two Ute nations. They built a commission to co-manage the land with the federal government. Trump’s proclamation dissolves that commission.

I’m sure you’re thinking, Can he even do this? Short answer. No. The Antiquities Act lets a president create a monument. It says nothing about destroying one. In 1938 the attorney general ruled that a president cannot abolish monuments. Last year Trump’s Justice Department overruled him. He wrote himself a permission slip.

But they’re doing this on purpose. It’s a trap. The tribes will have to sue to keep the land, and the case will climb toward a Supreme Court where John Roberts has already put his contempt for the Antiquities Act in writing. Win there and it is not two monuments. It is every acre any future president could ever protect.

None of this takes effect for sixty days. The Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition and the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance will be the ones in that courtroom. Fund them.

Unless you think these places are too generic.

Sources

Reporting by Jim and Will Pattiz at More Than Just Parks .

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/07/modifying-the-bears-ears-national-monument/

https://www.kuer.org/politics-government/2026-07-13/trump-shrinks-bears-ears-grand-staircase-escalante-utah

https://utahnewsdispatch.com/2026/07/13/president-trump-shrinks-bears-ears-and-grand-staircase-escalante-again/

https://biologicaldiversity.org/w/news/press-releases/trump-slashes-bears-ears-grand-staircase-escalante-national-monuments-for-second-time-2026-07-13/

https://www.grandcanyontrust.org/blog/update-white-mesa-uranium-mill/

https://www.justice.gov/olc/media/1403101/dl

https://www.hcn.org/articles/doj-opinion-puts-national-monuments-at-risk/

https://www.propublica.org/article/utah-mike-lee-public-lands-sell-off

https://suwa.org/national-monuments/

This week: the Justice Department sent federal agents to reporters’ front doors. ICE killed a homebuilder in his own work van, and the only witnesses are being pressured to deport themselves. Trump fired the last two Democrats off the bipartisan election commission with a hundred and sixteen days to go before the midterms. A congressman quietly asked the VA to strip the VFW of its ability to help disabled veterans get their benefits. And the leader of the free world is building an unclimbable wall around the park where people go to yell at him.

Let’s start with the the new air force one.

Qatar handed Donald Trump a four hundred million dollar jet. He then poured tens of millions of your dollars into fixing it up, and he would not shut up about it. His big beautiful plane that definitely wants a bribe.

And the New York Times found out that his beautiful plane wasn’t secure enough to fly him home from the NATO summit. He had to take the old one. The four hundred million dollar gift he’d spent a year bragging about, and he couldn’t ride in it.

Now, there were two available responses. Fix the plane. Or admit the plane is broken.

He went with door number three, which was to send the Justice Department after the reporters. Julian Barnes, Eric Lipton, Tyler Pager, Eric Schmitt. Federal agents served some of them at their houses. Their houses. Men with badges on a reporter’s front step, in front of the neighbors.

And nobody leaked a troop movement here. Nobody burned a source. Everyone told him that plane wasn’t secure the day Qatar handed it to him, and the Times reported that they were right.

David McCraw, the paper’s lawyer, said federal agents at a reporter’s door should alarm anyone who believes in the Constitution. That’s the polite version. The real version is that the most powerful man alive got humiliated by an airplane and went looking for someone to punish for it. He cannot absorb a failure. Somebody else always pays for it.

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was fifty two years old. He’d been in this country thirty five years. He built houses, he owned the company, he had three sons, one’s a teacher and two are engineers, and he had no criminal record. His family says he was close to finally getting legal status. Tuesday morning he was driving his crew to a job site when an ICE officer fired through the side of his van and hit him in the abdomen. He died at the hospital.

DHS says he weaponized his vehicle. That’s their phrase, and they use it constantly. Every time they kill somebody in a car, the car did it. Sure. Sure sure sure.

The three men riding with him, one of them his brother, all say the same thing. No agent was ever in front of that van. There was no threat. The shots came from the side. The Harris County medical examiner ruled it a homicide. Oh, and DHS eventually admitted they were looking for a different guy entirely.

Also, there’s no footage, because the officer wasn’t wearing a body camera. Here’s the explanation for that, word for word. Quote. “The officers involved in the incident in Houston had not been issued body worn cameras due to back to back Democrat shutdowns.”

BTW- in April, after the shutdowns, Congress handed Homeland Security twenty million dollars specifically to buy body cameras. The line item says procurement, deployment, and operations of body worn cameras. Four months later, DHS still hasn’t put cameras on the officers who are killing people, and is blaming a shutdown that ended before the check cleared.

They can’t even keep the story straight. Publicly, DHS says cameras are in more than half of their field offices. Privately, acting ICE director David Venturella told Congresswoman Sylvia Garcia that fewer than a third of officers have them. And apparently they’re all in Chicago.

Meanwhile the three men who watched Lorenzo die, the only living witnesses, are sitting in ICE detention getting pressured to sign self deportation papers. That is the pattern. ICE has pushed people to self deport after killings before. Send the witnesses to Mexico and the case goes with them.

Venturella has also conceded he owes the family an apology, not for agents murdering him, no, for releasing Lorenzo’s name to the press before anybody told his sons their father was dead. And his family still cannot claim his body.

A hundred and sixteen days before the midterm elections, Trump wiped out the Election Assistance Commission. There is now nobody on it. Zero commissioners. The only federal agency whose entire job is helping states run elections cannot legally do anything, four months before the midterms.

And here’s what the White House gave as the legal basis. The Slaughter decision. The Supreme Court ruling I told you about two weeks ago, the one that handed Trump the power to fire the heads of independent agencies at will. This is what he did with that power. So he’s making it harder to register, harder to vote. And now deleting the referee.

Two weeks ago I told you that Congressman Mike Bost, who chairs the House Veterans Affairs Committee, accused the VFW of promoting political violence over a protest cartoon. A cartoon the VFW first ran in 1933, the last time Congress tried to balance a budget on veterans’ backs, and reprinted now because Bost is trying it again.

Here’s what we just learned. On the same day he put out that statement, Bost and Congressman Jack Bergman quietly sent a letter to the VA asking them to review whether the VFW should keep its accreditation.

That accreditation is what lets a VFW service officer file a veteran’s disability claim, fight the denial, and win the appeal. It’s a mountain of paperwork with a thousand ways to lose, and most veterans do not get through it without one. Bost wants the VA to look at taking that away.

Because they reprinted a ninety three year old cartoon about his bill. A horrible bill Which cuts disability compensation for a million and a half veterans.

That is not a policy dispute. That’s a committee chairman trying to use a federal agency to take the megaphone away from the people who called him out.

And Trump, meanwhile, is fortifying the White House. Against? Shrug?

The Secret Service is reinforcing the actual front doors of the White House. The columns went under scaffolding in June, which the White House called standard restoration work, and that scaffolding is now draped in a giant tarp with columns and a lamp printed on it. He hung a picture of the White House on the White House. Because? He needs to be reminded where the entrance is?

Then there’s the fence. It would go around Lafayette Park, directly across from his front door, and possibly across Pennsylvania Avenue itself. Eight or nine feet. Permanent. And in the proposal, they call it “non scalable.”

Non scalable. Like the border wall was non scalable, right up until people started scaling it with ladders they bought at Home Depot.

But the reason for the fence is what matters, and they put it in writing. The plan says Lafayette Park and Pennsylvania Avenue are a focal point for the public to gather for demonstrations. It says those assemblies elevate into non peaceful demonstration. And it concludes that a properly anchored permanent fence would assist in de-escalating most potentially violent protest.

So he’s spending millions to wall off the park where Americans go to hold up signs. The last people to actually storm a federal building in this city, he pardoned.

Violent insurrectionists walk. People with cardboard get a nine foot fence.

And let’s not forget the granite helipad going in on the South Lawn. Thirteen million dollars, rushed, with an extra eight hundred and seventy five thousand thrown at the helipad alone to finish it in time for a state visit they won’t name. Reinforced doors. Unclimbable walls. Private helicopter pad. One point two billion dollars in construction.

That’s not maintenance. That’s a man hardening a position. You don’t spend a billion dollars making a house impossible to approach if you’re planning on handing the keys to somebody else.

Lightning round. Trump took another unannounced physical at Walter Reed, his second in two months, and he let it slip mid rant at New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman while volunteering that he’d requested a cognitive test and aced it, something he brought up unprompted for no reason whatsoever. He also threatened to bomb Iran for a full year if they assassinate him. My dude, who is do you think is going to run that bombing campaign? You think JD will be out there avenging you? Meanwhile, the administration has spent months insisting the Strait of Hormuz is open but is now demanding Iran publicly admit that it’s open, so somebody in there needs to pick a lane. FBI Director Kash Patel was on the tarmac about to fly the Bureau’s jet to Chicago to watch his girlfriend sing at a country music festival when Trump’s people yanked him back, and he responded by calling the reporters who broke the story gold plated dumbasses. The Great American State Fair was cancelled on the final day of its run because - nobody showed up. which means the Freedom 250 celebration of American greatness was killed by American indifference, and honestly, that’s the most patriotic thing that’s happened all year. And in the middle of a housing crisis, the biggest housing bill in thirty years just became law without Trump’s signature, because he sulked when Congress wouldn’t pass his voter ID bill, and he didn’t dare veto it either, because it passed eighty five to five and he knew he’d get overridden. So the first federal ban on private equity buying up your neighborhood is now law. He was too proud to sign it and too weak to stop it. But sure, he totally cares about your well being.

That’s your week in tyranny. Welcome to the golden age.

Sources:

https://www.propublica.org/article/federal-election-assistance-commission-trump-dismantled

https://www.votebeat.org/national/2026/07/09/trump-fires-election-assistance-commission-members-hicks-hovland-mccormick/

https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/politics/immigration/2026/07/10/556770/ice-shooting-houston-lorenzo-salgado-araujo-passengers-dispute-dhs-account/

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/what-to-know-about-the-fatal-shooting-of-lorenzo-salgado-araujo-by-ice

https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2026/07/10/white-house-fortifying-front-door-where-tarps-hang-amid-trumps-construction-blitz/

Kristofer Goldsmith MeidasTouch Network

Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services is reorganizing its Office for Civil Rights around “conscience and religious freedom.” Law professor Liz Sepper says the target is EMTALA, the law that requires an emergency room to stabilize you. A conscience exemption would mean a hospital gets to decide whether saving your life is something it’s comfortable with.

Delaware’s attorney general settled with the Alliance Defending Freedom and stopped enforcing a law that required crisis pregnancy centers to post a notice saying they are not a licensed medical facility. Delaware is also paying ADF about $50,000.

Congressmen Randy Fine and Greg Steube wrote a formal letter to the governing body of Irish dance in Dublin, and Florida AG James Uthmeier threatened legal action, all to stop one trans girl from competing in Orlando.

Students for Life wants a House Judiciary hearing on the Clean Water for All Life Act, which would require “biohazard catch kits” so women who miscarry at home collect the tissue themselves and return it. Kansas Rep. Ron Bryce says there’s no scientific data on abortion pills in the drinking water, which is why he wants Trump’s EPA to go find some.

Speed round: SBA Pro-Life America endorses Vivek Ramaswamy. Indiana’s Todd Rokita moves to cut Planned Parenthood off Medicaid. Iowa and Oklahoma restrict abortion pills. Kat Cammack. And Graham Platner drops out in Maine.

Nearly all of this is Jessica Valenti and Kylie Cheung reporting at Abortion, Every Day. Follow them.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/30/trump-religious-freedom-health-lgbtq

https://iowacapitaldispatch.com/2026/05/19/gov-kim-reynolds-signs-laws-restricting-access-to-abortion-pills-hpv-vaccine/

https://www.thehandbasket.co

I was a combat photographer and public affairs sergeant with the 1st Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division, deployed to Iraq in 2004, and I’m the daughter of two retired National Park rangers. I came to the commission as the person this arch claims to honor and the person raised to protect what it would destroy. It betrays both.

The Park Service’s own report says the arch can be built 20 hours a day, year round, for up to three years, under cranes taller than the arch itself. Arlington buries its dead close to thirty times a day. Under this plan, families would lower their loved ones into the ground to the sound of pile drivers. We ask our dead for everything. The least we owe them is silence, and for three years we would deny them even that.

Memorial Circle looks like empty lawn. It isn’t. It was left open on purpose, so the line between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington could hold its meaning: a country made whole after the Civil War. The excuse for skipping Congress is a ninety-year-old permission for two columns we were wise enough never to raise.

Free nations build arches to the dead, not to their living rulers. America’s own Commemorative Works Act forbids a memorial to any person until twenty-five years after their death, so history, not vanity, decides. Asked who this arch was for, President Trump said, “Me.” America does not gild the living. Dictators do.

On June 4th this commission refused to approve the arch and demanded answers on its height, on air traffic, on pedestrian safety. Those problems have not been cured, and the deepest ones cannot be. Congress never authorized it. The design was sole-sourced to avoid open bidding. And Interior now swears it is “not a memorial,” even as the President calls it his, so it can slip past the law entirely.

This is National Park Service land, meant in the words of the Park Service’s own founding law to stay “unimpaired for those who come after us.” I asked the commission to reject this arch.

This is my testimony to the National Capital Planning Commission on July 9 against Trump’s arch at Arlington. The vote happened, but the fight isn’t over. Call your representatives and tell them Congress never authorized this.

This spot was built after the Civil War as a sacred sightline connecting Arlington House and the Lincoln Memorial. Trump now wants to erect an arch here, one he has said himself is for him.

Under his plan, construction runs 20 hours a day for the next two to two and a half years. Arlington holds between 20 and 30 funerals a day. That means families burying their loved ones will never get a moment of silence, only the circus of construction now and bright lights, crowds, and an observation tower later. They claim it won’t block the view between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington. I’ll be sharing images on my social media that show you absolutely will not.

This is also lawlessness. Trump moved to do this without the authorization of Congress and without proper procedure, on National Park Service land. My parents are retired National Park rangers who spent their careers protecting this country’s lands and history for future generations, and he would wipe that out to build a monolith to himself. Private funds or not, the result is the same.

We asked our service members to give everything. The least we owe them is silence. I’m testifying before the National Capital Planning Commission to help stop this arch.

Call your representatives. Talk to your loved ones. If you know a service member, tell them you care about them. Don’t let this pass in silence. Trump is counting on the chaos to drown it out, and we’re here to make sure no one forgets.

The National Capital Planning Commission takes up the arch at its public meeting Thursday, July 9, 2026, at 1:00 PM ET (hybrid, in person and virtual). Meeting info and how to comment:

https://www.ncpc.gov/review/meeting/

https://www.ncpc.gov

Donald Trump didn’t like a red card at the World Cup, so he called FIFA president Gianni Infantino and had it overturned, the first World Cup red card reversed like this in over 60 years, for a sport he openly admitted he doesn’t understand.

The player he moved the entire federal government to protect? Folarin Balogun, the birthright-citizen son of Nigerian immigrants, the exact policy Trump is fighting to destroy.

Then he smeared the referee, bragged that Biden wouldn’t have done it, pre-loaded a “rigged” excuse before kickoff, and watched Belgium beat the United States 4-1 anyway.

Everything Donald Trump touches, he breaks, and then loses anyway.

Sources:

https://apnews.com/article/balogun-red-card-uefa-us-belgium-d32fc2e13728cef9317feeb7b72c279b

https://thehill.com/policy/sports-gaming/5954150-fifa-world-cup-folarin-balogun-red-card-trump/

https://www.aljazeera.com/sports/2026/7/6/why-fifas-balogun-red-card-suspension-after-trump-call-is-so-controversial

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jul/07/trump-renews-call-us-take-over-greenland-nato

Harry Sisson Robert Reich

The Supreme Court overturned a 91-year-old rule and handed Trump the power to fire the heads of independent agencies at will. The commissioners who run the Federal Trade Commission, the labor board, and the agency that recalls dangerous cribs now serve at his pleasure, and he can swap in loyalists for any reason. The Court carved out exactly one exception: the Federal Reserve. The watchdogs that protect consumers and workers are now his to remove. The one that protects the stock market stays untouchable.

