Caruso’s arrest was announced on X by Attorney General James Uthmeier: “Early this morning, with substantial assistance from FDLE and local law enforcement, Palm Beach County Clerk of Court Michael Caruso was arrested on charges related to child sexual abuse. The investigation is ongoing, and we will provide more information to the public at the appropriate time.”

Jail records confirm the devout DeSantis ally was booked into the Palm Beach County jail on an out-of-county arrest warrant just before 9 a.m. local time on Tuesday, August 18th.

The Crime

The arrest warrant out of Orange County confirms that Caruso is facing a total of five felony charges: Kidnapping, lewd or lascivious molestation, lewd or lascivious exhibition, luring or enticing a child, and child abuse (mental injury). A probable cause affidavit states that the sexual abuse against the child, an undefined relative of Caruso’s, began sometime in 2024 and continued until at least August 2025.

Subscribe now

The affidavit further alleges that the victim was a young boy, under the age of 12, who lives in Orange County in Central Florida, where Caruso will be arraigned on his charges.

According to an additional probable cause affidavit, the young boy’s father became aware of the sexual abuse being perpetrated against his son by Caruso in October 2025, after witnessing his son engaging in disturbing sexual behavior with his younger brother.

The boy’s father immediately intervened, which prompted the young boy to finally tell his father that, during a cruise with Caruso over the summer, the man had showered with him and performed a lewd sex act. An interview with investigators was promptly conducted, where the young boy further disclosed that Caruso had sexually assaulted him in the days before Thanksgiving 2024, as well.

The child’s father ultimately confronted Caruso regarding his son’s gut-wrenching allegations, and Caruso allegedly told the father that he regularly showers with all of his own children, but denied showering with the man’s young son. The now-former county clerk went on to attempt to twist the blame regarding these horrifying allegations onto his own ex-wife, asking the victim’s father if he had spoken with her, claiming that she is “evil” and suggesting that the woman “fabricated the allegations in an effort to poison the child against him.”

Share

The affidavit further confirms that, during this confrontation, Caruso openly acknowledged that one of his own daughters had made similar allegations of sexual abuse against him.

The father went on to confront Caruso’s current wife, Tracy, who vehemently asserted that her husband could be arrested and that these sorts of charges were a “life in jail kinda thing.”

In a second conversation between Caruso and the victim’s father, this one recorded for law enforcement officials, Caruso emphatically claimed that the allegations lodged against him were actually “impossible” because he’s straight, and sexual deviations are always directed towards only the one sex that you are attracted to.

The affidavit confirms that Caruso went on to plead to the father, “If you report this to the authorities there won’t be any of me left, I can tell you that.”

Caruso’s victim is being represented by attorney Lisa Haba, who said in a statement:

“This arrest is a decisive line in the sand. When someone targets a child, they don’t just break the law — they shatter a community’s trust. We intend to make sure this survivor’s voice is heard through every step of this process.”

This Is Far From The First Time…

Records have already proven that this is far from the first time Mike Caruso has been the subject of horrifying, deeply disturbing allegations by both his children and his ex-wife. In fact, his pattern of abuse stretches all the way back to 2001.

In ‘01, Caruso was investigated over allegations that he had physically abused one of his seven children, after the child was observed with welts all across their back, neck, and face, per the Delray Beach police report. The Department of Children and Families (DCF) was first to investigate, with Delray Beach Police picking up the investigation soon after. In separate interviews, Caruso’s wife and child both denied the allegations. DCF ultimately concluded that the case was unfounded, and Delray Beach Police ultimately declared it exceptionally cleared.

But that’s not where Caruso’s story of abuse ends. Far from it.

In 2012, Caruso was embroiled in a divorce from his now-ex-wife Beverly, who, in a counterpetition for divorce, alleged that her husband “has severe emotional problems which consist of anger, rage and a history of physical and emotional abuse of one or more of the children.”

She further alleged that one of the children she shares with Caruso “was forced out of the home by the husband” and maintained no relationship with their father.

Caruso pulled a page directly from the domestic abuser’s handbook during his nasty divorce, attempting to turn the tables against his soon-to-be ex-wife by filing a petition for a restraining order that accused her of committing DV against him, alleging that Beverly struck him and tackled him to the ground during an argument.

Caruso’s DeSantis-Riddled Political History

67-year-old Mike Caruso first dipped his toes into the wide open world of politics as a state legislator, beginning in 2018, where he immediately positioned himself as a staunchly devout ally of Florida’s highly controversial governor, Ron DeSantis. After years of making Ron DeSantis’ success his personal mission in Congress, Caruso was appointed to serve as the Palm Beach County clerk of the circuit court and comptroller following Joseph Abruzzo’s decision to resign from the position and take a new one as Palm Beach County administrator.

For once in his miserable, pathetic life, Ron DeSantis actually did do the correct thing in response to Caruso’s arrest, announcing within the hour that the Clerk of Court was officially suspended from public office and would be immediately replaced by current chief of staff and deputy chief clerk, Shannon Ramsey-Chessman, who was sworn in as interim Clerk of Court by Tuesday morning.

In a press conference on Tuesday, DeSantis said, “It was a very easy decision for me to yank him from that position.” When asked whether or not he or anyone within his administration had been aware of the allegations against Caruso, DeSantis responded, “Of course not.”

“He had a clean vet, he was well-regarded in the community,” DeSantis stated in the presser, describing the allegations against Caruso as “horrific.”

What Happens Next?

Caruso raked in a cool $212,385 a year as clerk and was expected to run for official election in November to secure his position. DeSantis’ order suspending him from office does not actually affect his candidacy. However, Caruso can be replaced on the impending November ballot should he resign as a candidate.

However, time is of the essence.

Assuming Caruso will actually resign from his position in all the shame he deserves, Republicans will have limited time to actually get the name of his replacement on the ballot, as it must be done before the primary election results are certified, which takes place 9 days after the primary election, per Florida state law.

If Republicans fail to meet that deadline, a new candidate could still run for the job, but Caruso’s name would remain on the ballot, and notices would be placed to inform voters that casting their vote for Caruso would count as a vote for whomever his replacement was.

Former clerk and current county administrator Abruzzo said:

“No title, political affiliation, personal relationship, or position of influence places anyone above accountability. Governor DeSantis acted appropriately and decisively in immediately suspending Michael Caruso from office. I have complete confidence in Shannon Ramsey-Chessman as she assumes leadership of the Clerk of the Circuit Court and Comptroller’s Office. Shannon served as my Chief Deputy Clerk and Chief of Staff, and I know firsthand that she is a remarkable person and an exceptionally capable public servant. She possesses the integrity, experience and steady judgment necessary to lead the office through this difficult moment while protecting the public’s records, finances and trust.”

In a statement on social media, the Clerk of the Circuit Court & Comptroller’s Office said of Caruso’s arrest: “While this is surprising news for our entire team, it does not change who we are at the Clerk’s office or our commitment to the community and customers we serve. For decades, the Clerk’s office in Palm Beach County has consistently stood for professionalism and outstanding service for our customers. That focus remains for every one of our 650 employees.”