Congressman Mike Bost, who chairs the House Veterans Affairs Committee, spent the week trying to silence veterans. He’s pushing a bill that cuts disability pay for a million and a half veterans with conditions like tinnitus and sleep apnea. The VFW has been fighting that cut with a protest cartoon it first published in its own magazine in 1933. Bost put out an official statement accusing the VFW of inciting political violence and demanded they take the cartoon down, all while claiming to respect the First Amendment.

Three federal firefighters burned to death fighting a wildfire in western Colorado. Emily Barker, 38, Nick Hutcherson, 27, and Sydney Watson, 27, were overrun by a wind-driven fire near the Utah border. Their deaths put a spotlight on the new U.S. Wildland Fire Service, an agency Interior Secretary Doug Burgum created this year without approval from Congress, and on a revived order to attack every wildfire as fast as possible, everywhere, that fire scientists have long warned gets crews killed.

Trump’s annual financial disclosure shows he made over $2 billion last year, $1.4 billion of it from crypto. He sold supporters a memecoin at $75 that’s now worth $1.66, took a cut of every trade, collected $263 million from a UAE royal four days before the inauguration, and pocketed $86.5 million in legal settlements from companies like ABC and CBS.

In the lightning round: the Justice Department accidentally emailed a sealed report to the defense team for the woman it’s prosecuting for stealing that same report; the Secretary of Defense cut the Pentagon’s weapons-testing office from 126 people to 30, an office Congress created in 1983 after the M16 failed in Vietnam; ICE handcuffed a Nigerian Catholic nun on her way to Mass and confiscated her rosary during a sweep that arrested 10,000 people and brought this year’s ICE-custody death toll to 20; and a federal appeals court cleared the way for the Park Service to keep slavery and civil rights history out of its exhibits.

Sources:

https://ballsandstrikes.org/scotus/trump-v-cook-supreme-court-opinion/

https://www.stripes.com/veterans/2026-07-01/lawmaker-vfw-messaging-dangerous-rhetoric-22142203.html

https://coloradosun.com/2026/06/30/colorado-firefighter-deaths/

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-took-in-about-1-2-billion-from-crypto-businesses-last-year-financial-disclosure-shows

https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-26-108859

https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2026/07/01/pentagons-push-to-field-weapons-faster-risks-outrunning-its-own-oversight-watchdog-finds/

https://www.newsweek.com/list-slavery-signs-trump-can-remove-national-parks-court-win-12154454

The Fucking News Allison Gill The Breakdown On Offense with Kris Goldsmith

A Texas woman named Lynn Callaway filed a federal complaint against two Austin ERs that turned her away during a miscarriage and left her to nearly die. She’s fighting back under the same law Texas passed after three women died the same way.

The White House floated banning pregnant women from entering the country, and Rep. Andy Ogles introduced the “Anchors Away Act” to do it.

The Supreme Court refused to hear Trump’s appeal of the E. Jean Carroll verdict, so he owes her five million dollars. His Justice Department responded by investigating her.

California put the crisis pregnancy center industry on trial for lying about “abortion pill reversal,” a treatment with no evidence behind it.

The Supreme Court ruled states can ban transgender girls from school sports.

Plus: one year of the Planned Parenthood defund, abortion pills reclassified as trafficking in Mississippi and Oklahoma, a Boulder clinic besieged by extremists, and the manosphere turning up in college classrooms.

Sources:

https://www.texastribune.org/2026/06/22/texas-miscarriage-abortion-ban-hospital-complaint/

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/stephen-miller-birthright-citizenship-birth-tourism-supreme-court_n_6a446102e4b0aaefe6448c39

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/supreme-court-rejects-trumps-push-to-toss-5-million-verdict-in-e-jean-carroll-sexual-abuse-case

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/supreme-court-transgender-athletes-ban-west-virginia-idaho/

https://19thnews.org/2026/07/manosphere-misogyny-infiltrates-college-campus

Abortion, Every Day The 19th News

Jessica Valenti at Abortion Every Day pulled the actual funding documents and broke down what they require. Programs must teach girls about the “disadvantages of ovarian suppression,” which is federal code for discouraging the Pill, while offering “body awareness,” meaning period tracking, in place of contraception.

It lines up exactly with the Heritage Foundation roadmap to push young women into early marriage and motherhood instead of college and careers. And we already know abstinence-only education doesn’t lower teen pregnancy. It raises it. That’s the point.

Credit to Jessica Valenti and Abortion, Every Day for the reporting.

An active-duty Air Force major was arrested on the Capitol steps this week for calling on President Trump to be impeached. His name is Jason Watson, a twenty-year logistics readiness officer on leave from a NATO post in Poland.

Watson asked the group Removal Coalition, founded by Jessica Denson , to organize the event. He stood on the steps in uniform, held a sign reading Impeach Convict Remove, and said the strikes on Venezuela and Iran violated the War Powers Clause and killed thirteen service members.

The Capitol steps are a no-protest zone unless you are accompanied by a member of Congress. Watson was escorted up by Democratic Rep. Al Green of Texas, who has forced impeachment votes against Trump this term. The moment Green stepped away, Watson lost that protection and Capitol Police arrested him. As they led him off, the crowd chanted “who do you serve, who do you protect.”

The piece sits Watson’s arrest next to the January 6 pardons: the people who violently stormed these same steps walk free, while an active-duty officer who stood on them peacefully with a sign left in handcuffs

Sources

https://thehill.com/policy/defense/5951658-air-force-major-arrested-capitol

https://www.reutersconnect.com/item/us-air-force-officer-arrested-at-capitol-calling-for-trump-impeachment/dGFnOnJldXRlcnMuY29tLDIwMjY6bmV3c21sX01UMU5VUlBITzAwMEtJRTRFWg

New records reveal Pete Hegseth ran government business on Signal, a consumer messaging app, with chats rigged to auto-delete, instead of the locked-down classified system built to keep foreign adversaries out. The documents, pried loose by Democracy Forward and reported by The Atlantic, expose 13 previously unseen Signal chats from senior officials.

Signal is a good app, but it is not the government’s classified system. Cabinet officials get hardened equipment and secure facilities so that military planning doesn’t live on the same kind of phone you could drop in an airport. And it’s not hypothetical: a Signal-style archiving tool one of these officials was photographed using, made by TeleMessage, reportedly got breached by hackers.

The chats were also set to auto-delete. One with Hegseth, Rubio, and the Joint Chiefs chairman wiped every 8 hours. A 17-person thread with Hegseth, Vance, and Lutnick wiped every week. Federal law requires the government to preserve these records, and a chat that erases itself three times a day does the opposite.

They were told to stop. In April, in the Oval Office, Trump told The Atlantic’s editor “maybe don’t use Signal.” Ten days later, senior officials were still on it, in chats with names like “Iran/Ukraine Planning.”

When lawyers closed in, the government bought software called LeapXpert, which advertises itself as turning Signal into a “government-grade communication channel,” and switched it on about a day before a court deadline, with four months of messages already gone.

A servicemember who left classified material on an unsecured device would be prosecuted. The Secretary of Defense did it at scale and the White House called it “old news.”

Sources:

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2026/06/hegseth-rubio-caine-signal-auto-delete/

https://democracyforward.org/updates/signalgate-foia/

https://www.mediaite.com/media/news/pete-hegseth-and-marco-rubio-stayed-on-signal-chats-records-show-despite-trump-warning/

Trump’s Interior Department has told National Park Service employees they can no longer release information about serious injuries or deaths on public lands. Everything now routes through the Department’s communications office, which decides what the public gets to know.

So when a 72-year-old man died of heat on a popular Grand Canyon trail on June 12, the rangers who wanted to warn the next hikers were silenced. Four days later, a couple in their late sixties died of heat on that same trail. About 300 million people visit these parks every year, and roughly 350 of them die. The people who know which trail, on which day, have been ordered to keep it to themselves.

Here is where the safety money went. The Park Service could not find $424,000 for a guardrail on a cliff edge in Colorado’s Black Canyon of the Gunnison, a project its own employees flagged in writing as a significant safety hazard for visitors. It did find $689,232 to rip out the White House walkway and replace it with polished African granite, carved in Italy. When a reporter asked Trump who paid for it, he said, “Paid for by me.” He did not. It came out of the National Park Service, the same budget as that guardrail.

The Park Service also spent $347,503 redoing a wall so Trump could hang portraits of past presidents next to plaques of his own opinions about them. And this is bigger than the walkway. Spending across the Washington capital region jumped 92 percent in a year, covering fountains, the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, and a Fourth of July fireworks show, while parks across the country lost the money to keep visitors safe.

Meanwhile Trump has clawed back funding from more than 900 park projects, some parks losing nearly 70 percent of their approved funds. He has bused rangers off the trails to Washington for his Freedom 250 events. The Park Service has lost almost a quarter of its staff since he took office, and his 2027 budget calls for cutting another 31 percent. He also asked for $10 billion to beautify Washington, nearly eight times what the entire Park Service spent on projects in 2025. Even the Senate took that one back out.

Original reporting by Michael Scherer at The Atlantic. The policy hiding park deaths was reported by Wes Siler and by Jake Spring at the Washington Post.

Sources:

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/06/national-parks-trump-white-house-renovations/687700/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2026/06/24/internal-memo-tells-staff-stay-mum-deaths-national-parks

Heather Cox Richardson Wes Siler More Than Just Parks @

Trump’s Board of Peace wrote itself blanket legal immunity, can’t be prosecuted or sued for anything it does running Gaza, and gave itself the power to take Palestinian property “free of charge.” The board is Kushner, Witkoff, Wiles, and Rubio.

House Republicans are pushing the “Repealing Big Brother Overreach Act” to gut the Corporate Transparency Act and legalize anonymous shell companies, the same law Trump signed himself in 2021.

Postmaster General David Steiner told the Senate the Postal Service won’t deliver mail ballots in vote-by-mail states that refuse to hand over their absentee-voter lists. A federal judge separately struck down the administration’s voter database that ran 67 million Americans through it.

Texas voted to make Bible passages required reading for more than 5 million public school students.

An Oregon attorney turned Congress’s own Congressional Review Act theory back on it, threatening 70% of federal oil and gas leasing acreage.

Plus: a farmer arrested at a data center meeting, John Bolton’s guilty plea, and PECO’s first strike in 145 years.

Sources:

https://www.theguardian.com/law/2026/jun/27/board-of-peace-legal-immunity-un

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/26/texas-bible-required-reading-public-school

https://www.404media.co/bodycam-footage-video-claremore-oklahoma-data-center-meeting/

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/ex-national-security-adviser-john-bolton-pleads-guilty-to-illegally-retaining-classified-information

https://whyy.org/articles/peco-strike-2026-union-negotiations/

More Than Just Parks Scott MacFarlane

JD Vance won’t say he opposes jailing women for an ab@rt!on, and Texas Right to Life wants to revoke the medical licenses of women who take abortion pills.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth killed the 74-year-old DACOWITS committee and is reviewing women out of ground combat, the same elite schools he never finished.

Tennessee unveiled the country’s first anti-abortion monument on its Capitol lawn, a few feet from the memorials to the Holocaust and slavery.

Plus: the moms.gov data-harvesting update, the Turning Point USA “Women’s Leadership Summit,” and the Heritage Foundation’s 250-year plan to put women back in the home.

https://19thnews.org/2026/02/women-combat-roles-pete-hegseth-pentagon-review/

https://www.aclu.org/news/womens-rights/pete-hegseth-wants-women-out-of-the-military-and-hes-not-hiding-it

https://www.nashvillescene.com/news/pithinthewind/state-capitol-tennessee-monument-to-the-unborn/article_d10b9a46-6396-4bb8-b625-4edeb222b38f.html

https://theprint.in/feature/tpusa-womens-summit-erika-kirk-texas/2968767/

https://www.deseret.com/opinion/2026/01/28/heritage-foundation-250-plan-to-save-the-family/

Team Steady Abortion, Every Day

Eight people were sentenced this week for a July 4th protest outside the Prairieland ICE detention center in Alvarado, Texas, getting a combined 450 years in prison. Only one of them, Marine veteran Benjamin Song, fired a weapon. The other seven shot no one.

Five defendants got 50 years each for “providing material support to terrorists.” The evidence included wearing black, carrying first-aid kits, using Signal, and belonging to a left-wing book club. Daniel Sanchez Estrada got 30 years for moving a box of zines after a protest he didn’t attend.

The trial judge, Trump appointee Mark Pittman, said the difference between this and January 6th was that this case was charged differently, with a finding of terrorism. The other sentencing judge, Reed O’Connor, called the protest an assault on democracy. For comparison: the longest January 6th sentence was 22 years, and Trump pardoned roughly 1,500 Capitol defendants, including hundreds who assaulted police.

This was the first major test of a new federal playbook for prosecuting protest as terrorism, and it’s already being aimed at activists in Michigan and Minnesota.

Sources:

https://theintercept.com/2026/06/23/prairieland-texas-ice-protest-prison-sentences/

https://www.democracynow.org/2026/6/25/prairieland_nine

https://truthout.org/articles/prairieland-protesters-sentenced-to-30-to-100-years-for-terrorism-charges/

https://mlfa.org/alleged-antifa-members-get-decades-in-prison-over-violent-ice-protest/

The Supreme Court Just Shielded Monsanto From Cancer Lawsuits. The Supreme Court ruled 7-2 that Monsanto can’t be sued by the people its weedkiller gave cancer, because Monsanto used the Roundup label the EPA approved and the EPA never required a cancer warning. John Durnell sprayed Roundup for about 20 years, developed non-Hodgkin lymphoma, and won $1.25 million from a Missouri jury. The Court erased it. The world’s leading cancer agency calls glyphosate a probable human carcinogen, the EPA says it isn’t likely to cause cancer, and the Court sided with the EPA.

The fix runs deeper than the bench. The Justice Department urged the Court to back Bayer, helped along by lawyers who came from Bayer’s own law firms. Months earlier, Trump declared glyphosate critical to national defense, and Bayer is the only company in America that makes it. Bayer’s stock jumped about 16% the same day the cancer claims got harder to file.

Sources:

https://www.npr.org/2026/06/25/g-s1-120233/supreme-court-monsanto-roundup-decision

https://usrtk.org/pesticides/trump-administration-asks-supreme-court-to-back-bayer-again-aided-by-officials-who-came-from-bayers-law-firms/

https://prospect.org/2026/04/27/bayer-turns-over-every-stone-to-stiff-roundup-cancer-victims/

Donald Trump canceled the signing of the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act an hour before the ceremony, refusing to sign the most significant housing affordability bill in a generation until Congress passes the SAVE Act, his voter bill.

The housing bill passed the House 358 to 32 and the Senate 85 to 5. It builds homes and caps the Wall Street firms buying up single-family houses. It landed as inflation hit 4.2 percent, gas sat up around 50 percent since the Iran war, and beef ran nearly 19 percent higher.

Trump called the bill “of minor importance” and reportedly told his own Republicans “I don’t care about housing.” Congressman French Hill was caught praising the bill on live TV as staffers unscrewed the presidential seal behind him.

The SAVE Act can’t pass. Thune won’t kill the filibuster, the Senate parliamentarian already ruled it can’t go through reconciliation, and Republican Anna Paulina Luna called that plan Kool-Aid. Trump has ten days to sign the housing bill or let it die in a pocket veto.

Sources:

https://thehill.com/homenews/house/5938384-save-america-act-reconciliation-johnson/

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/24/trump-cancels-housing-bill-signing-save-america-act.html

https://newrepublic.com/post/212282/republicans-scramble-trump-refuses-sign-housing-bill

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm

https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-trump-administrations-tariffs-and-iran-war-will-cause-americans-to-face-higher-prices-this-summer/

The New Republic

Cops got caught using Flock, the nationwide license-plate camera network, to stalk their ex-girlfriends, the same system cities were supposed to dump after it was used to track women driving to clinics.

Trump’s Justice Department went to federal court to defend Elon Musk’s right to run 57 unpermitted gas turbines pumping formaldehyde over a Black Memphis neighborhood, arguing his Grok chatbot is too vital to national security to shut off.

The January 6 rioters who assaulted police are now demanding millions through a quiet Federal Tort Claims Act back door, with Trump’s own former defense lawyers deciding who gets paid.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth scrapped the military’s flu shot mandate in April; two months later 160 troops are sick at a Texas base and a recruit is dead.

Asked at the G7 whether anyone would be held accountable for a U.S. strike that killed more than 170 people, most of them little girls, at an Iranian elementary school, Trump called it “a strange question.”

The Forest Service is preparing to spray cancer-linked glyphosate across 75,000 acres near Lake Tahoe, leaning on a safety study Monsanto secretly ghostwrote.

Plus Trump’s algae-choked Reflecting Pool, his feud with Giorgia Meloni, and Jeff Bezos trashing his own newspaper.

Sources:

https://www.404media.co/cops-keep-getting-arrested-for-using-flock-to-stalk-people/

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jun/16/elon-musk-xai-datacenters-trump-administration

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/17/january-6-defendants-compensation-process

https://thehill.com/policy/defense/5932135-flu-outbreak-lackland-air-force/

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-school-bombing-iran-accountable_n_6a32da0fe4b04f5fa0bdeafb

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/18/lake-tahoe-glyphosate

https://www.newsweek.com/cyclist-arrested-handcuffed-reflecting-pool-national-guard-12098916

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/italys-meloni-pushes-back-on-trumps-fabricated-claim-as-top-diplomat-cancels-u-s-trip

https://www.status.news/p/jeff-bezos-washington-post-donald-trump-dinner

The administration quietly rewrote a federal grant program, the Embryo Adoption Awareness program at Health and Human Services, to describe frozen embryos as “children who already exist.” It looks like paperwork. It’s fetal personhood, the legal groundwork to ban IVF and ab@rt!on nationwide without a single vote. We already saw it in Alabama, where calling embryos “children” shut IVF clinics down overnight.

A new report from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research finds ab@rt!on bans are draining roughly $140 billion a year from the economy, pushing women out of jobs and whole states out of the running for the workers who’d power them.

In San Antonio, artist Ana Hernandez unveiled a mural honoring four women killed by Texas’s ban: Josseli Barnica, Nevaeh Crain, Porsha Ngumezi, and Tierra Walker. Meanwhile Arkansas approved a monument to the unborn at its Capitol, built from a design taken from a local artist who was never paid. In Wyoming, after a judge struck down three anti-ab@rt!on laws, Republicans moved to dismantle their own supreme court. And in the lightning round: Kentucky activists campaigning to end IVF, Ohio trying to put the ab@rt!on pill on an opioid-style watch list, and a fake clinic opening across the street from a real one in Danville, Illinois.

This Tuesday marks four years since Dobbs. Stay angry. Stay loud. Under Her Eye.

Sources:

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-admin-embryo-child-grant-program_n_6a32dd6ae4b0dfdabce9ca40

https://iwpr.org/articles/more-than-140-billion-in-lost-earnings-abortion-restrictions-continue-to-harm-women-and-are-a-persistent-drag-on-the-economy/

https://www.sacurrent.com/news/texas-news/new-mural-in-southtown-remembers-women-who-died-due-to-texas-abortion-ban/

https://www.propublica.org/article/porsha-ngumezi-miscarriage-death-texas-abortion-ban

https://reproductiverights.org/news/u-s-repro-watch-6-16-26/

Abortion, Every Day

MLB warned the three players that writing on the uniform is against the rules and that further violations could bring discipline, the same policy that keeps any player from scrawling a personal message across his jersey. The verse Roupp chose, Genesis 9:12-16, happens to be the passage where God sets a rainbow in the sky as the sign of his covenant, which means a protest against a rainbow celebration was staged using the one piece of scripture about the origin of the rainbow.

What should have ended in the clubhouse became a federal matter instead. Vice President JD Vance posted that Trump won and “we don’t have to do this anymore.” California State Senator Scott Wiener replied, “Yes, we do.” Then Harmeet Dhillon, the Assistant Attorney General who leads the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, sent Commissioner Rob Manfred a letter referring the league to federal investigators over whether warning the players amounts to religious discrimination. The San Francisco Archdiocese has since joined the administration in defending the players.

The inversion is hard to miss. The players had a rule-free way to opt out and didn’t take it. They wore the hat, defaced it, and were warned for breaking a rule every player follows. And the federal government’s response is to target the league for enforcing its own rulebook, not the players who broke it. A Civil Rights Division that has spent the year stepping back from cases involving voting, housing, and discrimination is now treating a baseball uniform policy as a civil rights emergency.

Sources

https://www.sacbee.com/news/california/article316193934.html

https://abc7news.com/post/vice-president-jd-vance-criticizes-giants-pride-night-controversy-trump-won-california-state-sen-scott-wiener-responds/19317184/

On Monday, Immigration and Customs Enforcement quietly released a new set of National Detention Standards, the rules that govern how people are treated inside ICE jails. ICE says the standards “streamline” its regulations and “reduce the burden” on detention operators. In practice, they strip away some of the last protections detained immigrants had, and they were shaped, in part, by the for-profit prison company that profits most from them.

The first change eliminates the requirement that facilities pay detained people for their labor, a wage that usually amounted to a dollar a day. The new rules go further, barring facilities from paying more than a dollar a day and reclassifying the people doing the work as “not employees.” That reclassification arrives at a convenient moment. GEO Group, one of the country’s two largest private prison companies, is currently facing class-action lawsuits from detainees demanding to be paid an actual wage for the work they’re forced to do. The new language reads almost exactly like it was written to defeat those suits.

The second change scraps the requirement to provide in-person and telephone interpreters. In their place, ICE says artificial intelligence can handle what it calls “non-critical communication.” Advocates who reviewed the standards point out that “non-critical communication” includes detainee grievances, which are frequently complaints about being denied lifesaving medical care. So a person who doesn’t speak English, trying to report that they’re seriously ill, may now have that message routed through a machine that translates by guessing.

The third change is the quietest and the most dangerous. Facilities are now required to accept anyone ICE sends them, even people too sick or disabled for that facility to care for. Before, a jail that couldn’t meet someone’s medical needs had to transfer them to a hospital. Now it simply has to hold them. According to the Associated Press, this also reduces the facility’s liability when a detainee dies. At least 50 people have died in ICE custody since the start of the second Trump administration.

According to the Washington Post, GEO Group privately asked ICE for several of these changes, including the removal of language requiring contractors to follow state and local laws. CoreCivic, the other major private prison company, was also consulted. Both donated $500,000 each to Trump’s inaugural fund. And both border czar Tom Homan and acting ICE director David Venturella worked for GEO Group before taking the government jobs that now regulate it.

Public Citizen called the new standards a gift to the for-profit contractors. The people paying for that gift are the ones with no way out.

Credit to Shireen Akram-Boshar at Truthout, whose ongoing reporting on Delaney Hall and GEO Group surfaced this story.

: https://truthout.org/articles/ice-releases-new-detention-regulations-benefiting-for-profit-prison-companies/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2026/06/16/ice-removed-detainee-protections-after-private-outreach-top-contractor/

https://apnews.com/article/ice-detention-standards-conditions-immigration-detainees-5f87c9e1099cc70718a2a7f39fb7f9ff

https://www.ice.gov/doclib/detention-standards/2026/nds2026.pdf

https://www.citizen.org/news/new-ice-detention-standards-fail-to-address-detainee-exploitation/

Congressional Republicans have introduced the Take Care of America’s Veterans Act, a 554-page package that bundles more than 60 veterans’ bills, including the widely supported Major Richard Star Act. But to satisfy budget rules, the package offsets its cost by cutting future VA disability compensation for two of the most common service-connected conditions: tinnitus and sleep apnea. The VA projects the change would reduce disability payments by up to $57 billion over ten years, affecting as many as 1.5 million veterans.

The bill effectively eliminates the standalone disability rating for tinnitus, the single most common service-connected disability, treating it as a symptom that only counts if paired with separately documented hearing loss. For sleep apnea, it ties the rating to treatment: veterans whose CPAP machines successfully manage the condition could see their rating cut toward zero.

As a combat veteran, I have tinnitus, and like roughly a quarter million other service members, I was part of the litigation against 3M over the defective Combat Arms earplugs issued during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, a case that ended in a $6 billion settlement for causing the exact hearing injuries the earplugs were meant to prevent.

Every major veterans service organization, including the VFW, DAV, IAVA, and Paralyzed Veterans of America, opposes the funding mechanism. The Major Richard Star Act can be passed as standalone legislation without cutting other veterans’ benefits.

Sources:

https://www.govexec.com/management/2026/06/gops-va-overhaul-bill-narrows-some-employees-rights-spurs-privatization-union-says/414230/

https://www.unite4veterans.org/press/vets-tcava-va-disability-rating

https://www.stripes.com/veterans/2026-06-11/major-veterans-legislation-60-bills-21939097.html

https://www.dav.org/learn-more/news/2026/dav-condemns-congressional-proposal-to-cut-disability-benefits-for-1-5-million-veterans/

https://taskandpurpose.com/news/veterans-bill-tinnitus-sleep-apnea/

https://www.military.com/daily-news/2024/03/27/250000-veterans-agree-6-billion-settlement-3m-over-earplugs-alleged-cause-hearing-loss.html

The report documents the conditions through specific cases: a 2-year-old, separated from his detained father, who stopped eating for 12 days; a 1-year-old who began hitting himself and stopped speaking; and a 1-year-old girl given only Tylenol before being hospitalized for a week with COVID, pneumonia, bronchitis, and RSV. Pediatric experts note that infancy and toddlerhood are when detention causes the most lasting developmental harm.

In response, the Department of Homeland Security said ICE “is not targeting children” and questioned the media’s coverage of immigration under the prior administration, rather than addressing the documented conditions.

Border crossings have fallen sharply, undercutting the security rationale for the policy.

Reporting by The Marshall Project and MS NOW.

Source:

https://www.ms.now/news/trump-ice-detention-dilley-kids-immigration

https://www.themarshallproject.org/2026/06/09/babies-and-toddlers-in-ice-detention

The UFC event, billed as part of the country’s 250th-anniversary celebration, drew more than 4,000 guests. The UFC said it covered the cost, but the National Park Service stated in a court filing that taxpayers are out more than $60 million, with seven federal agencies involved. A Trump-family crypto company added a $250,000 bonus pool, and a commercial pilot landing at Reagan National filed a federal safety report over the event’s lighting. The same week, a court ordered the President’s name removed from the Kennedy Center.

A Government Accountability Office report on Camp East Montana, the largest immigration detention facility in the country, found that a detainee, Geraldo Lunas Campos, died in a guard restraint ruled a homicide, and that the contractor never provided required use-of-force and death reports, with evidence “missing or destroyed.” The report also documented a lost loaded firearm, a detainee escape, tuberculosis screening by questionnaire, and detainees with diabetes and HIV left without treatment plans. DHS described the facility as “upgrading.”

In Pittsburgh, a medical examiner ruled the death of Daphy Michel, a Haitian asylum seeker released by ICE into freezing weather, a homicide, the kind of post-release death ICE recently stopped reporting. And an investigation by The City found that more than 93% of people arrested in ICE street operations across New York and New Jersey were Latino, with agents detaining people they admitted were not their intended targets.

Plus: the administration waived the Endangered Species Act and other laws to build a border wall through Big Bend National Park; a judge ordered the restoration of censored Park Service exhibits on slavery and climate; and Trump asked Congress to expunge his two impeachments.

Sources:

https://apnews.com/article/trump-80th-birthday-ufc-biden-e14d1bbccc1cbaaad42fd541b1fe833d

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/-ice-camp-east-montana-gao-report-tuberculosis-guard-lost-gun-rcna349213

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/womans-hypothermia-death-pittsburgh-after-her-release-ice-custody-ruled-homicide_n_6a2db098e4b08741f51b1b65

https://projects.thecity.nyc/ice-street-arrests-investigation-racial-profiling/

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/13/texas-border-wall-big-bend-national-park

https://apnews.com/article/trump-national-parks-lawsuit-c39eee6f77c2e782fc494e2167bf5a39

This week on the Gilead Gazette, the stories the press isn’t covering.

YouTuber Jesse Ridgway and his wife shared that they ended a pregnancy after a Down syndrome diagnosis, a decision made by roughly 74% of families who receive that diagnosis. The post drew nearly 25 million views and a wave of death threats. Conservative figures including Matt Walsh and Abby Johnson attacked the family, and House Speaker Mike Johnson called their private decision “evil.” The family says they now sleep next to a gun.

In Illinois, one of the most pro-choice states in the country, a man who secretly drugged his girlfriend with abortion medication to end her pregnancy was sentenced to seven years for “voluntary manslaughter of an unborn child,” a fetal-personhood charge that casts the woman not as the victim of an assault but as incidental to it.

In Georgia, Republican gubernatorial candidate Rick Jackson was recorded agreeing that rape victims should have to “prove” they were assaulted to qualify for the state’s narrow exception. Two of three rape victims never report to police, and roughly 98% of perpetrators are never convicted.

In Arkansas, Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders is invoking sovereign immunity to avoid disclosing what her office told the family of Emily Waldorf, who was denied emergency abortion care and nearly died.

Plus: an Alabama AG threatens websites that share abortion-pill information, the Texas Alliance for Life urges the GOP to drop its “abolitionist” execution plank, and a TPUSA Women’s Summit speaker defended the Salem witch trials.

Sources:

https://www.usmagazine.com/celebrity-news/news/jesse-ridgway-sleeping-next-to-a-gun-amid-abortion-backlash/

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/leaked-audio-shows-gop-candidate-agreeing-that-women-should-prove-rape-to-access-abortion_n_6a0f1637e4b0bb04cec3cc88

This week on the Gilead Gazette, the stories the press isn’t covering.

YouTuber Jesse Ridgway and his wife shared that they ended a pregnancy after a Down syndrome diagnosis, a decision made by roughly 74% of families who receive that diagnosis. The post drew nearly 25 million views and a wave of death threats. Conservative figures including Matt Walsh and Abby Johnson attacked the family, and House Speaker Mike Johnson called their private decision “evil.” The family says they now sleep next to a gun.

In Illinois, one of the most pro-choice states in the country, a man who secretly drugged his girlfriend with abortion medication to end her pregnancy was sentenced to seven years for “voluntary manslaughter of an unborn child,” a fetal-personhood charge that casts the woman not as the victim of an assault but as incidental to it.

In Georgia, Republican gubernatorial candidate Rick Jackson was recorded agreeing that rape victims should have to “prove” they were assaulted to qualify for the state’s narrow exception. Two of three rape victims never report to police, and roughly 98% of perpetrators are never convicted.

In Arkansas, Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders is invoking sovereign immunity to avoid disclosing what her office told the family of Emily Waldorf, who was denied emergency abortion care and nearly died.

Plus: an Alabama AG threatens websites that share abortion-pill information, the Texas Alliance for Life urges the GOP to drop its “abolitionist” execution plank, and a TPUSA Women’s Summit speaker defended the Salem witch trials.

Sources:

https://www.usmagazine.com/celebrity-news/news/jesse-ridgway-sleeping-next-to-a-gun-amid-abortion-backlash/

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/leaked-audio-shows-gop-candidate-agreeing-that-women-should-prove-rape-to-access-abortion_n_6a0f1637e4b0bb04cec3cc88

Abortion, Every Day

According to Democracy Now and advocates working with detainees, most of the hunger strikers have been transferred to other ICE facilities in recent days, moves advocates describe as retaliation that separates strikers from family, counsel, and outside observers. DHS has disputed the hunger strike’s existence, pointing to increased commissary snack sales at the facility.

The strike at Delaney Hall is no longer isolated: the ACLU and detention-watch groups count at least five additional active hunger strikes in ICE detention across six states, with the Tacoma, Washington facility seeing nine separate strikes this year. Meanwhile, New Jersey’s attorney general is suing GEO Group over access for state health inspectors, and Jersey City has voted to divest from a bank that finances GEO.

This is a follow-up to my earlier report on Delaney Hall, where detainees described worm-infested food, denied medical care, and beatings, and where the Supreme Court ruled 9-0 this year that GEO Group can be sued for its $1-a-day forced labor program.

Sources:

https://www.democracynow.org/2026/6/12/headlines

https://inthesetimes.com/article/new-jersey-prison-immigrants-strike-ice-trump

Artan returned to Mogadishu to a hero’s welcome, with thousands filling a stadium to greet him. The mayor of Toronto and the premier of British Columbia, in co-host nation Canada, publicly invited him to referee there.