Interestingly enough, during his time in the Florida House of Representatives, representing District 87, Caruso was a huge backer of what is now known as the 2023 Florida Capital Sexual Battery law. This piece of legislation allows prosecutors to seek the death penalty for any adult who has been convicted of sexual battery against a child under the age of 12. Caruso voted in favor of this bill on April 13, 2023. It was signed by DeSantis in May 2023 and took effect six months later.

We can only hope that Caruso will soon fall on his own sword of poetic justice.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Earlier this year, a federal agent with the United States government went undercover inside University Baptist Church in Minneapolis, which describes itself as a “progressive, open, theologically diverse and biblically-inspired environment,” where congregants are focused on “peace, justice, inclusion, and authentic and relevant religious expression.” The undercover agent was acting as part of a larger undercover federal operation, spearheaded by the Department of Homeland Security, against the house of worship that included repeated surveillance, including hidden agents who recorded individuals entering and exiting the church, took photos of vehicles around the building, and even ran license plate numbers to determine individuals’ identities.

The aforementioned undercover DHS agent entered University Baptist Church on May 28th of this year, posing as “one of them,” to gain access to “Left Jab,” a class that was described by the US federal government as a Left-wing martial arts group, held in the church’s gymnasium.

While attending the group, the undercover female agent physically sparred with multiple other attendees as part of the group’s intended training and utilized that opportunity to pressure them for information regarding how they became involved with the group.

In the course of the event, the agent’s recording device fell to the gymnasium floor towards the end of training. It took her 3 minutes to discover that her recording device was missing and return to the gymnasium to retrieve it.

A Homeland Security report of investigation contained the following, with regard to the earpiece incident:

As noted above, this particular undercover operation was part of a larger scheme by DHS, as confirmed in the same report of investigation:

All of this behavior, and more, from the Department of Homeland Security appears to stand in direct violation of a federal court injunction that barred the US federal government from any enforcement of civil immigration laws on any property belonging to University Baptist Church. UBC belongs to the Alliance of Baptists and the American Baptist Churches USA. Both entities successfully secured a temporary injunction in the District of Massachusetts in February 2026 against Homeland Security that effectively forbade the department from taking and “immigration enforcement action” at any of their churches. That injunction was signed by US District Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV and explicitly banned “arrest, seizure, search, interrogation, questioning, interview of investigation” of any churches belonging to the entities that won the court order.

Yet, DHS did all of the above.

The injunction clearly states that violations of the court order would lead to punishment via sanctions and/or penalties for the defendants, which includes any and all officials and agents operating under the purview of the Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and Border Protection.

The discovery of the undercover agent infiltrating University Baptist’s “Left Jab” group came in connection with federal reports that went public in the ongoing conspiracy case against 15 anti-ICE protesters in Minnesota, known as the Minnesota 15.

The church has submitted evidence to the court, alongside a legal declaration, noting that they have posted multiple notices all around the grounds of their church, informing the public that their grounds are under the protection of the federal court order in Massachusetts. Among that evidence was a photo of a sign on church grounds that clearly states that federal agents are not permitted on the property.

Share

Interim pastor of University Baptist, Rev. Cody J. Sanders, told MPR News that church leaders were unaware that their church was being surveilled and investigated by Homeland Security until one of the defendants in the Minnesota 15 case filed a motion for discovery this week.

Sanders openly encouraged society to embrace the notion that churches and other sacred spaces should never be subject to government infiltration, but openly acknowledged that churches across the US, in today’s political environment, “have become a threat to those in power when we care for our neighbors, provide safe spaces for our community members to gather in peace, and strive together toward justice.”

“We will continue to insist that solidarity with our most vulnerable neighbors is the way that we best follow the ways of Jesus in the world.”

The surge of documents that went public following the discovery motion in the Minnesota 15 case has shed horrifying new light on just how far the federal government is going in its clandestine efforts to bring left-leaning Americans to heel, following the massive intrusion of ICE and other federal agencies into Minnesota, where both Renee Good and Alex Pretti were slaughtered in the streets, over the winter that ignited a hurricane of public outrage.

These documents reveal that much of the federal operations were connected to Operation Puppet Master, a federal initiative aimed at what the government describes as “violent opportunists,” born from a 2025 executive memorandum that directed law enforcement in the US to sharpen its focus on investigations into “anti-fascist” individuals and entities.

The newly uncovered DHS reports reveal a long-running history of federal agents going undercover as protesters to infiltrate churches, union halls, and libraries all across the Twin Cities.

These horrifying revelations have sparked intense outrage among community groups, leading to a powerful coalition statement: “We know the power we have when we organize and act together, and we’ll continue using that power to defend our neighbors and our freedoms.”

Please make no mistake that the United States federal government is coming for us all, and they’ve made it perfectly clear that no court order, injunction, or sign will stop them.

Act accordingly.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

In a resurfaced clip from earlier this year that’s gaining new traction across social media right now, the financial “expert,” radio talk show host, and author that everyone loves to hate bestowed some extra nasty advice upon a caller who said she didn’t want to leave her kids any inheritance money anymore, because they’ve “turned into” a couple’a Woke “Socialists.”

Monique, from Bangor, Maine, called into The Ramsey Show positively stricken with uncertainty, despair, and depression as she looked to the man with more bankruptcy under his belt than hairs on his head for advice regarding leaving behind an inheritance for her two children who no longer align with her nasty political ideologies.

After claiming to have spent over half a million on higher education for her two daughters, Monique told Ramsey that she has reached a breaking point with her girls.

Explaining that her two daughters have ended up leading two very different financial lives — with one being firmly planted in the top 1% with her husband while the other is scraping by on a meager $50k a year — the caller said that she has long been divided on how she should properly divide her assets when she finally (finally!) dies.

But now, she doesn’t wanna give either one of them a dime because, dammit, they turned out to be good and decent people despite her very best efforts to prevent that!

“For several years I felt uncomfortable about how to divide up the assets,” Monique told Ramsey. “But more recently I've gotten to the point where I don't want to give either of them any money.”

“I feel like I've worked so hard my whole life,” she whined, before driveling on about all of the sacrifices she’s made for the children she chose to conceive, birth, and commit to raising, “I paid for college for them, I’ve paid over half a million dollars for college for them, and they’ve turned into socialists.”

Ramsey and his co-host immediately burst into laughter. Genuinely, ole Dave would not stop, apparently finding her woes to be the funniest shit he’s heard this decade and, frankly, I don’t think poor, pitiful Monique was super thrilled about that.

Share

“I know we're all laughing,” she interjected, decidedly not laughing herself as Ramsey continued to guffaw, “but, frankly, I’m depressed. I’m very depressed about where I see my children heading.”

And, boy, did Ramsey do what Ramsey does best — and by that, I mean behave like an absolute pig of a useless human being: “You shouldn’t [feel terrible.] They’re not entitled. They didn’t hit the DNA lottery.”

He went on to declare that parents don’t owe their kids shit, before making her feel a little more validated by confirming that he also holds his children financially hostage with regard to the millions he’s amassed by being a tone-deaf asshole.

“If my children are going to be parasites, I'm not going to finance their lives,” he proudly declared.

As Monique attempted to question whether or not she could structure a trust so that her children couldn’t access her money until their 70s, when, hopefully by then, they had turned away from their evil Socialist ways, Ramsey quickly and, frankly, quite rudely shot back, “Then they’d just be a 70-year-old Socialist.”