Meanwhile, hundreds of Scotland supporters, a country on no travel ban list, have had previously approved ESTA travel authorizations canceled without explanation, some hours before departure, with some told to obtain criminal-record checks that take longer than the tournament itself. Scotland’s First Minister has raised the issue in Parliament.

And days before kickoff, roughly 180,000 tickets remained unsold. FIFA slashed prices across all 104 matches and returned most of its block-booked hotel rooms, while New York and New Jersey’s attorneys general subpoenaed FIFA over ticketing practices.

Sources:

https://www.espn.com/soccer/story/_/id/49016259/us-official-somalia-omar-artan-suspected-terror-ties

https://www.npr.org/2026/06/10/nx-s1-5853075/somali-world-cup-referee-denied-u-s-entry-hailed-as-hero-at-home

https://www.espn.com/soccer/story/_/id/49011169/first-minister-scottish-fans-entry-world-cup

https://www.newsweek.com/scotland-fan-missing-world-cup-opener-says-trump-should-return-the-hospitality-12059715

https://theconversation.com/the-ticket-price-fiasco-for-the-mens-fifa-world-cup-has-been-a-spectacular-own-goal-282532

https://www.newsweek.com/reseller-platform-denies-fifa-collusion-as-world-cup-tickets-remain-unsold-12028175

The exhibits were produced with Hillsdale College and PragerU, and reporting shows the displays skew American history toward Christian nationalism, including echoes of antisemitic myths about the Revolutionary War. The trucks have already visited more than 300 schools and aim to reach 20 million people, with corporate sponsors including ExxonMobil, Palantir, and Lockheed Martin.

The irony is generational: the U.S. government stripped Ali’s heavyweight title and cost him three prime years because his faith forbade him from fighting in Vietnam. One of his final public statements, in December 2015, was a rebuke of Donald Trump’s proposed Muslim ban. A month into Trump’s first term, border agents detained Ali’s son, a U.S. citizen, and asked him, “Are you a Muslim?”

This story was broken by independent journalist Jonathan Larsen , the only outlet reporting it. Subscribe to his work. The Fucking News Jonathan Larsen’s Substack

Sources:

The United States spent years lobbying to co-host the 2026 World Cup. Days before kickoff, it’s already turning the world away at the door.

Omar Artan, one of Africa’s top referees and set to become the first Somali to officiate a World Cup match, was denied entry to the US despite holding a valid visa. He flew to Miami and was turned away by Customs, which cited “vetting concerns.” Somalia is on the Trump administration’s travel ban list, and the president has previously disparaged Somali immigrants. FIFA said it would not intervene, noting the host nation controls entry.

Iran, which qualified for the tournament and is scheduled to play all three of its group-stage games in the United States, has had visas delayed and denied for members of its delegation. As a result, the team is basing in Tijuana, Mexico, and traveling in for matches. When the players arrived, they wore gold pins reading “168,” the number of people, most of them children, killed when a missile struck an elementary school in Minab, in southern Iran, in February. No government has formally accepted responsibility; the UN condemned the strike and the Pentagon has said it is investigating.

The World Cup was supposed to showcase the host nation. This one is showing the world a country deciding, at the airport, who counts.

Sources:

https://www.espn.com/soccer/story/_/id/49002985/somali-referee-world-cup-denied-entry-united-states

https://abc7ny.com/post/irans-world-cup-players-wear-pins-for-victims-deadly-strike-on-school-as-they-arrive-mexico/19258775/

This week in tyranny: while the president rambled to farmers about sinking 159 ships, his administration was denying detainees water, hiding the dead, and getting help from the Supreme Court to rig the next election.

At the Florida detention camp nicknamed “Alligator Alcatraz,” detainees reported that guards withheld food and shut off drinking water, water they say was already contaminated with mosquito larvae, to pressure them into signing English-language self-deportation documents they could not read. Detainees with diabetes and high blood pressure were reportedly denied medication. The state called the accounts “complete fabrications.”

The same week, acting ICE director David Venturella issued a memo eliminating the requirement to report detainee deaths that occur within 30 days of release from custody, narrowing public reporting to deaths that happen in custody. The change lands as ICE records its deadliest stretch in two decades. The 2021 rule it rescinds was created precisely to stop the agency from releasing critically ill detainees to avoid recording an in-custody death.

The Supreme Court, via its shadow docket, allowed Alabama to use a congressional map that lower courts repeatedly found to be intentionally racially discriminatory, further eroding the Voting Rights Act. And NOTUS reported that the administration routed $26 million in national park recreation fees to nearly double the U.S. Park Police force in Washington, D.C., explicitly to expand immigration enforcement.

Plus: a DOJ lawyer conceded in court the government could demolish the Statue of Liberty if it moved quickly enough; the DOJ opened an FBI investigation into California’s election after Trump alleged fraud without evidence; CBS gutted “60 Minutes”; and the House voted to check Trump on Iran and advance aid to Ukraine.

Sources:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/05/alligator-alcatraz-detainees-denied-food-water

https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/2026/06/04/ice-stop-reporting-deaths-newly-released-detainees-internal-memo-says/

https://www.notus.org/trump-white-house/president-trump-white-house-national-park-fees-park-police-doubled

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-doj-demolish-statue-liberty_n_6a23066be4b0a18aef0bf611

The Fucking News Heather Cox Richardson The Contrarian

The Trump administration funneled pregnant, unaccompanied immigrant girls, some as young as 13 and roughly half pregnant as a result of rape, into a single facility in San Benito, Texas, a state that bans abortion. A former Trump health official described the strategy as “100% and exclusively about abortion.” Rep. Maxine Dexter, a physician, was blocked from seeing any of the children, and the number held at the facility has dropped sharply, raising fears the girls have been deported, along with their US-citizen newborns.

The Republican Party of Texas announced that Abolish Abortion Texas, a group that supports charging abortion patients with homicide, is an official sponsor of its 2026 state convention. The FDA launched a new “safety study” of mifepristone, a drug proven safe over 25 years and hundreds of studies, with results conveniently not expected until after the November midterms. And House Republicans voted to cut $141 million from WIC, slashing fruit and vegetable benefits for low-income mothers and children.

Plus: a federal judge blocked Trump’s $1.8 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” on May 29, which was set to compensate anti-abortion extremists; Tennessee candidate Monty Fritts wants abortion patients charged with murder; and wins in Nevada and Illinois.

Sources:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/01/pregnant-minors-texas-ice-facility

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/fda-abortion-pill-safety-study_n_6a223725e4b0d8021c9f018c

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2026/apr/17/media-coverage-violence-against-women-low-report

Abortion, Every Day

According to ProPublica, of the dozens of companies the Pentagon was weighing at the time, Vulcan’s was the only deal initiated by a top White House official: Peter Navarro, the senior counselor for trade, who has no formal role in Pentagon lending decisions. One defense official said staff were told, “The call came from the White House: We have to get this done.” Navarro is a close friend of Trump Jr., who visited him during his four-month prison sentence for defying a January 6th subpoena, and who promoted Navarro’s book to his streaming audience roughly a week before the loan was announced. After the deal, Vulcan’s estimated valuation grew roughly tenfold.

This week, a group of lawmakers including Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Richard Blumenthal, Mazie Hirono, and Reps. Jason Crow and Mike Levin sent a letter to the White House demanding answers. Sen. Patty Murray of Washington called for a congressional investigation, and Sen. Raphael Warnock of Georgia called it “corruption to the highest degree.”

Sources:

https://www.propublica.org/article/donald-trump-jr-vulcan-lawmakers-letter

https://www.propublica.org/article/donald-trump-jr-vulcan-deal-white-house

Meanwhile, the National Park Service faces a maintenance backlog estimated at $24 billion, even as the administration has redirected roughly $76 million in national-park entrance fees toward beautification projects in Washington, D.C., ahead of the country’s 250th anniversary. That includes a no-bid contract to repair and repaint the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, which has ballooned to about $13.1 million, roughly seven times the initially stated cost. At Crater Lake National Park, 18 of 45 permanent positions sit vacant and the superintendent resigned after five months.

Credit to More Than Just Parks for tracking this throughout. Follow them for updates and for the public comment link when the next window opens.

Sources:

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/27/us/national-park-fees-dc-projects.html

One of the women removed had completed the Navy’s advanced nuclear power school and was selected to aide a four-star admiral; her name had surfaced on a website targeting “woke” officers because she served as a diversity liaison two decades ago. Hegseth has already fired the first woman to lead the Navy and the second Black chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and nearly 60 percent of the senior officers he has removed are women or Black, according to Senator Jack Reed.

Hegseth also pushed to add his own special assistant, a SEAL who was ineligible under the board’s rules, to the promotion list, and told a member of Congress he was “not aware” of it when asked directly.

Separately, on the same week, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled his transgender troop policy unconstitutional, with the court describing it as driven by animus, though the ruling was narrowed to currently serving members and is on hold pending further appeal.

Sources:

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/01/us/politics/hegseth-navy-promotion-list.html

https://www.notus.org/donald-trump/circuit-court-strikes-down-pentagon-hegseth-policy-transgender-active-military

Inside Delaney Hall, a private immigration prison in Newark, New Jersey, detainees are being forced to work for as little as a dollar a day, served food reportedly crawling with worms, denied medical care, and beaten by guards when they went on strike. Most have never been charged with a crime — many were detained at routine immigration check-ins they attended voluntarily.

The facility is run by the GEO Group, a private prison corporation operating on an ICE contract worth roughly a billion dollars. Its business model depends on keeping beds full, and detainees report being coerced into a so-called “Voluntary Work Program” under threat of solitary confinement. In February 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 9-0 in GEO Group v. Menocal that the company can be sued for forced labor under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act; lower courts found ICE never required GEO to force the work or cap pay at a dollar.

When demonstrators gathered outside, New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill sent hundreds of state police, who fired rubber bullets, tear gas, and flash-bang grenades and charged protesters on horseback. The ACLU called it a militarized attack on free speech.

Sources:

https://inthesetimes.com/article/new-jersey-prison-immigrants-strike-ice-trump

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/may/30/protests-ice-immigration-detention-center-new-jersey

https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/mikie-sherrill-police-newark-ice-protests-20260531.html

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/daily-labor-report/justices-reject-fast-appeal-in-geo-1-per-day-forced-labor-case

Donald Trump Jr. is an investor in Vulcan Elements, a rare-earth startup that just received a $620 million Pentagon deal — a deal that, according to ProPublica, was pushed from the White House and increased the company’s valuation roughly tenfold. He’s also a shareholder in a drone company now positioned for a share of the Pentagon’s billion-dollar drone program, even as Iran downs U.S. drones over the Gulf and injures American personnel in Kuwait.

The U.S. Postal Service proposed mailing ballots only to voters on a federal list — a significant federal intrusion into an election system the Constitution reserves to the states — alongside two pending Supreme Court cases on mail-in ballot deadlines and party-candidate spending coordination, and the fallout from April’s Voting Rights Act ruling.

Trump established “Freedom 250” inside the congressionally chartered National Park Foundation, installed campaign staff on its board, and began selling access to himself at $1 million to $5 million per tier, while the National Park Service has lost more than a quarter of its workforce and faces a proposed 25% operations cut.

A federal judge froze Trump’s $1.8 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” 11 days after its launch, and a second judge reopened his lawsuit against the IRS to investigate whether it amounted to fraud on the court. Plus: a proposed $250 bill bearing Trump’s face, Justice Alito’s son working quietly at Treasury, and the Pentagon recruiting uniformed troops for Trump’s 80th-birthday UFC event at the White House.

Sources

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/may/30/trump-irs-suit-reopened

https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/how-supreme-court-is-reshaping-us-midterm-elections-2026-05-31/

https://www.notus.org/us-news/samuel-philip-alito-trump-treasury-department

More Than Just Parks Heather Cox Richardson The Contrarian The New Republic

A new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, examining over 123,000 patients, found that abortion bans are degrading miscarriage care. In ban states, miscarrying patients were more likely to be sent home to “wait and see” and less likely to receive mifepristone, the standard medication, because it is the same drug used in abortions. The result is prolonged miscarriages and increased risk of hemorrhage and sepsis.

A fringe group called the American College of Pediatricians (ACPeds), a roughly 500-member organization designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, coined the term “sex-rejecting procedures” to attack gender-affirming care. ACPeds is frequently mistaken for the legitimate American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), which has 64,000 members. ACPeds is also a plaintiff in litigation seeking to pull mifepristone from the market.

In the rapid fire: South Dakota passed a law taking effect July 1 that criminalizes advertising abortion pills, prompting a First Amendment lawsuit from former state lawmaker Nancy Turbak Berry and Mayday Health; an Arkansas judge revived a lawsuit from six women denied care under the state’s near-total ban; advocates sued Friday to block Trump’s “Anti-Weaponization Fund” from paying January 6th rioters and anti-abortion extremists; and former AG Pam Bondi testified behind closed doors about the Epstein files while the DOJ pursues a criminal investigation into E. Jean Carroll, the writer a jury found Trump sexually abused.

Links in the comments. Thank you to the reporters and outlets doing this work, including Abortion, Every Day.

Stay angry. Stay loud. Under Her Eye.

Sources:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/may/28/abortion-restrictions-miscarriage-healthcare

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/pam-bondi-epstein-files-house-oversight-committee/

Abortion, Every Day

The only one of the 14 whose identity is publicly known is Sergeant Cory Hicks, a 19-year Army veteran who survived a March drone strike on his base in Kuwait that killed six Americans. Hicks sustained a lacerated kidney, a severed spleen, and a traumatic brain injury, and has spoken publicly about the survivor’s guilt he carries. The Defense Department has not released the identities of the other wounded service members.

This follows a documented pattern. After Iranian strikes on U.S. forces in Iraq in January 2020 caused traumatic brain injuries to dozens of American troops, Trump publicly downplayed the injuries as “headaches.” A CBS News investigation later found that dozens of those brain-injured soldiers were denied the Purple Heart, a decision that minimized the severity of their wounds. One of those soldiers later died by suicide.

In 2017, during his first term, Trump visited Walter Reed and personally awarded a Purple Heart to a soldier who had lost a leg, in a widely photographed ceremony. The contrast is the point: when wounded soldiers serve his image, he seeks them out; when they are evidence of a war he started, he walks past them.

If you or someone you know is a veteran in crisis, call or text the Veterans Crisis Line at 988, then press 1.

Sources:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-visited-soldiers-walter-reed-not-14-injured-in-iran-war/

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/purple-heart-us-soldiers-iran-al-assad-air-base-attack-traumatic-brain-injury/

In that deposition, Carroll said she had not received outside funding for her lawsuit. It was later revealed that a nonprofit connected to LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman had helped cover some of her legal expenses, an arrangement Carroll’s attorneys have said she had no direct knowledge of. The same accusation was raised in court during the original litigation, and in 2024 a three-judge panel of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed the claim.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has recused himself from the investigation because he personally represented Trump in the Carroll appeals before joining the administration. The probe is being led by US Attorney Andrew Boutros of the Northern District of Illinois, a Trump appointee.

The Carroll investigation joins a growing list of Trump DOJ criminal probes into the president’s political adversaries, including former FBI Director James Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and Democratic members of Congress. Two federal judges have separately found prosecutorial misconduct in recent Trump DOJ political prosecutions, including the Broadview Six case and the case against Kilmar Abrego Garcia.

In 2023, a federal jury awarded Carroll $5 million after finding Trump liable for sexually abusing her in a Manhattan department store in the 1990s. A second jury awarded her $83.3 million in 2024 in a related defamation case. Both verdicts were upheld on appeal.

Sources:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/may/27/trump-doj-investigation-e-jean-carroll

https://abcnews.com/US/doj-launches-criminal-probe-jean-carroll-sources/story?id=133367551

https://www.cnn.com/2026/05/27/politics/exclusive-justice-department-launched-e-jean-carroll-investigation

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/justice-department-investigating-whether-trump-accuser-e-jean-carroll-committed-perjury/

https://time.com/article/2026/05/28/e-jean-carroll-trump-justice-department-criminal-investigation/

https://www.ms.now/news/e-jean-carroll-trump-doj-criminal-investigation

The proposal is a federal regulation, not a bill or an executive order. It does not require congressional approval. It will be officially published Wednesday and open for a 30-day public comment period before OPM can finalize it.

While technically voluntary at the agency level, the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), the largest federal workers’ union, said the administration will pressure every agency to require the NDA and then fire workers who refuse to sign.

This is the same legal tool Donald Trump has used throughout his career to silence ex-wives, contestants on The Apprentice, campaign staff, Stormy Daniels, and women who have accused him of misconduct. It is now being deployed against the federal workforce.

The proposal fits a broader pattern of state-coerced censorship that has emerged in recent weeks: the Department of Justice deleted approximately 1,700 press releases related to January 6th prosecutions, calling the federal record of the insurrection “partisan propaganda”; The Late Show with Stephen Colbert aired its final episode after CBS’s parent company Paramount caved to Trump administration pressure during a major merger review.

To submit a public comment, visit FederalRegister.gov.

Sources:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2026/05/26/trump-administration-proposes-expansive-ndas-all-federal-workers/

https://www.cnn.com/2026/05/26/politics/ndas-federal-workers-trump-administration-proposal

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5895178-trump-administration-federal-worker-ndas-leaks/

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/05/26/nation/trump-ndas-federal-workers/

Public inspection PDF (available now): https://public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2026-10471.pdf

Memorial Day was established in 1868 by veterans who walked into Civil War cemeteries and laid flowers on the graves of the men they served beside. They called it Decoration Day. It was, and is, for the dead.

This Memorial Day, the Commander in Chief of the United States military is Donald Trump, a man who received five deferments to dodge the Vietnam War, who once said avoiding sexually transmitted infections was his version of combat, who called the American war dead in France “suckers” and “losers,” who attacked a Gold Star family on national television, who told a military widow her dead husband “knew what he signed up for,” who called John McCain a “loser” for being captured, who stood inside Arlington National Cemetery and asked General John Kelly, a four-star Marine whose son was killed in Afghanistan, “what was in it for them?”, who called for the execution of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who said he didn’t want to be seen with wounded amputees, who skipped the dignified transfer of four soldiers killed in Lithuania to host a gala at his golf club, and who said this month that he gets “a kick” out of people bringing up the 13 American service members who died in his Iran war. “Only thirteen,” he said.

His Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, has spent the last year remaking the U.S. military in his own image. He fired Adm. Lisa Franchetti, the first female Chief of Naval Operations. He fired Gen. CQ Brown, the first Black Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He banned transgender service members. He gutted diversity training. He stripped ships of the names of civil rights heroes. He hired his own pastor, a public opponent of women’s suffrage, to advise Pentagon policy. He shared classified war plans on Signal. He renamed the Department of Defense the “Department of War” without congressional approval. He told the graduating class at West Point last week to follow the advice of a racist Christian nationalist.

The U.S. military is constitutionally required to be non-religious and non-partisan. Pete Hegseth is openly violating both.

Today is Memorial Day. It belongs to the fallen. Honor them by remembering. Honor them by voting. Honor them by refusing to let men who never served decide what their sacrifice meant.

Sources:

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/09/trump-americans-who-died-at-war-are-losers-and-suckers/616370/

https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/22/politics/john-kelly-donald-trump-fitness-character

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/02/21/hegseth-firings-cq-brown-joint-chiefs/

https://abcnews.com/US/army-cuts-dozens-medical-training-courses-amid-funding/story?id=133192487

The same week, the DOJ moved to vacate the seditious conspiracy convictions against Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes and seven others, with prejudice, meaning the charges cannot be brought again. Rhodes had weapons stash houses across the Potomac on January 6 and was convicted by a jury, with the conviction upheld on appeal.

Two federal judges in two states tossed two of Trump’s biggest political prosecutions in the same week. Judge April Perry dismissed the Broadview Six case in Illinois, saying she had never in her career seen prosecutorial behavior this bad. Judge Waverly Crenshaw in Tennessee dismissed the human smuggling case against Kilmar Abrego Garcia, ruling the prosecution was vindictive and pointing directly at acting Attorney General Todd Blanche.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth delivered a commencement address at West Point in which he told graduates to “seek God” and follow the advice of the late Charlie Kirk, a Christian nationalist activist. The United States military is constitutionally required to be non-religious and non-partisan.

Stephen Colbert’s Late Show aired its final episode on Thursday, ending an 11-year Colbert run and the 33-year Late Show franchise on CBS. CBS announced the cancellation last summer days after Colbert criticized Paramount’s settlement with Trump, while Paramount was awaiting Trump administration approval of a major merger.

Plus: Senate Republicans fled town to avoid voting on Trump’s slush fund. Iran has destroyed $1 billion in U.S. Reaper drones. Trump fired DNI Tulsi Gabbard days after her husband’s cancer diagnosis. And Trump’s net worth has jumped to $6.1 billion as his organization fast-tracks 25 foreign real estate projects.

Sources:

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-justice-department-scrubs-website-news-releases-jan-6-defendants_n_6a11a923e4b084c012e70e21

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/kilmar-abrego-garcia-charges-dismissed-indictment-judge/

https://www.notus.org/trump-white-house/cfpb-deletes-consumer-advisories-from-its-website

https://www.cnn.com/2026/05/22/media/stephen-colbert-last-late-show-hnk

https://apnews.com/article/congress-billion-ballroom-trump-funding-bill-republicans-d0b0d2ee59a95f6199d80998ab89d7e4

Minority Veterans of America filed a federal lawsuit against the Trump administration over the Department of Veterans Affairs abortion ban, which was quietly implemented three days before Christmas in 2025. The ban prevents VA providers from offering abortion care or even counseling, even in cases of rape, incest, or life-threatening pregnancy. The legal memo justifying the policy argued that the ban “protects” veterans from depression that can follow abortion. The lead plaintiff is a pregnant veteran whose own VA doctor is now legally forbidden from discussing abortion with her.

Politico’s Alice Miranda Ollstein reported that the fine print of Trump’s $1.7 billion Anti-Weaponization Fund specifically names people convicted under the FACE Act, the federal law that protects abortion clinics from violence and obstruction. The story comes the same week the National Abortion Federation released its annual violence report: death threats against clinics doubled in 2025, stalking doubled, blockades surged 500%, and clinics suffered four arsons after zero in 2024.

In Texas, 25-year-old Jon Demeter was indicted this week for slipping abortion pills to his pregnant girlfriend disguised as a “passion fruit liquid IV.” He is the first person charged under the state’s anti-abortion law in this manner. The case exposes the dystopia in practice: the woman had to seek emergency care from urgent care because OBGYNs in Texas are too terrified of prosecution to treat pregnancy losses.

A new study in JAMA found that miscarriage patients in abortion-ban states receive worse care: 2.8% more likely to receive “expectant management” and 13.8% more likely to receive misoprostol alone instead of the more effective mifepristone and misoprostol combination. Nearly 3,700 women a year are getting substandard miscarriage treatment.

A bipartisan bill to create a Smithsonian museum of American women’s history collapsed in the House after Rep. Mary Miller (R-IL) added an amendment barring the museum from depicting “any biological male as female” and giving Trump personal authority over the museum’s location.

Plus: Vanderbilt poll finds 1 in 4 Tennessee voters support charging abortion patients with homicide. Iowa signs telehealth abortion ban. Turning Point USA hosts a Women’s Leadership Summit featuring a 20-year-old tradwife who openly campaigns to repeal the 19th Amendment.

Sources:

https://abortioneveryday.substack.com/

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/05/face-act-trump-weaponization-fund

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2026

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/crime/article/woodlands-abortion-pills-demeter-charged

https://www.notus.org/congress/womens-history-museum-house-vote-fails

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/22/us/politics/georgia-supreme-court-abortion-election.html

Abortion, Every Day

The Army Medical Center of Excellence at Fort Sam Houston has canceled at least 34 medical training courses through the end of the current fiscal year, according to ABC News reporting and internal Army documents. Many of the canceled programs are tied directly to frontline combat casualty care. Other cuts include leadership and certification training for senior medical officers, including officers preparing to command helicopter medical evacuation units.

The cuts come less than three months after the March 1st Iranian drone strike on a U.S. base in Kuwait that killed six American service members, including Master Sgt. Nicole Amor of White Bear Lake, Minnesota. Amor died in a civilian van on the way to a Kuwaiti hospital because the medic riding with her did not have the supplies or specialized training to keep her airway open.

Last week, the Army’s acting top officer, Gen. Chris LaNeve, told lawmakers during congressional testimony that the Army had not canceled anything. Internal documents reviewed by ABC News show this statement was false.

The Pentagon is requesting a $1.5 trillion budget for fiscal year 2026, a 50% increase. The figure does not include the cost of the Iran war, which has already topped $29 billion. Additional Army expenses include support for DHS border operations, the National Guard mission in Washington D.C. (projected at $1.1 billion this year), and rising fuel costs. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s previous management experience was running two veterans nonprofits, both investigated for financial mismanagement and both of which he was forced out of.

On Monday, the EPA proposed removing the legally enforceable nationwide drinking water limits on four forever chemicals, including GenX, a Teflon byproduct that contaminates the Cape Fear River in North Carolina and is linked to cancer, hormone disruption, liver damage, and infertility. The Biden administration had set the country’s first nationwide limits on these chemicals in 2024. Zeldin’s EPA is now scrapping those limits and giving water utilities until 2031 to comply with rules on the better-known forever chemicals PFAS and PFOA.

Today, Trump is signing an executive action loosening restrictions on hydrofluorocarbons, the refrigerants used in cooling equipment. HFCs are greenhouse gases thousands of times more potent than carbon dioxide. The action reverses a bipartisan 2020 law Trump himself signed in his first term. The signing event at the White House includes executives from Kroger, Piggly Wiggly, and other grocery chains. The EPA argues the rollback will lower grocery prices, but has provided no estimate of how much or when.

Make America Healthy Again activists, who petitioned for Zeldin’s removal last year over similar moves, have so far been silent. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who built his public identity around removing toxins from the American body, has not commented. Zeldin said the action represents “a dagger through the heart of climate change religion.”

Sources:

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/05/19/trump-epa-forever-chemicals-pfas-drinking-water-rule

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/may/21/trump-refrigerant-rule-kroger

https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/epa-announces-actions-pfas-drinking-water-2031-deadline-extension

Master Sergeant Nicole Amor of White Bear Lake, Minnesota, was alive when soldiers pulled her out of the rubble. She was transported in a civilian van to a Kuwaiti hospital because there weren’t enough U.S. military ambulances on site. The medic riding with her did not have the supplies he needed to keep her airway open. She died in the van. Major Stephen Ramsbottom, a career soldier and one of the survivors, told CBS that if there had been a doctor, an aid station, or more than one ambulance, Amor would still be alive.

Master Sergeant Ann Marie Carrier, another survivor, told CBS the unit had never done a single mass casualty rehearsal before the war began. U.S. intelligence had warned in January that Iran would target the base. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth went on television the day after the attack and described the drone as a “squirter” that snuck past fortified defenses. There were no fortified defenses. The “bunker” was a triple-wide trailer with a tin roof.

The dead: Captain Cody Khork. Master Sergeant Nicole Amor. Sergeant First Class Noah Tietjens. Sergeant Declan Coady. Major Jeffrey O’Brien. Chief Warrant Officer Robert Marzan.

Four Democratic senators on the Armed Services Committee have launched a formal investigation. The Pentagon has called the survivors’ accounts “unfounded and inaccurate.” Eight soldiers from the unit say the Pentagon is lying.

Massive credit to CBS News for the reporting, and to Jonathan Larsen at The Fucking News for being one of the only journalists in the country refusing to let this story die.

Sources:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/troops-army-medical-support-iran-kuwait-attack

https://www.thedailybeast.com/pentagon-pete-hegseth-accused-of-failing-to-protect-troops-before-deadly-kuwait-attack/

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/democratic-senators-launch-investigation-kuwait-strike-killed-u-s-troops/

At 7:50 this morning, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, formerly Donald Trump’s personal criminal defense attorney, scanned a one-page document and uploaded it to the Department of Justice website. The document permanently bars the IRS from ever auditing Donald Trump, his family members, his trusts, his businesses, or anyone “affiliated” with him. No one at the IRS signed it. No one from Trump’s legal team signed it. Just Blanche.

The addendum was the secret final piece of Monday’s IRS lawsuit settlement, in which Trump dropped his $10 billion suit against the IRS in exchange for a $1.776 billion taxpayer-funded “Anti-Weaponization Fund” that Trump personally controls and that explicitly includes payments to the 1,600 January 6th insurrectionists he pardoned. Senator Ron Wyden called the deal “the most brazen theft and abuse of taxpayer dollars by any president in American history.” Congressman Jamie Raskin called it “pure fraud and highway robbery.”

Hours after uploading the audit immunity addendum, Blanche testified for two hours before the Senate Appropriations subcommittee. The addendum was technically public during the hearing, but no Senator asked about it. Meanwhile, Treasury Department General Counsel Brian Morrissey, a former clerk for Justice Clarence Thomas appointed by Trump himself, resigned in protest. Ninety-three Democratic House members have filed an emergency motion to block the settlement, arguing the Judgment Fund cannot legally pay people who were not parties to the lawsuit and that Congress, which holds spending authority, never authorized the fund.

The New York Times previously calculated that just one of Trump’s pending audit losses alone could cost him over $100 million. The audit immunity could be worth hundreds of millions to Trump personally.

This isn’t a settlement. It’s a heist with a federal seal on it.

Sources:

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/05/19/doj-trump-irs-tax-audits-blanche-addendum

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026/05/18/trump-will-end-10-billion-lawsuit-against-irs-over-leaked-tax-records/

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/18/us/politics/treasury-lawyer-morrissey-resigns-irs-settlement.html

https://abcnews.com/Politics/acting-ag-todd-blanche-faces-questions-17-billion/story?id=133107554

https://www.cnn.com/2026/05/19/politics/takeaways-todd-blanche-senate-testimony-weaponization-fund

Trump’s $10 billion IRS lawsuit transformed overnight into something worse: a $1.7 billion taxpayer-funded compensation fund that Trump will personally control, with no oversight, that explicitly includes payments to “entities associated with Trump himself” and the 1,600 January 6th insurrectionists he already pardoned. Congressman Jamie Raskin called it “an absolute corruption and prostitution of the Judgment Fund.”

A historic Black cemetery in Palmetto, Florida, established in 1904, was vandalized with the words “Trump” and “DeSantis” spray-painted in red across 17 gravesites, including the grave of a World War II veteran.

A NOTUS report revealed Trump bought up to $1 million in Nvidia stock days before his administration granted Nvidia permission to sell chips to China. He bought $100,000 in AMD before the same. He bought $150,000 in Palantir weeks before Palantir won a new contract with his Department of Homeland Security. This is insider trading by definition.

The Trump administration and Texas AG Ken Paxton forced Texas Children’s Hospital, the largest children’s hospital in the country, to pay $10 million, fire five doctors who provided gender-affirming care to trans youth, and open the nation’s first “detransition clinic.” 40 hospitals have shuttered their trans youth programs nationwide.

The Pentagon abruptly cancelled the deployment of 4,000 American troops to Poland after the soldiers had already started arriving. Republican Congressman Don Bacon called it “an embarrassment to our country.”

Plus: DOJ dropped fraud charges against Indian billionaire Gautam Adani after he hired Trump’s personal lawyer. Ryan Zinke wants to delist grizzly bears from the Endangered Species Act because the gutted Park Service can’t manage trails anymore. And FBI Director Kash Patel was photographed snorkeling above the USS Arizona memorial.

Welcome to the golden age.

Sources:

https://abcnews.com/US/trump-poised-drop-irs-suit-launch-17b-weaponization/story?id=132962661

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/florida-cemetery-vandalized-trump-desantis-graffiti

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-stock-trading-nvidia-amd-palantir-corruption

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/texas-childrens-hospital-detransition-clinic-settlement

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/05/16/hegseth-poland-troops-cancelled-pentagon

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/may/16/kash-patel-snorkeling-uss-arizona-memorial-hawaii

Dr. Mehmet Oz, who runs Medicare and Medicaid, used the launch of Moms.gov to announce that one in three Americans are “under-babied.” Mississippi and Oklahoma both passed laws making it a felony to distribute misoprostol, the medication that’s also used to safely complete m!scarriages and prevent postpartum hemorrhage. Florida’s two-year-old six-week ban is driving a 25 percent surge in mothers receiving delayed or no prenatal care. Lynchburg, Virginia, passed a zoning ordinance that effectively bans cl!nics from operating anywhere in the city. And in California, anti-abortion stalker Anastasia Rogers is going to trial under the state’s version of the FACE Act because Trump’s DOJ stopped enforcing the federal version in January, the same week he pardoned anti-@bortion protesters who used violence.