But he did proceed to explain that an inheritance can technically be tied to any sort of bullshit nonsense you want to tie it to — just like he’s done for his own children.

Calling his fortune “God’s money,” Ramsey said of his own kids and their potential windfalls when he finally does us all a favor and leaves this earth: “If they’re not walking with God, they don’t get to manage God’s money.”

In case you hadn’t caught on yet, “God,” when referenced by Dave Ramsey in this context, really just means… Dave Ramsey. The man truly and honestly believes himself to be of God-status — which is crazy, because one would think God would at least give himself a hairline that wasn’t quite so unfortunate.

Leave a comment

The only problem? This massive “terror threat” appears to be completely made up by the Trump Administration as a ploy to launch counterterrorism tactics against American citizens who dare to dissent from Donald J. Trump.

Subscribe now

The Cuba Report

The Cuba Report asserts that Cuba, a beleaguered communist nation, is actively engaged in “a sustained campaign of subversion against the United States” and is solely responsible for shaping and subsequently sustaining America’s political Left via espionage and outright terrorism. According to the report cited at the global meeting in D.C., Cuba is responsible for the creation and sustainment of “Antifa,” one of Donald Trump’s most pronounced, perceived enemies, as well as a whole host of “leftist nonprofits, anti-ICE collectives, social groups and Marxist militant organizations.”

Essentially, the Trump Era State Department is openly claiming that any organization, charity, or even vaguely organized individuals who are publicly speaking out and protesting against the Trump Administration are directly involved in a terrorism scheme stemming from Cuba and, as such, should be treated like terrorists on American soil.

In fact, the Cuba Report, at its core, is truly little more than a blueprint criminalizing any public dissent against the Trump Administration under the accusation of a dubious and terroristic link to Communist Cuba.

Front Groups and Fellow Travelers

Two chapters of the report are dedicated solely to the subjects of terrorism and espionage, with one chapter, titled Front Groups & Fellow Travelers, specifically targeting a variety of American leftist groups that have publicly called for a lift of the Trump Administration’s embargo against Cuba while openly and vehemently criticizing the administration’s cruel mass deportation platform that Trump has carried out via the militarization of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol agents.

The report specifically highlights numerous U.S. activist groups and their activities, including several registered charities, essentially labeling the various entities as terror cells on American soil under the purview and control of Cuba and evil Communism.

Yet, none of the activities outlined in the report as so-called “proof” of these so-called “terroristic” activities are actually criminal in any way. The organizations and entities are engaged in political advocacy, aid convoys, political campaigns, organized and lawful initiatives, close monitoring of law enforcement agencies, and crowdsourcing bail funds for unfairly prosecuted protesters across the nation.

Everything that Donald J. Trump hates. Nothing that is illegal, let alone even within the realm of terrorism. In fact, it's the very epitome of what the United States of America is supposed to look like — a nation in which American citizens are free to organize, protest, and work to ignite change under the rights afforded to them by the United States Constitution.

Donald Trump and his Administration have now stooped to outright lying in fabricated reports to strip the opposite political side of those rights.

During his opening remarks at the Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Violence last month, Secretary of State Rubio openly asserted a tangible link between Cuba and left-leaning domestic protest groups in the US, stating: “The Cuban regime’s sprawling intelligence and ideological network helped to build the far left in our country and in our hemisphere. And it remains inextricably linked to the far-left groups and movements across and beyond the West.”

The Trump Administration is actively working to criminalize any political dissent from the MAGA platform via allegations of domestic and foreign terrorism against the left contained in a report that critics are already sounding the alarm on.

Share

Rubio Organizes Global Counterterrorism Coalition

Coupled with the report, Rubio has made a concerted effort to mobilize a global counterterrorism coalition meant to specifically target the American left, openly threatening the Constitutional rights of an entire political party in this country, according to critics who warn that the Trump Administration is all but ensured to cite this report as justification for unconstitutional means of surveillance and sanctions against US citizens — the accusations of terrorism affording them the ability to skirt the constitutional safeguards meant to limit and control domestic law enformcent against Americans.

Tom Joscelyn, who served as a senior professional staff member on the House Jan. 6^th Committee and played a large role in writing the final report on the infamous Capitol attack that actually qualified as domestic terrorism, spoke with Raw Story on the matter of the Cuba report:

I think the concern is they’re hyping fears of a foreign threat to tie in actors here on domestic soil. Whether they can do that with Cuban communists or a foreign antifa group, they can use counterterrorism tools on American people: surveillance, de-banking, and other strong counterterrorism tools.

Joscelyn went on to further add the worst part: there is absolutely no evidence of a legitimate “foreign nexus” that would even come close to justifying the deployment of global counterterrorism measures against United States citizens who openly oppose Donald Trump. So, “they’re inventing one because they don’t have one.”

Among the US organizations targeted in the State Department’s Cuba report is the National Network on Cuba, an organization that the report describes as “a key node for coordination between the Cuban regime and the American far left.” The report claims that a “National Rapid Response Plan” was distributed by this network in June, with the State Department describing this alleged “Response Plan” as “a detailed strategy for activating and launching ‘coordinated nationwide actions’ against federal institutions, U.S. military bases, and ICE detention centers and field offices in the United States within 24 hours of U.S. military action… against Cuba.”

However, the State Department’s Cuba report conveniently leaves out even a mere mention of any of the types of actions that are actually outlined in the plan that they’re citing as terroristic activites.

When you actually look at the details contained in this plan, the entire notion of domestic and/or foreign terrorism completely falls apart, as all that’s contained within it are constitutionally protected actions, ranging from protests, rallies, and meetings to art builds, flyers, and banner drops. Absolutely nothing calls for political or criminal violence of any kind and actually encourages individuals and organizations to “Make your plan and start publicizing it now.”

All of the other examples pointed to by the Trump Era State Department in the Cuba report are in a similar vein — targeting left-leaning organizations and charities in the United States with absolutely no tangible evidence that they are actually engaging in any criminal activities.

Among those was the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization, a registered charity in the US with a long-standing history of providing humanitarian aid to Cuba. The report accuses the foundation of facilitating “radical agitation with the United States” through a separate fiscal sponsorship program, listing five different groups that have received donations through that program while standing accused of “radical agitation.”

All of those groups are left-leaning organizations with left-leaning missions, and not a single one of them is being accused of a single shred of legitimate criminal behavior by the State Department. Their only crime, at this point, is quite literally the audacity to not only publicly dissent from Donald Trump, but to actually organize and work against his horrific policies and actions.

“Investigate and Disrupt” The Left

Last September, Donald Trump issued a directive, the National Security Presidential Memorandum/NSPM-7, that instructed his agencies to “investigate and disrupt” leftist movements within the United States that were motivated by “extremism on migration, race and gender.” The positions of the organizations and groups being targeted with the Cuba report are well within the same scope of anti-ICE, police abolitionist, and pro-LGBTQIA+ positions that Trump has been targeting his entire presidential term.