The bans aren’t the project. Forced birth is the project. The bans are how they get there. Make sure to follow and subscribe to Jessica Valenti and Abortion, Every Day

Sources:

https://abortioneveryday.substack.com/

https://www.axios.com/newsletters/axios-future-of-health-care-89b8c440-4fad-11f1-882f-0b97d6833720.html

https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/fda-commissioner-makary-removed-by-trump

https://www.nj.com/opinion/2026/05/nearly-half-of-nj-women-cant-access-the-birth-control-they-actually-want-opinion.html

https://www.cbsnews.com/texas/video/how-the-supreme-courts-pending-decision-on-abortion-pills-could-impact-texas-women/

Cuba needs approximately 8 fuel tankers per month to meet basic energy needs. In April, the Trump administration permitted exactly one. The Cuban President has called the blockade “a genocidal energy blockade.” Under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, starvation of civilians and the blocking of humanitarian relief are explicitly listed as prosecutable war crimes. Because the United States is not formally at war with Cuba, the same conduct also qualifies as a crime against humanity under international law.

On Thursday, CIA Director John Ratcliffe traveled to Havana to deliver a message that the United States would “seriously engage on economic and security issues, but only if Cuba makes fundamental changes.” No American troops are at risk. No Cuban military threatens the United States. The U.S. military operates a base on Cuban soil at Guantanamo Bay. This is being done in your name, with your tax dollars, while corporate media looks away.

Sources:

https://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2026/05/14/Cuba-says-oil-reserves-totally-drained/9311778746907/

https://www.wsj.com/world/americas/protests-erupt-in-cuba-as-fuel-runs-out-8e577bc9

https://www.wsj.com/world/americas/cia-director-visits-havana-as-fuel-runs-out-in-cuba-f3ac4286

https://apnews.com/article/cuba-us-meeting-cia-john-9a3e7946460f8e5e48424f3a59df3fe8

https://asil.org/insights/volume-22-issue-5/

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/01/addressing-threats-to-the-united-states-by-the-government-of-cuba/

The DOJ is now racing to settle before May 20 so the judge never gets to rule. According to the New York Times, the proposed settlement would drop all current and future IRS audits of Trump, his family, and his businesses. The Times previously calculated that one pending audit loss alone could cost Trump over 100 million dollars.

This same week, the Department of Health and Human Services placed a six month moratorium on new Medicare enrollments from hospice and home health care providers, affecting access for over 5 million elderly and disabled Americans. The administration also froze 1.3 billion dollars in Medi-Cal funding to California. The Trump DOJ previously settled a similar case with Michael Flynn for 1.25 million dollars in April, calling it a remedy for “historic injustice.”

Congressman Don Beyer called the IRS scheme potentially “the largest single act of grand larceny in American history.”

The Wall Street Journal revealed Monday that the DOJ quietly served them grand jury subpoenas back in March, demanding records from reporters covering the Iran war. According to WSJ and CNN reporting, President Trump personally handed Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche a stack of printed news articles in an Oval Office meeting with a Post-it note on top. Written in Sharpie, in Trump’s own handwriting, was one word: “Treason.”

Todd Blanche is Trump’s former personal criminal defense attorney. He took over the Justice Department last month after Trump fired Pam Bondi. The article that triggered the March subpoena was a February 23rd WSJ story reporting that General Dan Caine, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had warned Trump against starting an extended military campaign against Iran. Five days later, Trump launched the war anyway. Two months in, the war continues with no stated goal and no timeline.

Trump publicly threatened reporters with prison at a news conference last month: “We’re going to go to the media company that released it, and we’re going to say: National security, give it up or go to jail.” Dow Jones called the subpoenas an attack on constitutionally protected newsgathering.

The Trump administration launched Moms.gov on Mother’s Day, a government website that appears to be an official resource for pregnant women but immediately funnels them to anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers while collecting their personal medical data.

Names, home addresses, menstruation dates, marital status - all collected by Heartbeat International, one of the largest anti-abortion organizations in the country, whose terms of use allow them to share that information with corporate employees, CPC volunteers, and in at least one case, anyone with an internet connection, according to reporting by Abortion Every Day.

Senate Democrats flagged Option Line’s data collection practices in 2022. The Trump administration built a government website around it anyway.

Crisis pregnancy centers are not medical facilities, are not staffed by licensed providers, and have been documented lying to patients about gestational age, medical risks, and available options. Republicans tried to launch this same website in 2023 and called it life.gov. Then pregnancy.gov. Then Moms.gov, until it sounded warm enough that nobody would notice what it actually does.

This follows the EPA adding birth control to a federal contamination watch list two weeks ago. They are building a surveillance system around women’s reproductive decisions piece by piece.

Shout out to Abortion, Every Day and Mother Jones for the reporting.

Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior, is proposing to open 24 million acres of federal public land to cattle grazing, bypassing environmental review, including parts of the Grand Canyon, Grand Staircase-Escalante, and other sensitive landscapes.

Cattle strip native grasses down to the root, collapse stream banks, flood waterways with manure, and raise water temperatures until native fish can’t survive. Then the government kills wolves and grizzlies to protect the cows that destroyed the land in the first place.

Two thirds of all federal grazing is already controlled by just 10% of permit holders, including billionaires like Rupert Murdoch and Stan Kroenke. Less than 2% of American beef comes from public lands and the US imports more beef than it exports, meaning this does nothing for American food security. It is a giveaway to wealthy donors that will destroy your land.

Simultaneously, the administration proposed canceling grazing permits held by American Prairie, a conservation nonprofit that spent twenty years growing a bison herd from 19 animals to 952 and sending bison to tribal nations to help restore herds deliberately wiped out as a weapon of genocide against Indigenous peoples.

They are evicting bison, the animal on the Interior Department’s own seal, to make room for cattle. The Taylor Grazing Act being used to justify this was passed in 1934 after cattle overgrazing turned the Great Plains into a wasteland, with dust storms reaching Washington DC. Congress passed it specifically to stop this from happening again.

The Center for Biological Diversity filed notice of intent to sue in April, arguing the plan will drive wolves, grizzlies, and steelhead salmon toward extinction. The administration has 60 days to respond. Contact your senators and tell them to oppose this.

Shout out More Than Just Parks and for being some of the only people reporting on Trump’s attacks on the environment.

Always Free! If you like what you see, considering becoming a subscriber. The revolution starts with us. ✊

Following last week’s Supreme Court ruling gutting the Voting Rights Act, Republicans rushed to redraw maps across the South to eliminate Black political representation before November’s midterms.

In Tennessee, state representative Justin Jones burned a Confederate battle flag in the Capitol rotunda as Republicans cracked Memphis into three pieces, eliminating the state’s only majority-Black congressional district, one that has existed since the 1920s.

In Virginia, the state Supreme Court struck down on a 4-3 partisan split a redistricting referendum voters had just approved. In Mississippi, Republicans called a special session at the Jim Crow era Old Capitol.

In Alabama, the governor called for new maps despite a federal court injunction forbidding it. The NAACP has filed suit in Tennessee.

Economist Justin Wolfers published an analysis showing the Iran war will cost hundreds of billions to trillions, the $25 billion Pentagon figure only counts missiles and equipment, not lost lives, oil market disruption, or Iran’s new ability to charge Strait of Hormuz tolls. Trump is reportedly bored with the war. China is openly questioning whether the US can defend Taiwan.

Tennessee Governor Bill Lee also signed a law vastly expanding the state’s power to collect private medical data on transgender patients and their healthcare providers.

Trump granted two-year clean air compliance pauses to 180+ facilities including coal plants using a presidential exemption never invoked before.

FEMA is systematically denying disaster aid to Democratic-led states while speeding it to Republican ones.

Rapid fire: Kash Patel distributing personalized bourbon on DOJ aircraft while the FBI investigates the journalist who exposed it. Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy filmed a road trip TV show while on the job. Trump gave a no-bid $6.9 million Reflecting Pool contract to a company that worked at his golf club. A gold 22-foot Trump statue was installed at his Miami golf course, paid for by crypto investors promoting their memecoin. And the Department of War released UFO files. For fun.

Welcome to the golden age.

If you or anyone you know needs legal help related to a pregnancy outcome, call 844-868-2812 or visit ReproHelpline.org.

A new Johns Hopkins study found a 9.2% increase in pregnancy-related deaths in states with abortion bans. At least five women have been named: Josseli Barnica, Porsha Ngumezi, and Nevaeh Crain in Texas, and Amber Nicole Thurman and Candi Miller in Georgia. Researchers say these are the tip of the iceberg.

In Iowa, Jessica Djukanovic was denied care for a fatal fetal diagnosis because her doctor was too afraid of legal consequences to act. She was lucky. Not every woman is.

Missouri’s Born Alive bill passed Senate committee and is heading for a full Senate vote.

The Supreme Court’s pause on the Fifth Circuit’s mifepristone ruling expires Monday May 11. Contact your senator. Share resources like Plan C and ReproHelpline.org.

For the most in-depth reporting on attacks on women’s rights, follow Jessica Valenti and subscribe to Abortion, Every Day

Stay angry. Stay loud. Under Her Eye.

Republicans introduced the Dismemberment Abortion Ban Act this week, banning dilation and evacuation, the standard medical procedure doctors use for virtually all second trimester women’s abortions. That includes women whose wanted pregnancies were diagnosed with fatal abnormalities, whose fetus has organs growing outside its body, or whose continuing the pregnancy will kill them. Doctors who perform the procedure face two years in prison.

Rep. Kat Cammack introduced the bill, the same Florida Republican who two weeks ago blocked the Endangered Species Act because she was worried about sea turtles, saying “protected means protected.” Sea turtles: protected. Women needing lifesaving care: protected?

Republicans know banning abortion outright is politically toxic so they ban the procedures doctors use instead. This is the first step: ban second trimester procedures, normalize it; then come back for 12 weeks, then 6.

The bill is HR 8603, referred to the House Judiciary Committee. It has not passed. Contact your representative and tell them to oppose it.

For the most in-depth reporting on attacks on women’s rights, follow and subscribe to Abortion, Every Day

Trump signed a new counterterrorism strategy classifying transgender people, anti-fascists, and left-wing extremists alongside ISIS as top national security threats. The document authorizes using counterterrorism surveillance tools to map domestic groups and identify their members.

Antifa is not an organization. It has no membership, no leadership, no headquarters. Antifa means anti-fascist, every Allied soldier in World War II was antifa.

The administration that pardoned over 1,600 January 6th insurrectionists, vacated the seditious conspiracy convictions of Proud Boys and Oath Keepers leaders, and called January 6th a beautiful day just put trans people and people who oppose fascism on the terrorism list.

Congress also just extended Section 702 of FISA for 45 days without reforms, the warrantless surveillance law already used on Black Lives Matter protesters, government officials, journalists, and 19,000 donors to a single congressional campaign. The government has labeled a political ideology as terrorism and has the legal tools to act on it.

Full document linked HERE. Thanks to MeidasTouch Network for doing the actual reporting on this. Follow and subscribe to them.

The FDA suppressed four of its own scientists’ studies proving COVID and shingles vaccines are safe, two of which had already been accepted by peer-reviewed medical journals. Scientists were directed to withdraw them.

In February, FDA officials blocked researchers from submitting vaccine safety abstracts to a major drug safety conference. Last month the CDC separately chose not to publish its own report showing last winter’s COVID vaccine cut hospitalizations.

The official HHS excuse: the authors drew broad conclusions not supported by the underlying data. The conclusion was that vaccines are safe. The data showed vaccines are safe. Those are the same sentence.

Both the FDA and CDC are run by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a man who has spent thirty years claiming vaccines cause harm without evidence, and who said he is not worried about germs because he has, quote, snorted cocaine off a toilet seat.

When his own scientists spent millions of taxpayer dollars proving him wrong, he made the results disappear. He is also currently withholding $600 million in vaccines from 30 of the world’s poorest countries over the same theories his scientists just disproved.

A former CDC official who led the agency’s COVID hospitalization tracking called it censorship of taxpayer-funded science. Your money. Your health. His feelings.

I provide this Substack to everyone without paywalls because information is power. But if you like what you see, consider becoming a paid subscriber.

The Trump administration shut down the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman this week, the only office legally required by Congress to investigate abuse and handle complaints in ICE detention facilities. The office had over 100 employees when Trump took office. By December it had five. This week it has zero.

30 people died in ICE custody last year, the deadliest year in two decades. 18 have already died this year. Use of force against detainees is up 54%.

ICE is currently holding about 60,000 people on any given day and has a mandate to arrest and remove 1 million people a year. They’re building toward 100,000 detention beds - not for border security, but to have somewhere to put everyone they haven’t gotten to yet.

Lawsuits allege unsanitary cells, measles outbreaks, children being medically mistreated, people held for months without lawyers. Every oversight body is gone - the civil rights office gutted, the detainee complaint office eliminated, the ombudsman closed.

And DHS’s official response to conditions in their facilities is: “detention is a choice.” This from the same administration that tells women they can’t make decisions about their own bodies.

My dude, detention is not a choice. But apparently accountability is. Because they just closed the office that was legally required to provide it.

RFK Jr. is withholding $600 million in vaccines from 30 of the world’s poorest countries including Mali, Chad, and South Sudan, demanding GAVI remove thimerosal from vaccines despite zero scientific evidence it causes harm. Same playbook as Zambia, poor people’s lives used as leverage.

ICE hired MVM Inc., a contractor previously sued for torture, enforced disappearance, and cruel treatment tied to family separation, to track down unaccompanied migrant children. Internal ICE documents show the real goal is deportation, not welfare checks.

Saturday was day 60 of the Iran war, the War Powers Act deadline. Congress did not vote. Trump did not seek authorization. The war continues illegally. $25 billion spent. Thirteen Americans killed. Gas prices up 47% since the war started.

And Trump is putting his face on US passports - his portrait on the inside cover, his signature in gold over the Declaration of Independence. First sitting president ever to do this. Also on coins, park passes, and a battleship named after himself.

Rapid fire: 5,000 troops withdrawn from Germany, Spirit Airlines shut down, the Forest Service is spraying Roundup across California’s national forests in record amounts killing everything on the forest floor, and the ICE agent who shot and killed US citizen Renee Good on camera is back on duty with no charges.

Welcome to the golden age.

This week on the Gilead Gazette:

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a nationwide stay of the FDA’s 2023 telehealth abortion rules, effectively banning mail-order mifepristone in every state effective immediately. The court cited $92,000 in Medicaid costs for two patients to justify stripping telehealth abortion access from every woman in the country.

Texas Congressman Brandon Gill asked law professor Jessica Waters her “favorite type of abortion” before a House Judiciary subcommittee, with a grin. Jessica Valenti at Abortion, Every Day responded with every type of abortion that saves women’s lives, including her own.

In Iowa, gubernatorial candidate Brad Sherman called for prosecuting abortion patients.

In Oklahoma, the legislature sent the governor a bill making delivery of abortion pills a felony, ten years in prison and a $100,000 fine. Illinois meanwhile passed a bill protecting abortion medication from state surveillance.

Trump replaced his surgeon general nominee with Fox News contributor Nicole Saphier, who said in 2019 that every woman has the right to choose, the anti-abortion movement is not pleased.

Conservatives filed yet another lawsuit to keep Virginia’s abortion rights amendment off November’s ballot.

And Trump’s DEI purge reached the soybean board, every woman selected was replaced by a man.

Big thanks to Jessica Valenti and the team at Abortion Every Day for the essential reporting. Follow and subscribe to them.

Stay angry. Stay loud. Under Her Eye.

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals just issued a nationwide stay of the FDA’s 2023 rules allowing mifepristone to be prescribed via telehealth and mailed to patients, effective immediately. This is a nationwide ruling covering every state, not just Louisiana.

Mifepristone accounts for roughly two thirds of all abortions in the United States. Telehealth accounts for about one in four abortions. The ruling comes from a lawsuit filed by Louisiana AG Liz Murrill challenging the FDA’s 2023 rules. A district court previously refused to block the rules while the FDA completed its safety review. Murrill went to the Fifth Circuit, which granted her motion.

The opinion was written by Trump-appointed Judge Kyle Duncan. The court said Louisiana was suffering irreparable harm because approximately 1,000 abortions were occurring in Louisiana every month through telehealth. The state cited $92,000 in Medicaid costs for two patients to justify a nationwide ban.

Women who cannot afford to travel, live in rural areas, cannot take time off work, cannot find childcare, or live in abusive households just lost access today - on May Day, while hundreds of thousands of Americans marched for workers’ rights.

The ruling is temporary while the case continues and reproductive rights organizations are already preparing challenges.

Share this now. Most people have no idea this just happened.

Link to AP article Here

ProPublic has reported that the Trump administration is moving to cut SSI disability benefits for 400,000 Americans with Down syndrome, autism, dementia, severe mental illness, and other disabilities who live at home with families that receive SNAP benefits.

The proposed rule would count a disabled adult’s bedroom as income and cut their monthly benefit by $300 to $330, or eliminate it entirely. The annual savings: $2 billion a year, according to conservative think tanks. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities notes the entire annual savings wouldn’t cover a single day of the cost of the tax cuts for the wealthy Republicans just passed. The Iran war has cost $25 billion in 8 weeks. Trump’s Pentagon is asking for $1.5 trillion in defense spending next year.

Trump promised not to cut Social Security. SSI is administered by the Social Security Administration. The White House says the disability programs are technically separate from retirement benefits. The kind of distinction only Ebenezer Scrooge would make. Or in this case, Russell Vought.

Cutting Shy’tyra Burton’s benefit saves $11 a day. If it forces her father to place her in a residential facility, the cost to taxpayers jumps to hundreds of dollars a day.

Huge shoutout to ProPublica for their reporting. Read the story Here.

The Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act today in a 6-3 decision written by Justice Samuel Alito, 61 years after police beat John Lewis and 600 civil rights marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma for trying to register to vote.

Section 2 of the VRA has protected minority voters for 60 years by prohibiting election maps that dilute minority political power even without proof of intentional discrimination.

Alito just changed that standard. Now you have to prove intentional discrimination, which voting rights groups say makes cases all but impossible to win because lawmakers don’t write down that they’re doing racism.

Louisiana has one majority-Black congressional district despite Black voters making up more than a third of the state’s voting age population. Courts ordered a second. Alito said drawing that district violated the rights of white voters under the Equal Protection Clause.

Republicans can now redraw majority-minority districts across the South before November’s midterms. Black Democrats across the South could lose their seats.

Justice Elena Kagan filed a 48-page dissent and read it aloud from the bench - something justices almost never do, reserved for when they need the country to hear it in their voice. She called this the court’s now-completed demolition of the Voting Rights Act. She closed by saying “I dissent” four times.

The White House called it a complete and total victory for American voters. Just not Black ones. Sixty-one years. One decision.

This is the administration that pulled out of the Paris Agreement, gutted wetland protections, approved a 211-mile mining road through a national park, and is actively expanding fossil fuels and coal. But birth control in the water is where they draw the line. Students for Life ran a fake environmental campaign for years claiming women are putting abortion medication in the drinking water. There is no science behind it.

Former EPA officials told the New York Times that existing wastewater surveillance technology can already identify abortion medication on a specific street or in a specific home. Law professor Mary Ziegler warns this could lead to a much more robust set of prosecutions.

The EPA just opened a 60-day public comment period, Senator Ron Wyden called it a barely-veiled invitation for anti-abortion groups to flood it with demands to add mifepristone. Comment deadline is June 1st. Tell them birth control and abortion medication are not environmental contaminants, there is no peer-reviewed science supporting this, and that listing them opens the door to surveilling women in their own homes.

If they’re flooding the comment period, we flood it too. Birth control being on this list is not an accident. More on that soon.

Here’s the link to leave a comment.

https://www.regulations.gov/docket/EPA-HQ-OW-2022-0946

Shoutout to Abortion, Every Day for reporting on this.

Trump’s government has given Zambia until Wednesday to hand over its mineral rights or lose the AIDS medication keeping 1.3 million people alive. This story broke six weeks ago in the New York Times. Nobody noticed. A

leaked State Department memo confirmed the threat: sign over preferential access to Zambia’s copper, cobalt, and lithium or face massive cuts to PEPFAR funding.

Zambia relies on American money for 80 percent of its HIV treatment. 1.3 million people are on daily medication that depends on it. In December Trump’s government suspended health funding talks entirely when Zambia wasn’t moving fast enough on minerals.

The deadline is this week. Zambia said no. Zimbabwe walked away from a similar deal. Kenya’s compact is suspended by a court order.

Trump’s leverage has already failed everywhere. Which means if he follows through, 1.3 million people lose their treatment not because negotiations collapsed but out of spite.

Since Trump took office, aid trackers at Boston University estimate his cuts have contributed to over 518,000 child deaths and 263,000 adult deaths from manageable diseases. The testing money is gone too so we can’t even count them all.

Two weeks ago I covered Gilead Sciences charging $28,000 for an AIDS drug that costs $25 to make. This week Trump’s government is threatening to let people die of AIDS unless a poor country hands over its minerals. The through line is the same: human lives are not the point. Resources are. The people dying are the leverage. Hat tip to Jonathan Larsen at The Fucking News for tracking this story.

The State Department transferred $1.25 billion in disaster relief and peacekeeping money into Trump’s Board of Peace - a personal international organization he chairs for life with no audits, no transparency, and no congressional vote.

Senate Democrats are about to pass the Fix Our Forests Act, handing permanent industrial logging authority to Tom Schultz, a former lumber executive now running the Forest Service who believes you prevent wildfires by not having trees, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, a political operative with no land management background, and Michael Boren, the Undersecretary who illegally built a private airstrip inside a national recreation area and is now in charge of your national forests. Thanks to More Than Just Parks for flagging this story.

House Oversight Chair James Comer confirmed some Republicans want to pardon Ghislaine Maxwell in exchange for testimony she could give without being under oath.

The DOJ indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center for paying informants to infiltrate the KKK, intelligence they shared with the FBI for years until Kash Patel cut the relationship in October and Todd Blanche indicted them six months later.

At the White House Correspondents Dinner, Trump’s first as president, a gunman sprinted through security and exchanged fire with Secret Service. Before Trump’s press conference, MeidasTouch Network pointed put that MAGA accounts tweeted the same ballroom talking points simultaneously. Trump bragged about the crowd size and made the case for his $400 million ballroom with a secure underground bunker. Make of that what you will.

Welcome to the golden age.

This week on the Gilead Gazette: Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti pressured the state legislature to pass a brand new law giving his office sovereign immunity, specifically to stop six women from testifying about nearly dying under the state’s abortion ban. One woman’s fetus had organs growing outside its body. Others developed sepsis. They waited years for their day in court. He invented a law to silence them the week before they were scheduled to testify.

In Louisiana, AG Liz Murrill filed with the Fifth Circuit to stop all telehealth abortion pill prescriptions nationally while her mifepristone lawsuit plays out. Since Dobbs, abortion rates have actually increased nationwide - bans haven’t stopped abortions, telehealth has kept them accessible, which is exactly why Republicans are trying to kill it.

New Guttmacher data confirms the bans are failing at their only stated purpose: the abortions Republicans spent years calling murder are up, while emergency medical care for pregnancy complications has decreased so precipitously it’s costing women their lives.

We’re also in a femicide crisis that the media won’t name. This week alone: a Louisiana man killed eight children in a domestic violence shooting, Justin Fairfax killed his wife during divorce proceedings, a Utah man killed his wife the day after she filed for divorce, and D4vd was charged with murdering a 14-year-old girl he’d been sexually abusing. The New York Times called it “relationship stress.” It’s femicide, connected to the manosphere, Andrew Tate, Epstein, and a culture that treats women as property.

Pennsylvania’s Commonwealth Court struck down the state’s Medicaid abortion funding ban, ruling it violates the state’s Equal Rights Amendment. A win.

For the most essential reporting on attacks on women’s rights, follow Jessica Valenti and subscribe to Abortion, Every Day .

Stay angry. Stay loud. Under Her Eye.

Eric Trump went on Fox News this week to celebrate a $24 million Pentagon contract his company just won for autonomous military robots - in a war his father started, while his father controls the Defense Department.

Before his dad became president, Eric Trump ran golf courses and hotels. That was his entire professional background.

His business partner explained on Fox that these robots need to rapidly deploy in situations where “we cannot always be calling a CEO to ask for permission.” No human in the loop. Lethal decisions made independently. By robots funded by a contract Eric Trump got while his father runs the Pentagon.

Senator Elizabeth Warren said: “Is the Pentagon just a cash machine for Trump’s kids now? This looks like corruption in plain sight.”

Stephen Hayes of The Dispatch noted that Fox spent years covering Hunter Biden’s laptop - congressional investigations, special counsels, hearings, rally chants - and zero evidence emerged that Joe Biden did anything illegal. Eric Trump goes on Fox to brag about his Pentagon contract and they ask him to tell them more about the robots.

Rep. Shontel Brown said it directly: “The Trump family gets rich off of Trump’s war. Working people get higher prices.”

The president starts a war, his son gets a Defense Department contract for autonomous weapons in that war, and Fox News throws him a party. Tell us about the robots, Eric.

The Trump administration has identified 384 naturalized American citizens whose citizenship it wants to revoke, and they’re calling it the first wave.

Between 1990 and 2017, the government filed just 305 denaturalization cases total over 27 years, averaging 11 per year, almost exclusively targeting people who committed war crimes abroad before becoming Americans.

Now the Trump administration has ordered DHS to refer 200 denaturalization cases a month to the DOJ. They’ve assigned those cases to prosecutors in 39 regional offices who have never handled denaturalization before, pulling them off healthcare fraud, civil rights enforcement, and procurement cases.

The administration hasn’t explained what led them to target these specific 384 people. What we do know is that Trump specifically named Americans of Somali descent as targets.

UVA law professor Amanda Frost, who has written extensively on the history of denaturalization, says the government has used this power in the past to target people it views as political opponents.

If you were born here, your citizenship cannot be revoked. If you were naturalized, the Trump administration is now telling you it’s conditional.

And if they’re willing to go after naturalized citizens today, the question is who’s next. Political enemies. Activists. People they simply don’t like. They called these 384 people the first wave. Which means they already know there will be a second.

Happy Earth Day. The Trump administration is building a border wall through Big Bend National Park and the adjoining state park, one of the most remote and ecologically irreplaceable landscapes in the United States. Big Bend accounts for roughly one percent of all border apprehensions in the entire country. In 22 years of guiding river trips through the region, one local guide has seen exactly one group of migrants cross. The administration waived more than two dozen environmental laws in February to fast-track construction. After massive bipartisan backlash - conservative judges, sheriffs, ranchers, and tourism operators all united against it - the CBP map quietly changed in April to show detection technology instead of a physical wall through the national park. The tractors didn’t leave. Roads are being widened, survey stakes are in the ground, and a $1.2 billion contract was awarded to Fisher Sand and Gravel at $17 million a mile. Fifth-generation cattle rancher Yolanda Alvarado’s family cemetery will be cut in half by the wall. Her grandparents are buried there. The Center for Biological Diversity just filed a lawsuit arguing the environmental waivers are unconstitutional. The former Big Bend superintendent says existing surveillance technology has already been working. Crossings have dropped to historic lows under Trump’s own crackdown. There is no operational need for this wall. Donate to Keep Big Bend Wild and the Center for Biological Diversity’s legal fund. Call your representatives. Remember who did this. Make sure to subscribe to More Than Just Parks

The Atlantic published a bombshell investigation this week reporting that FBI Director Kash Patel is a hard-drinking alcoholic whose addiction is actively interfering with his ability to do his job. His security detail has requested breaching equipment, the kind SWAT teams use, to wake him up because he was unreachable behind a locked door. He’s known to drink to obvious intoxication at a Washington club called Ned’s in front of White House staff, then spend his weekends at the Poodle Room in Las Vegas on the FBI jet.

More than two dozen sources told The Atlantic that early morning meetings had to be rescheduled because of his alcohol-fueled nights, that agents were losing their minds waiting for time-sensitive decisions, and that officials are genuinely alarmed about what happens if there’s a terrorist attack while Patel is unavailable.

He was confirmed 51-49 because Trump wanted someone personally loyal running federal law enforcement. He’s purged agents who worked January 6th cases, fired a counterintelligence squad focused on Iran days before the US went to war with Iran, and polygraphs employees to find out if anyone has said anything mean about him.

He responded to The Atlantic by filing a $250 million defamation lawsuit, which immediately backfired when his own lawsuit confirmed the very thing the FBI had previously called 100% false. If the lawsuit moves forward, there will be discovery. The last thing Kash Patel wants is a deposition.

BlisterPearl on X called him and Hegseth the liquor cabinet. No notes. Hat tip to Sarah Fitzpatrick and The Atlantic for the reporting.

This Week in Tyranny: The Wall Street Journal reported Trump’s military advisers deliberately excluded him from a live rescue mission inside Iran, they feared his erratic behavior would get troops killed. His generals concluded the most dangerous variable in the operation was Donald Trump himself.

The Big Beautiful Bullshit Bill’s SNAP paperwork requirements have stripped 2.5 million Americans of food benefits, with 4 million expected after the first round phases in.

Trump’s 2027 budget eliminates LIHEAP for the sixth time while raising defense spending to $1.5 trillion - ships, weapons, aircraft, and a new battleship named after Trump. Defense contractor stocks jumped 5% the day it dropped.

Starting Monday, $166 billion in illegal tariff refunds flows back to corporations, not the families who paid $1,700 each.

Tulsi Gabbard filed criminal referrals against the Ukraine whistleblower and the inspector general who triggered Trump’s first impeachment.

Guards at Alligator Alcatraz beat detainees after a federal judge ordered their rights protected.

Rapid fire: Vought lied to Congress about impoundment, an ICE officer was criminally charged in Minnesota, Trump’s all-Trump commission approved a 250-foot golden arch at Arlington Cemetery despite 100% public opposition. The people buried there are the ones Trump called suckers.

Welcome to the golden age.

Hat tip to Jonathan Larsen at The Fucking News for his stellar reporting. Follow him!

This week on the Gilead Gazette: A Planned Parenthood clinic in Cincinnati was set on fire on Thursday. Despite significant damage, the clinic resumed services by Friday morning. Assistant medical director Gwen Perry’s response: “Oh, hell no.” This arson happened the same week Trump’s DOJ released an 882-page report declaring clinic violence protected Christian expression.

In Georgia, Attorney General and gubernatorial candidate Chris Carr went on the radio claiming no women have died from the state’s abortion ban and that doctors saying otherwise are playing politics. Georgia’s own maternal mortality committee concluded that the deaths of Amber Nicole Thurman and Candi Miller could be attributed to the ban. The Republican-led state fired the entire 32-member committee. Carr was AG at the time.

In South Carolina, Republicans advanced SB 1095, a bill that would imprison abortion patients for a few years instead of charging them with murder. They are calling it a compromise.

In Missouri, Rep. Brian Seitz said rape victims should be counseled before being allowed to access emergency contraception.

And in Massachusetts, a federal judge ruled that a lawsuit brought by a reproductive health clinic against a crisis pregnancy center for false advertising can move forward. This is what fighting back looks like.

Big thanks to Jessica Valenti and Abortion, Every Day for the fearless reporting.

Stay angry. Stay loud. Under Her Eye.

Senate Republicans voted 50-49 yesterday to hand the headwaters of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness to a Chilean mining company.

A multi-year Forest Service review drew 675,000 public comments, over 95 percent in favor of protection, and concluded sulfide-ore copper mining would cause irreversible harm.

Republicans used the Congressional Review Act, a procedural tool designed to kill regulations, to kill a wilderness protection for the first time in history.

The CRA’s poison pill means no future administration can issue substantially similar protections without a new act of Congress. They didn’t just open the door. They welded it shut.