The People’s Forum, one of the groups specifically targeted with the Cuba report, has recently been subpoenaed by the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee, chaired by Rep. Jason Smith, standing accused of foreign influence. The group vehemently decried the report as propping up “false and sweeping allegations that everyone opposing the criminal blockade of Cuba or supporting social justice movements are left-wing terrorists.” They went on to openly describe the State Department’s report and the subsequent congressional probe as “part of an escalating crusade against all progressive organizations and any group or person who expresses opposition to the ultra-right, racist, and pro-war policies of the Trump White House.”

The National Lawyers Guild and The Global Project Against Hate & Extremeism have both been targeted as a result of the Cuba report and have released respective statements openly criticizing the State Department’s “fascist repression” and accusing the Trump Administration of “creating a framework that recasts constitutionally protected speech, protest, and association as foreign-directed extremism, making the next round of investigations and prosecutions easier to sell to the public.”

Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate & Extremism, said that she is most troubled by the Trump State Department’s efforts to vilify and criminalize activities that are undeniably protected by the First Amendment of the US Constitution:

Solidarity trips, aid convoys, and anti-embargo advocacy are constitutionally protected speech and association, not evidence of foreign control. By blurring compassion for Cubans into ‘being directed by Cuba,’ the report revives a familiar Cold War tactic, effectively demonizing dissent as foreign-directed subversion.

Please make no mistake here. The party that claims to be champions of the Constitution, true American patriots, is actively working to strip Americans of those very Constitutional rights.

This is fascism, plain and simple, in all its horrifying glory.

Leave a comment

As the notion of a deployment of ICE agents to polling places across the country began to grow in validity, Democrats demanded that Immigration and Customs Enforcement produce records of their plans — documents that Immigration and Customs Enforcement attorneys have already admitted they likely have thousands of.

Subscribe now

Yet here we are, nearly ten months out from the initiation of the Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the Democratic National Committee, and all ICE has done is troll a judge’s court order by handing over a few hundred pages of press clippings that were already public.

Last month, in connection with the DNC’s FOIA lawsuit, Judge Beryl A. Howell issued an order against ICE, demanding that they produce at least 1,000 pages per month. ICE turned over 576 pages of absolutely useless and already publicly accessible bullshit, consisting of press clippings compiled for Homeland Security’s “daily briefing.”

In a joint status report submitted to the court following the press clippings fiasco, the DNC says ICE’s actions have explicitly “circumvented the court’s orders” and accuses the agency of intentionally hiding its polling place plans from the American public.

In fact, the DNC pointed to the specific language included in its FOIA request that specifically asks Immigration and Customs Enforcement to exclude any stand-alone news articles, press clippings, and publicly available materials that do not contain actual discussions by officials within the agency when complying with the request.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew Vaden told the court in response to the DNC’s accusations that he was calling “ICE’s attention to the proviso”; however, he vehemently rejected the DNC’s claim that ICE is “queuing… nonresponsive documents before responsive ones” in order to keep its plans shielded.

Share

Both Attorney General Todd Blanche and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin have repeatedly made public statements expressing their openness to and support for deploying ICE agents to polling places. Both officials have maintained that agents would only be utilized to assist local law enforcement, should a security threat arise, with Mullin comparing their presence to a TSA checkpoint, while emphatically insisting that agents would not be involved in voter identification or the verification of immigration status — while simultaneously doubling down on their vicious assertions that only American citizens should and can vote.

Nevertheless, ICE has viciously pushed back on any efforts to publicly uncover any internal plans or discussions with regard to their potential presence at US polling places.

The DNC’s original FOIA request took place in October 2025. By July 13, 2026, Judge Howell was forced to issue a court order against the immigration agency, noting that the midterm elections were less than four months away and ICE had yet to produce even “a single page of responsive materials.” ICE’s unwillingness to comply with the FOIA request led Howell to issue the July 13th court order, demanding that Immigration and Customs Enforcement “immediately begin processing” responsive materials “at a rate of at least 1,000 pages per month, including the month of July.”

ICE failed to meet even that simple deadline, with the agency granting itself an additional week to meet Howell’s monthly quota, informing the court that the agency was setting a new deadline of August 7 “so as to include a greater number of responsive, non-exempt records” in its first production — only to turn over a first batch of documents that were resoundingly and, let’s face it, purposefully useless.

This fiasco comes after ICE had initially responded to the DNC in early June, claiming that they did not have any responsive records related to their FOIA request. This prompted Democrats to openly accuse the immigration agency of a “remarkable lack of diligence.” The DNC cited multiple news reports that covered the presence of ICE agents at polling places in both Texas and California amid the states’ primary elections in May and June, as well as Mullin’s own words during his sworn testimony at his Senate confirmation hearing.

In a court filing calling the Trump government out on its bullshit, DNC lawyers blistered, “Shockingly, ICE agents also entered an active polling place in New York to confront a poll worker over a month-old Instagram post addressing the killing of Renee Good.”

The Trump federal government is desperately trying to convince you that this country has a problem that only they have the solution for. But the reality is simply this — they do not want you to vote in a free and fair election, because they know they cannot win in a free and fair election. ICE is currently the single most terrifying entity in this nation, and they know it. There is only one reason the federal government would want them at your polling places, and it’s damn sure not to keep you safe.

Leave a comment

According to a disturbing new analysis from POLITICO, this indiscriminate war — that stops just short of targeting anyone that’s not blonde-haired and blue-eyed — against immigrants on American soil has facilitated an “all-out siege” on US federal courts that has “stretched the judiciary to the breaking point.” Over the course of Trump’s second term, in which he truly honed in on his vicious hatred of Brown people, the federal court system has heard more than 19,000 cases related to Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s detention practices alone.

Subscribe now

Of those 19,400-plus cases in which the federal courts reached a formal ruling, just short of 17,000 of them were concluded with rulings against the Trump Administration, according to POLITICO’s case tracker.

While Trump’s crackdown on immigrants in the US as a whole has been disturbing enough in its own right, it is the tactics employed behind the four walls of his horrifying detention centers that have served as the epicenter of widespread controversy, criticism, and out-and-out outcry across the nation.

Just this week, The Guardian published a truly gut-churning, nauseating piece on Gabar Choli, a 40-year-old Kurdish asylum seeker who was swept up in Donald Trump’s wide-reaching immigration crackdown. Choli speaks of how he was detained in a solitary confinement medical cell inside the Port Isabel service processing center, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facility in south Texas, where he was shackled, pinned down, assaulted, and forcibly tube-fed by detention center guards who were trying to combat his hunger strike for more humane treatment inside these facilities.

The Trump Admin initiative now known as “Operation Metro Surge” in Minnesota’s Twin Cities area garnered perhaps the most widely recognized public outcry, earning ire from even some notable Republicans and sparking massive protests that bled into the entire US after ICE and Border Patrol agents shot two US citizens in cold blood on Minneapolis soil: Renee Good who was fatally shot in the face by ICE agent Jonathan Ross and VA ICU nurse Alex Pretti who was shot to death in the street by Border Patrol agent Jesus Ochoa and Customs and Border Protection officer Raymundo Gutierrez for defending a woman who was recording the agents during the public unrest.

The Minneapolis controversy alone led to the ousting of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem (otherwise known as ICE Barbie), DHS Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin, and Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino; as the situation grew so disgustingly harrowing, even Donald Trump had to do something.

Donald Trump’s mass exodus of immigrants in this country has grown so deeply disturbing that even Republicans are beginning to turn their backs on his blatantly unabashed cruelty, as poll numbers prove that the American public is rapidly souring on his tactics.

Court challenges have flowed like water, with the administration losing a high percentage of them, even when they’re overseen by judges who were appointed to their benches by high-ranking Republicans or even Donald J. Trump himself.

POLITICO’s Kyle Cheney wrote that the spark that ignited all of this fire was “a seemingly mundane reinterpretation of a complex immigration law” tucked away in the folds of a two-page memo issued by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on July 8, 2025. What appeared to be mundane and largely unimportant on the surface actually served as the vehicle through which the Trump Administration rehauled the federal government’s “detention tactics” in an “unprecedented” way.

Share

Cheney explains that POLITICO has “reviewed thousands of ICE detention cases and spoken with more than a dozen detainees, lawyers and judges at the heart of this historic controversy.” All of them share a general consensus that the updated ICE policy has created an “extraordinary strain” on the United States federal court system by serving as the launch point for “tens of thousands of emergency lawsuits.”

Presently, 469 judges and counting have ruled that the July 8, 2025 ICE memo at the heart of this whole thing “was an illegal distortion of long-settled detention policy.” In fact, Cheney notes that Trump’s own first presidential administration “declined to adopt” this “novel legal theory,” indicating that Trump is now truly operating under the freedom of having absolutely nothing left to lose.

Prior to Trump’s second White House term, this newly implemented, broad imposition of mandatory detention without bond would only be applied to “people apprehended soon after crossing the border or who were deemed to be dangerous, not for those who had built law-abiding lives — married U.S. citizens, had children, held jobs, paid taxes — since they arrived,” as explained by Cheney in the sweeping POLITICO analysis.

Now, they apply it indiscriminately to everyone who finds themselves in ICE’s crosshairs.

“ICE’s new memo erased that distinction,” Cheney further explains. “Now, even people who had lived in the U.S. for years were treated as though they had just crossed the border and were ‘seeking’ to enter the U.S., no matter where they were apprehended or how many years ago they arrived.”

He writes that the memo “was the beginning of an all-out siege on the American justice system — one that would upend tens of thousands of lives, fracture decades of trust between the courts and the Justice Department, overwhelm court dockets in every corner of the country and provoke a lopsided rebuke from judges of every ideological stripe,” pointedly describing it as “an effort to erase the due process rights of millions of immigrants who have resided in the U.S. for years, even those without criminal records and people who have attended all of their ICE check-ins or immigration court proceedings.”

“The flood of cases has stretched the judiciary to a breaking point across the country,” Cheney penned. “Thousands of rulings, from hundreds of judges rushing to respond to the individual cases in front of them, have added up to an overwhelming rebuke of Trump’s unprecedented policy.”

Judge Fred Biery of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, who was appointed to the bench by President Bill Clinton, told the publication that his San Antonio courthouse would typically see around 1,500 civil cases in a year. This year, they had waded through a staggering 4,000, just by the month of May.

“We’ve never seen anything like this in my career,” Biery confessed.

San Antonio is far from the only US city that’s found itself absolutely buried in the “mountain of lawsuits” lit aflame by Donald Trump’s sadistic narcissism. Cases surged in Los Angeles and Chicago, and Florida court systems were inundated with suits related to the infamous “Alligator Alcatraz” facility in the Everglades.

But according to POLITICO’s analysis, “nowhere was hit harder than Minnesota,” in the destruction and despair left in the wake of Operation Metro Surge and the killings of Pretti and Good.

Judges and court staff across the nation are being forced to work at “record speed,” staying awake into the “wee hours of the morning,” in an attempt to get a handle on the onslaught of cases wrought by the Trump Administration’s desire for maximum cruelty and inhumanity.

The cold, hard numerical data is enough to explode heads on its own. But it’s more important now than ever to understand the core of unadulterated human suffering underneath the numbers.

Cheney writes:

Everyone on the receiving end of ICE’s amped-up detention philosophy — detainees themselves, their lawyers and the judges who hear their cases — described the past year as both logistically and emotionally draining. Every case is existential for the people being detained as well as their families and communities. That makes the work weightier for both attorneys and judges. And there are more cases than attorneys or judges were ever equipped to handle.

…

Asked whether the administration had any concerns about the impact of its mass detention policy on the families of those held by ICE, particularly U.S. citizen spouses and children, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson responded simply: “No.”

Leave a comment

As the harrowing deployment stretched further and further amid Trump’s failure to find a solution to the war he never should have started, family members of troops trapped aboard the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier began to sound the alarm, warning that their deployed loved ones were teetering on the brink of insanity as the ship’s supplies rapidly dwindled. Recent reports have confirmed that sailors are facing a critical lack of basic necessities, such as toothpaste, soap, and deodorant, while their showers and toilets fall into disgusting disrepair as they work excruciating, torturously long shifts with little to no reprieve.

Subscribe now

It’s enough to break even the strongest soul.

And the souls aboard the USS Lincoln are beginning to break.

Harrowing reporting from Military Times has confirmed that multiple sailors have attempted to throw themselves overboard as a result of the seemingly never-ending deployment at sea.

While the Navy has failed to publicize a formal number of service members who have attempted to end their lives or harm themselves aboard the USS Lincoln, the partners and family members of troops on the ship spoke with Military Times and confirmed that the incidents are abundant and rapidly increasing.

Annabelle Loma described a call she received from the ombudsman, informing her that her husband had attempted to jump overboard. Since then, she has only spoken to her husband a handful of times, and he now remains on a medical hold.

“He’s scared,” Loma says of her husband. “He thinks he’ll get a dishonorable discharge, and just because he was burnt out, his 13-year career is ruined, just like that. That’s not fair, that’s not right. That’s not what he should be worrying about right now.”

Maria Rodriguez told the publication that she spoke with her husband, who told her he had spotted a different sailor perched on the edge, preparing to permanently end his suffering. She said her husband called out to his fellow sailor, grabbed their arms, and pulled them away from the edge. While the sailor was “safe,” he was merely pulled back down into the very thing that sent him to both the figurative and literal edge in the first place.

Share

Rodriguez said, “He said he hadn’t felt adrenaline like that in his life, and he was just so thankful he was able to get to [the sailor] in time, to stop them from going overboard.”

Yet another incident was reported by Stars and Stripes, pertaining to a sailor who was stopped from going overboard by a group of watchstanders.

MS Now reported on one sailor who did go overboard, spending an hour in the water before he was finally rescued and eventually medically evacuated.

Speaking with the publication on the condition of anonymity, the sailor’s wife described her husband’s fragile mental state, just before he went overboard on the USS Lincoln, recounting a text message he sent her, admitting that the poor conditions and exceedingly long deployment were wearing him down.

“I think the boat is finally getting to me and I really don’t think I can keep up my peace act anymore,” he wrote in the heartbreaking text message to his wife. “You are right about it all not being OK. We were supposed to leave 5th Fleet on July 15th, but then something had to come up, and my last hope of being home soon was gone.”

“I’m really trying to not feel negative or hopeless, but between the wifi and not knowing when I will come home and not knowing what is happening back at home, it’s really getting me. I don’t think I can do another deployment after this, and I don’t even know if I can finish this deployment.”