According to More Than Just Parks , which has been tracking every attack, this was number 40 in 15 months - the Arctic Refuge, 45 million acres of national forest unlocked for chainsaws, two marine monuments thrown to commercial fishing fleets, a 211-mile mining road through a national park, and the Park Service hollowed out by 24 percent. No previous Congress has come close.

Donate to Save the Boundary Waters for the legal fight ahead. If you live in Minnesota, call your state legislators and demand permanent state protections for the Rainy River watershed. Every Minnesota Senate seat is on the ballot in November. Remember who did this. They are counting on you giving up. Don’t.

This week Pete Hegseth read a Pulp Fiction monologue at a Pentagon prayer service and thought it was Ezekiel 25:17. He called it CSAR 25:17, a play on Combat Search and Rescue and Ezekiel 25:17. He was very proud of this.

The actual King James Bible verse is two lines about vengeance. Quentin Tarantino invented the rest for a movie about hitmen.

Baptist minister and journalist Brian Kaylor caught it. Jonathan Larsen at The Fucking News has been covering Hegseth’s unconstitutional monthly Christian nationalist Pentagon prayer services extensively.

Christian nationalists love the Old Testament when God is smiting enemies. Less so when he’s telling them to welcome the stranger. Hegseth went looking for a vengeance verse and came back with Tarantino.

If Quentin Tarantino is watching, you may have a copyright claim against the Department of Defense.

Meanwhile this same administration is furious at Pope Leo XIV for being too political about the Iran war. Trump called him a radical leftist. Hegseth quoted Samuel L. Jackson.

House Democrats introduced articles of impeachment against Hegseth this week. The unconstitutional sectarian prayer operation he has been running inside a secular military institution is not on the list.

And since Pete doesn’t read his sources all the way through: by the end of Pulp Fiction, Jules figures out he is the tyranny of evil men. Just thought you should know how your prayer ends, Pete.

Here’s the Pulp Fiction SCENE.

Yesterday, Trump’s Department of Justice asked a federal appeals court to vacate the seditious conspiracy convictions of the leaders of the January 6th insurrection, including Proud Boys and Oath Keepers members who planned the attack with encrypted communications, military-style tactics, weapons caches staged outside the city, and radios.

When Trump returned to office he pardoned over a thousand January 6th defendants but only commuted the sentences of those convicted of sedition, implicitly acknowledging the convictions were legitimate. Now he’s using his DOJ to erase them entirely.

The filing was signed by Jeanine Pirro, now serving as Washington’s U.S. Attorney. Families of Capitol police officers are calling it a personal affront. Jurors who spent weeks rendering those verdicts are being told they were wrong.

If the court agrees, the legal record of January 6th as an attempted overthrow of the United States government gets wiped. Not from history. Not from video. Just from the law. Which is apparently the only place Trump needs it gone.

Today Trump’s Department of Justice released an 882-page report from its Weaponization Working Group declaring that Biden-era prosecutions of anti-abortion activists under the FACE Act were religious persecution.

The FACE Act was passed in 1994 because abortion providers were being murdered. One of the groups Trump pardoned chained themselves to clinic doors and livestreamed it. Former DOJ prosecutor Laura-Kate Bernstein described a case where a woman having a miscarriage was bleeding in the back of her car, unable to enter the clinic because activists were blocking the door. Those activists were convicted by a jury.

Two of Trump’s pardoned activists were arrested again months later at a Pennsylvania clinic. The report includes little evidence, ignores multiple court rulings and jury verdicts, and is not legally binding. It was produced by a working group created by Pam Bondi, whom Trump fired last week.

This same DOJ has stopped enforcing the FACE Act at clinics while using it to arrest pro-Palestinian protesters and journalists.

In the months since Trump pardoned these activists, a 20-year-old in Montana was arrested for planning to assassinate an abortion provider, and an anti-abortion activist shot someone inside a South Carolina Planned Parenthood.

A drug called lenacapavir could end AIDS. Two injections a year. Costs twenty-five dollars to manufacture, less than a Netflix subscription. Gilead Sciences charges twenty-eight thousand dollars per person per year in the US. Doctors Without Borders spent a year trying to buy it directly from Gilead, not asking for a discount, just trying to purchase medicine. According to MSF, Gilead’s final answer was that negotiating supply contracts is “a lot of work.”

This is the same company that priced a Hepatitis C cure at eighty-four thousand dollars and whose CEO made forty million dollars that year. Meanwhile the Trump administration has gutted PEPFAR, credited with saving twenty-six million lives, and dismantled USAID entirely.

My oldest friend Peter Maybarduk, director of the access to medicines program at Public Citizen, told the LA Times: “We have a technology that could end AIDS, and collectively we’re wasting it.”

Gilead’s CEO speaks tomorrow at a webcast with State Department officials. We will be watching, with extremely low expectations. The company is named Gilead, after the biblical region famous for its healing balm. Apparently the irony was not a dealbreaker.

Read the full article here: https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2026-04-09/this-rich-pharma-company-has-miracle-drug-for-hiv-why-is-it-refusing-to-license-it-worldwide

Peter Maybarduk

This week on This Week in Tyranny: The Wall Street Journal reports Trump has been floating mass pardons for White House staff, for crimes they haven’t committed yet, telling aides he’ll pardon everyone within two hundred feet of the Oval Office.

In January, Pentagon officials summoned the Vatican’s ambassador to a closed-door meeting and told him America has the military power to do whatever it wants and the Church had better take its side. One official invoked the Avignon Papacy as a threat. The Vatican canceled a planned US visit. Pope Leo XIV will spend July 4th at Lampedusa instead.

Trump’s DOJ issued a 52-page opinion declaring the Presidential Records Act unconstitutional, the same law Trump was indicted under 40 times.

Florida’s Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission has been running ICE immigration searches through Flock AI surveillance cameras, hitting over 5,000 networks across the country, after DeSantis deputized 800 conservation officers as ICE agents.

Rapid Fire: Bondi fired out of accountability, Trump’s mail-in voting executive order, Raskin demands Trump cognitive test, and Trump endorsed Hungary’s election with US taxpayer money two days before the vote.

Welcome to the golden age.

This week on the Gilead Gazette: Trump posted unblurred surveillance footage of a woman being murdered on Truth Social, hours after Melania Trump held a surprise press conference distancing herself from the Epstein files. He didn’t name the victim. Her name was Nilufar Easmin. She was a Bangladeshi immigrant and mother of two.

Florida’s maternal mortality committee went dark for years, quietly withholding data covering the exact period when abortion restrictions began, the 15-week ban in 2022 through the six-week ban in 2024. Texas, Georgia, and Idaho did the same. You don’t suppress evidence you’re proud of.

Providence St. Joseph Hospital in Eureka, California turned away Anna Nusslock - fifteen weeks pregnant, actively hemorrhaging, twins nonviable - because one twin had a detectable heartbeat. They handed her a bucket and towels for the twelve-mile drive to the nearest ER. Their defense: she survived, so the care was appropriate. They are still open. They are now the only hospital with labor and delivery within 85 miles.

And Students for Life is currently lobbying the EPA to classify mifepristone as a drinking water contaminant during an open public comment period. The scientific basis: one activist testified we’re all drinking other people’s abortions.

Stay angry. Stay loud. Under Her Eye.

Make sure to follow Jessica Valenti for the latest in depth reporting on the attacks on reproductive rights.

Survivors of the deadliest Iranian attack on US forces are telling CBS News that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth lied about how their friends were killed. Hegseth claimed the missile that hit them was a “squirter” - military jargon for a freak hit that gets through despite functioning air defenses. Survivors say there were no defenses. They were left unprotected. Sitting ducks. Four Americans died in Benghazi and the Republican Party launched eight investigations, two select committees, thirty-three hearings, and turned it into a years-long political crusade. Now actual American service members are dead, the Defense Secretary is on tape lying about how it happened, and the entire GOP outrage machine has gone silent. Because the lie is theirs this time. Hegseth has lost in court four times. He fired the Army Chief of Staff for refusing his purges. And now he’s lying about dead troops on national television.

The Trump administration is trying to destroy Colorado’s wolf reintroduction program - a program Colorado’s voters approved at the ballot box in 2020, the first time in American history citizens voted to restore a species. Wolves were released in 2023 and pups were born in the wild for the first time in 80 years.

The man put in charge of killing the program is Brian Nesvik, Trump’s new Fish and Wildlife Service director. Nesvik previously ran Wyoming’s wildlife program where 85% of the state was a predator zone - shoot wolves on sight, no tags, no limits.

Under his watch, a man ran down a young female wolf with a snowmobile, taped her mouth shut, paraded her in a bar, and killed her. The fine was $250 for possession. His agency lied about it being the maximum penalty. The torturer pled guilty to a felony and got zero jail time.

Now Nesvik is weaponizing the Endangered Species Act - the law designed to protect wolves - to destroy the program recovering them. He’s manufacturing a paper trail of rancher complaints through a rigged public comment period to justify seizing control.

Shoutout to More Than Just Parks for their reporting on this story.

The public comment period is open through June 5, 2026.

Submit your comment here: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/04/06/2026-06638/endangered-and-threatened-wildlife-and-plants-request-for-information-on-implementation-of-the-gray

Conservative groups are using artificial intelligence to mass-ban books from public schools. A program called BLOCKADE feeds books into ChatGPT and xAI, runs them against 300 flagged words, and defines “educational inappropriateness” as “content offensive to conservative values.” The AI is told not to explain its reasoning. The output gets exported as a professional-looking book review and submitted as a formal challenge to school districts at scale. The books disproportionately targeted feature LGBTQ characters, Black and Brown protagonists, and stories about consent, prejudice, and free will. Companies like BookmarkED are now selling AI censorship tools directly to the districts overwhelmed by these challenges. A Texas district fast-tracked a $9,000 contract and removed over 1,400 books. Republicans have introduced a federal bill that would strip funding from any school with LGBTQ literature. PEN America’s Freedom to Read director called it what it is: states pass laws that censor books, then companies show up to charge districts for the censorship. Shoutout to 404 Media for breaking this story.

Today the president held a press conference about the war in Iran. When asked if he’s winding down or escalating, he said “I don’t know.” He then threatened to destroy every bridge and power plant in Iran by tomorrow night — civilian infrastructure that powers hospitals and water treatment. That’s a war crime under the Geneva Convention. As Allison Gill of Mueller, She Wrote has documented, the deadline has moved seven times - March 23, March 27, March 30, April 1, April 4, April 6, and now April 7 at 8 PM - always timed to when stock markets are closed. He claimed that Iranian civilians are begging the US to keep bombing through intercepts. He threatened to jail a journalist for reporting a downed fighter jet. He said some military leaders pushed back on the rescue operation, then pointed at Hegseth and said “these two were totally on board” - the same Hegseth who fired the Army Chief of Staff and two other generals last week for pushing back. War crimes experts say the threats alone are criminal. The Red Cross said today that threats against civilian infrastructure cannot become the new norm in warfare. 3,400 people are dead across the Middle East.

This week on This Week in Tyranny: Trump released a budget spending $1.5 trillion on defense, a 44% increase, and literally told a room “we’re fighting wars, we can’t take care of day care.” The EPA was cut in half. Low-income heating assistance eliminated. $73 billion in domestic cuts. But $10 billion for DC beautification and $152 million to reopen Alcatraz as a prison, a National Park since 1972 that closed in 1963 because it was too expensive to run. After starving TSA for 49 days and losing 500+ screeners, the budget cuts their funding and starts privatizing them. At the Supreme Court, Solicitor General Sauer was asked three times by Justice Gorsuch whether Native Americans are birthright citizens and couldn’t say yes. Chief Justice Roberts responded to Sauer’s “new world” argument with five words: it’s the same Constitution. The DOJ admitted it’s handing voter registration data to DHS to run against a citizenship database with a 14% false positive rate. The VA defied a court order for the second time. And on Easter Sunday, the president posted threats to destroy Iranian power plants and bridges in language so obscene CNN’s Jake Tapper warned viewers about children in the room, threats that war crimes experts say are themselves criminal. Then a US fighter jet was shot down by the air defenses Trump claimed were destroyed. The second pilot was missing for days. And the commander in chief who posts threats in all caps disappeared from public view.

Pete Hegseth fired Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George during a war for refusing to remove Black and female officers from a promotion list. George had 37 years of service, graduated from West Point, served in Iraq and Afghanistan, and had a year and a half left on his Senate-confirmed term. He asked Hegseth for a meeting to discuss the blocked promotions. Hegseth refused. Then he struck the officers’ names himself and fired the general who tried to stop him. He also fired two more generals the same day, the head of Army Transformation and Training and the chief of Army chaplains. NBC reports Hegseth has blocked or delayed promotions for more than a dozen Black and female officers across all four branches of the military. He previously fired the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, a Black man, and the Chief of Naval Operations, a woman. His replacement for George is Gen. Chris LaNeve, his own personal military assistant. Fifteen American troops are dead in the Iran war. Over 200 wounded. The 82nd Airborne is deploying. And the man running this war is firing his most experienced leaders because they won’t let him discriminate. I covered the original promotion purge last week, go watch that for the full background.

Call your senators at 202-224-3121.

Read the full story from More Than Just Parks HERE:

Read the full article by More Than Just Parks HERE

This week on the Gilead Gazette: A military veteran and mother of two in Georgia was charged with murder for a pregnancy outcome. Police claim she took abortion pills. A friend who was with her says she didn’t. The hospital security guard, a retired sheriff’s deputy, turned her in. She was interrogated in her hospital bed. She sat in jail for three weeks before a judge called the charge “extremely problematic” and set her bond at one dollar. The Senate voted 48-50 to uphold the Trump administration’s VA abortion ban, giving women veterans stricter abortion restrictions than federal prisoners. Five Republican senators are pressuring the FDA to seize abortion pill website domains, inspect packages through the postal service, and prosecute providers and anyone who helps women access medication. At CPAC, Benny Johnson told conservatives to “out-breed the left” and lied about an NBC poll, claiming young conservative women ranked having children as their top priority when the actual data showed it was number six — he swapped the men’s results onto women. Title X funding expires Monday, cutting two million Americans off from birth control and cancer screenings. Plus South Dakota outlawed abortion speech, Kansas is about to override a CARE Act veto, and Iowa is trying to ban shipping abortion pills. Follow Jessica Valenti for more in depth reporting on all these issues.

Read the Guardian article Here.

Read the Guardian article Here.

For in-depth reporting on abortion issues, make sure to subscribe to Jessica Valenti and Abortion Every Day.

Both chambers of Congress voted down War Powers resolutions this week, giving Trump a blank check for an illegal war that costs a billion dollars a day. Fox News digitally replaced footage of Trump wearing a baseball cap he sells at a dignified transfer ceremony for six dead soldiers. Russia is providing Iran with the locations of American troops and the White House said it “does not really matter.” The administration proposed the largest NPS budget cut in history while spending more in three days of war than all national parks cost in a year. Trump is closing the Kennedy Center for a “complete rebuilding” after already demolishing the East Wing. An ICE detainee named Emmanuel Damas died from an infected tooth after two weeks of begging for treatment while staff laughed. Nobody is stopping any of this. That is the story of this week.

The Trump administration is concentrating pregnant child rape victims as young as 12 in a single detention facility in Texas where abortion is banned. Florida political appointees gutted a sociology textbook and are telling professors the pay gap is biological. Tennessee killed a bill to save women’s lives and debated executing abortion patients in the same session. Puerto Rico gave legal personhood to a zygote. A Notre Dame professor was pressured out of a promotion over a pro-choice op-ed she wrote four years ago. Doctors are fleeing ban states across all specialties. South Dakota wants to ban advertising abortion pills. And Virginia is suing to block voters from voting on abortion rights.

You can find all my videos and follow me on TikTok (when they’re not censoring me) and YouTube (if you don’t mind trolls).

https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/exclusive-iranian-girls-killed-double-tap-strikes-minab-school

https://www.npr.org/2026/03/04/nx-s1-5735801/satellite-images-show-iran-school-strike-hit-more-buildings-than-earlier-reported

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/3/questions-over-minab-girls-school-strike-as-israel-us-deny-involvement

https://www.jamaicaobserver.com/2026/03/04/apparnt-ai-use-iran-war-raises-daunting-questions-expert/

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/iran-school-bombing-investigation-9.7114994

You can also find my videos on TikTok (when they’re not censored) and YouTube.