The sailor’s wife said he went to his chain of command, as well as the ship’s medical team, in search of answers and help with his mental state. She says he was promptly brushed off.

As families and loved ones back home have grown increasingly terrified, pressure has mounted against the US government, culminating in a meeting in San Diego with Secretary of the Navy Hung Cao and 200 people with family and loved ones aboard the USS Lincoln.

One spouse stood before officials and tearfully spoke of the message she received from her husband that same day, saying, “he hopes he doesn’t wake up tomorrow.”

Despite story after story after story, officials presiding over the meeting failed to directly respond to a single one of them, instead telling terrified families that sailors on the aircraft carrier have access to mental health workers, chaplains, and doctors — all of which makes little difference when you don’t have access to a clean shower, a working toilet, or adequate, safe food.

Cao claimed that the USS Theodore Roosevelt strike group is currently being prepared to relieve the USS Abraham Lincoln. Unsurprisingly, he failed to give any semblance of a timeline as to when that is expected to happen.

The USS Lincoln’s deployment began in November 2025 and was originally slated to end in May 2026. It is now mid-August 2026, making its ongoing service the longest US carrier deployment in modern history, and the troops onboard the aircraft carrier have no idea when they’ll see land again. The Lincoln’s deployment has now been twice extended by President Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and no formal return date has been made public.

At the beginning of his war with Iran, Donald Trump repeatedly boasted of his ability to have this conflict settled within a “few weeks,” if not days. It has now been nearly half a year, and the president is rapidly coming to realize that he has officially bitten off more than he can chew, as multiple attempts at a peace deal have failed. Iran has only grown increasingly vicious, the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, and Trump’s inner circle has deteriorated into exasperated in-fighting, as absolutely no one can get on the same page as to how to bring this thing to an end.

Instead, they simply continue to sacrifice our soldiers to the sea in the name of Donald Trump’s vanity, ego, and desperate desire for all-encompassing power.

I never again want to hear that support for US troops lies with the side of the political fence that is allowing 5,000 American troops to rot in the ocean.

Leave a comment

According to various filings with the Federal Election Commission, at least one member of the Jaffe family has donated upwards of $6,000 to groups that support the controversial Texas Senate candidate.

The family consists of descendants of the late patriarch, Morris D. Jaffe Sr., and his former wife, Jeanette Herrmann Jaffe Longoria — with the most notable names among them being Morris “Doug” Jaffe Jr., who manages the family’s extensive aviation leasing companies as well as infrastructure at their Horseshoe Bay Resort; Doug Jr,’s son, Morris Douglas Jaffe III, who has stepped into numerous, various high-profile executive roles, including serving at the CEO of Horsebay Resorts; and Jeffrey Herrmann Jaffe, Doug Jr.’s brother who develops high-end, high-dollar luxury real estate all across the state of Texas.

Subscribe now

In April 2026, an FEC filing showed that a $3,500 donation was made by a Doug Jaffe living in West Lake Hills, Texas, to the Paxton Cruz Victory Fund — then named the Ken Paxton Victory Fund — a joint fundraising committee supporting Paxton’s Senate bid. The West Lake Hills address was associated with Doug Jaffe III.

The very next month, in May 2026, another, separate FEC filing by Paxton’s own campaign reported a $3,000 donation from an address associated with both Doug Jaffe III and Doug Jaffe Jr., the latter of whom has claimed to have no knowledge of the donation.

You may find yourself wondering at this point why any of this matters. Shitty rich people donate to shitty Republicans left and right, day in and day out in this country. That’s certainly nothing to write home about.

What is particularly interesting, though, is the fact that the notorious Texas family is named not once, but twice, in the far more notorious Epstein Files.

Tucked away in the mountain of government and estate documents, emails, flight logs, media, and investigative evidence that make up the infamous Epstein Files is Doug Jaffe III’s name in connection to a 2020 anonymous tip made to the FBI National Threat Operations Center with allegations of potential sex and drug trafficking.

The anonymous caller claimed that, in the early 2000s, Doug Jaffe III invited the caller to join him and others at a Mexico villa partially owned by his aunt for Spring Break. The caller claimed that, while at the villa, they saw a young girl dressed “scandalously.” The caller estimated the girl’s age at around 11 or 12 years old.

Per the FBI log of the phone call, “Doug told ANON the girl was his niece, which she later found out what [sic] a lie.”

The caller went on to allege that Jaffe took them to the Palladium club in Acapulco, Mexico, where “young girls (possibly underage) were brought onto the stage and groped. The girls had their bras removed, and breasts fondled.

While the document contained in the files does not directly connect Jeffrey Epstein to these alleged events or assert that Doug Jaffe III and Epstein ever personally interacted, it does note that the anonymous tipster “remembers seeing several of Epstein’s associates in the Villas [sic] guestbook,” compelling them to make contact with the FBI, in case it could be useful information.

The FBI document contained in the files lists the anonymous tip as “closed” status, as of October 2021, with no indication that the claims were substantiated.

MS Now reports that they briefly spoke with Jaffe’s father, Dough Jaffe Jr., who described these disturbing allegations as “someone trying to stir up shit.” Doug Jaffe III, the subject of the allegations, told the publication that he had nothing to do with Jeffrey Epstein in an email responding to the claims.

But that’s not the family’s only connection with the infamous child rapist and sex trafficker. A separate set of documents that were released by the Department of Justice indicated that Jetran, an aviation company “owned and operated by the Jaffe family for nearly four decades,” had been in intense talks regarding the purchase of Epstein’s plane, sickeningly dubbed the “Lolita Express” — the very same plane that was allegedly personally used by Epstein to transport his child victims across his properties.

Jetran’s website notes that the company primarily focuses on the acquisition and conversion of aircraft.

This particular trove of documents shows emails between Epstein and his team, in which Doug Jaffe Jr. is invoked with regard to talks about the plane’s potential sale.

A letter of intent hailing from May 2016 details Epstein’s plan to sell the plane to Jetran for approximately $1.5 million. However, a subsequent email exchange that was forwarded to Epstein shows “the father,” Doug Jaffe, expressing concerns about “engine issues” with the aircraft. By June of that year, the deal had fallen apart, with an email included in the files showing that Jetran was responsible for rejecting the purchase of the Boeing jet following “due diligence.”

The elder Jaffe indicated to MS Now that he knew nothing of Epstein’s horrifying history at the time of the discussions to purchase the New York financier’s plane. He further claimed to have never had any direct contact with Epstein and stated that it is not uncommon for his company to be unaware of who the owner of an aircraft is when making a purchase.

Share

While there are certainly far more harrowing and horrifying transgressions detailed in those files than the Jaffes’, things start to feel particularly unsettling when you take a closer look at Paxton’s history as the Attorney General of Texas.

Paxton’s Democratic Senate opponent James Talarico recently invoked Epstein — and the overall frustration among Americans with regard to the Republican Party’s handling of the Epstein Files — to take aim at Paxton’s history of using his power to excuse child sex predators.

The Texas Attorney General’s Office, under Paxton’s purview, offered a deal to a Waco man who had been charged with the sexual abuse of a young boy. Under the requirements of the deal, the 49-year-old man served 30 days in jail, with an admission of molesting the victim, but was not required to register as a sex offender — something Talarico has repeatedly described as an “Epstein-style sweetheart deal.”

A Paxton campaign spokesperson has called Talarico’s attack “disgusting,” claiming that the deal was offered to the Waco man because, in order to prosecute, the young victim would have been forced to testify in a courtroom with his abuser.

Paxton’s office has not responded to questions as to whether or not the donations from the Jaffe family will be returned.

Leave a comment

I thought it might be useful to curate those into a “Saturday Stack” of articles for you to read and savor with your morning coffee and a sweet treat. I plan to make this an ongoing feature in the hopes that you’ll enjoy or be informed or both by the articles I include here.

Here we go!

Hunter Biden on The Seduction of Cynicism

“There are periods in the life of a republic when corruption hides because it must.

When the hiding stops, something has broken.”

Scott McFarlane clues us in on the new pathway to big payouts for J6 cop beaters.

Former CBS News reporter Scott McFarlane is a must-read. Every day he sends out an email letting us know what is happening and what he’s reporting on. But he also has other reports about important things, and this is one. That fund isn’t dead. It’s alive and well, and McFarlane explains how it’s going to work.

A judge convicted Weyer in 2023 of five counts. The Justice Department argued for a 30-month prison term for her. Prosecutors said, “Weyer filmed herself commanding rioters to ‘go’ and ‘tear it down’ referring to the metal barrier between the mob and law enforcement.”

According to my reporting from 2021, shortly after Weyer’s arrest, she was defiant in the days after the attack, denying the damage and the horrors that unfolded. She allegedly wrote: “I’m happy.”

Paul Krugman argues for a Medicare buy-in as the way to Medicare for All.

What, then, should Democrats of good will — that is, people who want their fellow citizens to have affordable access to quality healthcare like citizens of every other advanced country — support? Should they call for an all-out effort to implement the best policy — Medicare for All — that is likely to face significant pushback and political roadblocks, albeit unjustified? Or should they settle for a strategy that is likely to involve a more drawn-out process to achieve universal coverage, but is also more likely to turn into reality?

Just when you thought you knew everything about Max Miller, there’s more. Always, there’s more. The American Prospect has receipts, and it’s as terrible as you think.

“Can you just track this guy down now?” To the other dispatcher, he said, “I was cut off by a man in a Tesla … [who] then rolled down his window and said that I’m going to cut your throat and your daughter’s. And he said you’re a dirty Jew. I’m going to fucking kill you all. And I know who you are and where you live. And I followed him, and he rolled down his window, and I rolled down my window, so I could hear what he was saying …”

But there are some serious problems with his story. Spoiler: The man in the Tesla has records, because Tesla records everything.

Over at Baking. It’s better than Murder, Debrianna Mansini has thoughts on health insurance, finances, and bread.

Standing in front of the wall cooler at Smith’s, I looked over the egg selection, trying to remember which brands had the new salmonella risks, which came from family owned farms instead of a Trump supporting corporation and thus not getting rigorous enough inspections, and which eggs were on sale, calculating whether the 18 count would be measurably cheaper than a dozen. AND, did I have a coupon for it? Welcome to the era of Trumponomics. Ya’ll look over there while I rob you blind and tell you your life is fabulous. Decoys.

Tom Joad has a story about what people hear when they hear “Democrat.”

One of the men I had known since we were both young enough to believe that youth was permanent clapped a hand to my shoulder.

He did not smile.

“You know that most everybody in there hates your politics.”

I told him that I knew that. “They don’t dislike, they,” I paused looking more closely at him, “hate.”

He walked away, not intending to hurt my feelings I am sure.

Because it’s Saturday and you’ve been reading all day and for sure it’s 5:00 somewhere, the Better Filthiest Martini recipe is over at Wonkette. Make it and let me know how it is!

Happy Saturday, happy reading and farewell until next week!

If a person was listening to White House National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett’s television appearances concerning Donald Trump’s economy, you would think the country is in the midst of an unparalleled economic boom.

The administration is taking in billions of dollars from foreign tariffs that will fund massive construction projects which will create millions of great paying jobs, according to Hassett. Venezuelan oil is now ours, relieving the pressure on fuel costs until the Strait of Hormuz is opened and controlled by the US, too.

These are lies.

More lies:

• Corporations are fleeing their offshore manufacturing factories and building new ones in the US at an electrifying rate.

• Real wages are rising and prices are falling like never before.

• Public polling shows massive support for Trump, while the same polls blame President Biden for all their problems and the country is thankful that Donald is their president.

Wow, what a picture.

What a fantasy.

It’s a fantasy concocted by Trump’s director of the National Economic Council.

It’s a fantasy that flies in the face of all reported data.

It’s a fantasy that flies in the face of reality itself.

Yet, time and time again, Hassett goes on air, armed with a smug smile and enthusiastically spins his tale of deceit, unchallenged and undeterred.

TV hosts are the problem. They are unequipped to deal with the economic data he so easily cherry picks and corrupts.

Hassett is the favorite Trump administration stooge, sent out to refute the real economic data this country has been facing since Donald implemented his illegal tariff scheme in 2025. And by “refute,” I mean lie. He gives George Orwell a run for his money.

So far in 2026, I’ve estimated Kevin Hassett has appeared on major news networks over two dozen times. On a Fox News Sunday appearance, when asked about relief for the working class from inflation, Hassett blamed former president Joe Biden as the problem, while fear mongering a socialist takeover of the country. On a CNN appearance he denounced current polling, saying, “I just don’t believe that poll,” as if disbelief was enough to make it untrue. In another spot, Hassett scolded the Wall Street Journal for not understanding economics well enough to understand Trump’s “golden age” economy.

Hassett’s subterfuge culminated in an appearance on Fox News with host Bill Hemmer.

The Fox News host opened the segment by highlighting the terrible July jobs report.

“Employers are cutting 23,000 jobs. That’s well below the number we were expecting to add about 80,000,” Hemmer stated. “Unemployment rate did drop lower 4.1 percent.” He introduced Hassett for a take from the White House and asked, “How do you read it, strength, weakness?”

“Yeah, so the strength is what we’ve seen before,” Hassett insisted. “Construction workers, manufacturing workers, and so on.”

“The weakness in this number were really just two things - government workers and a sort of rebound from all the employment we got from the World Cup because the World Cup was ending,” he said, while smiling widely.

“If you throw out the World Cup and the government workers, we actually had a number that was about plus a hundred thousand, which is what we expected...” he added.

Conover Kennard wrote, “In other words: the jobs report looks bad only if you count the jobs that were lost.”

Hassett’s happy, shiny math is contingent on deleting the segments of the economy which make the report look bad.

His analysis is not only not incredible, it’s certifiable. Yet, networks continue to unapologetically host him.

It’s time for CNBC, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal, Reuters, Financial Times, New York Times / DealBook, Yahoo Finance, MarketWatch, Washington Post, Politico. Axios, NBC News, ABC News, CBS and CNN to stop giving him a platform without pushback.

There is too much at stake.

These various outlets, because of their formats, are the perfect launchpad for Kevin Hassett to lie with impunity. They let him give unsubstantiated statistics, and cherry-pick economic data to mitigate the damage the Trump administration has caused to the U.S. economy.

Here’s a quick solution. After a network invites Hassett back, networks must prepare their hosts beforehand about the data they will discuss and aggressively fact-check him, live. If they don’t have enough time to study the stats, their producers can give anyone on-air up to the minute data through their earpieces.

Networks can also put a real economist on the air when Hassett shows up, to help a host with an interview not familiar with economics.

It’s not asking too much from these multimillion-dollar media outlets to finally step up and be useful to the public they serve and challenge many of Hassett’s outrageous claims. They’re not supposed to be echo chambers; they’re supposed to inform people.

They should at least make an attempt at keeping him honest, instead of giving him free air time to lie.

To any credible observer, Hassett wins the Kewpie doll as the most prolific economic propagandist in the Trump administration. Scott Bessent comes in a close second.

This is one award no person with an actual conscience should ever want to receive.

Federal prosecutors in South Florida have spent the last year trying to build a criminal case against the FBI agents alone who investigated Russia’s US election meddling.

But Trump isn’t satisfied with nickel-and-diming petty little cases against individuals. The man wants to entirely rewrite the history of the notorious Russia investigation. In connection with that goal, the Trump White House recently released a trove of once-classified memos from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, vehemently citing these memos as evidence that Trump was right all along — the “Deep State” was out to get him.

This would, of course, make for massive, scandalizing headlines and vicious vindication for a man whose first words were probably “Witch Hunt!” if it weren’t for this one little problem — absolutely nothing actually shows that.

When it comes to Trump’s claims of political persecution from the Deep State, this trove of newly declassified documents contains virtually no substance and absolutely nothing that serves to invalidate the FBI’s rationale for moving forward with their investigation into Trump’s ties with Russia.

However, what they do accomplish is pulling back the veil of an overlooked and long-forgotten subset of the FBI’s investigation.

The New York Times thoroughly reviewed these newly released FBI memos and published a scathing analysis of what they found.

Everyone who hasn’t been living under a rock for the past two decades is at least fundamentally aware of the FBI’s investigation into Donald Trump’s 2016 election — colloquially known as the Mueller Probe. While it resulted in a series of horrifying revelations about the president, it failed to produce any charges. But it was at least seen through to completion. However, there was an additional offshoot investigation connected to the Russia ordeal that was never seen through to the end, and most people had never even heard of it until Trump himself re-exposed it in his campaign for vindication and retribution.

The Times analysis confirms that just one week after Donald Trump fired FBI Director James Comey in May 2017, officials within the bureau quietly launched a secret investigation, bizarrely coded “Oxferd Comma.” The probe contained two distinct paths: determining whether Trump’s ousting of Comey could be classified as obstruction of justice and a counterintelligence investigation into whether Donald J. Trump was personally compromised by Russia.

Former FBI Director Robert Mueller was eventually appointed by then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to spearhead a special counsel investigation. Rosenstein very specifically only authorized Mueller to investigate whether any crimes were committed. As such, the second avenue of this scandalous investigation, the counterintelligence probe that was meant to determine if Donald Trump, the president of the United States, was fundamentally compromised by a volatile foreign nation, was tossed to the wayside.

Counterintelligence investigations are a categorically unique beast in comparison to a criminal inquiry. They’re not meant to specifically determine whether or not a crime was committed, by legal definitions, but instead focus solely on whether or not a foreign adversary is compromising and undermining the nation. They are always heavily classified and unfold over several years or even decades.

The Times reports that one of the classified FBI memos that was just made public by the Trump White House read: “The goal of the investigation is to determine if President Trump is or was directed by, controlled by, and/or coordinated activities with, the Russian Federation in a manner constituting a threat to the national security of the United States and/or a violation of federal criminal statutes.”

The memos confirm that the FBI had already come to the conclusion that the Russian government had interfered in the 2016 United States presidential election for the sole purpose of installing Donald Trump in the White House. The FBI was aware that Russians had repeatedly offered their assistance with his campaign and knew that the Trump Campaign had instigated a heavy push within the Republican Party to embrace a position in favor of Russia in its war against Ukraine as a leg of his 2016 campaign platform.

Share

The Bureau was also fully aware that Donald Trump had been viciously pressuring James Comey to drop his investigation into the ties between Russia and his campaign before ultimately firing Comey.

In the memo connected to formally opening the investigation, the FBI said, “Open-source information indicates that President Trump has had a longstanding business and real estate ties to Russia and the former Soviet states, stemming from the 1980s. In 2008, President Trump’s son claimed that Russians made up a ‘disproportionate cross-section’ of many of President Trump’s assets. Open-source information also indicates that President Trump has had business ties in the United States and Russia with named Russian oligarchs.”

Trump has long maintained that his personal and business ties to Russia were minimal and irrelevant. But the FBI wasn’t convinced, as agents sought to determine whether Trump’s decision to oust Comey was really an effort to hide the ties he had to Russia.

The same day that the Oxferd Comma investigation was formally opened, then-acting FBI Director Andrew G McCabe immediately briefed then-Deputy Attorney General R. J. Rosenstein on their decision.

The very next day, Rosenstein made the stunning decision to appoint Robert S. Mueller III as special counsel to investigate the potential crimes of Donald J. Trump and his presidential campaign.

No one knew that this decision would serve to completely derail the counterintelligence investigation into whether or not Donald Trump was personally compromised by Russia.

Rosenstein was very specific when he appointed Mueller as Special Counsel: he was only to look for crimes, and a years long, open-ended probe was simply unacceptable.

Mueller interpreted these instructions with a painful degree of literality.

Rosenstein strictly forbade Mueller from conducting the counterintelligence investigation into Trump, but responsibility for that investigation was transferred to the FBI agents on Mueller’s team, according to the memos.

However, Mueller had been instructed to only focus on literal crimes, not potential ties, resulting in the counterintelligence investigation falling to the wayside.

When Mueller’s report was finally released in 2019, it determined that there was no evidence that Trump had personally conspired with Russia to meddle in the 2016 election. Mueller declined to make any determination with respect to the obstruction of justice allegations over Comey’s firing. And the section on Trump’s personal ties to Russia, including whether or not he was compromised by the foreign nation and presented a counterintelligence threat to the United States, was absent entirely.

The newly released memos have confirmed that the counterintelligence investigation was closed in 2019, with no conclusion, as it never truly even began, leaving Americans to wonder if there’s a Russian asset sitting in the People’s House.

Leave a comment

ICE is slated to drop upwards of $20 million on the purchase of thousands of “conductive distraction and de-escalation devices” by March, per a new notice published by the Trump-era Department of Homeland Security. The G.L.O.V.E. devices — Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter, manufactured by the Lexington, Kentucky Compliant Technologies LLC — are expected to be quite literally on the hands of immigration agents by March of next year. The horrendous devices have already been employed by some jails and police departments in recent years.

Subscribe now

The Associated Press has reached out to both the Department of Homeland Security and Compliant Technologies. DHS claimed that it was working on a response and offered no immediate comment, while Compliant Technologies founder and CEO Jeff Niklaus said, “Unfortunately, we are unable to speak on this subject.”

Compliant Technologies has confirmed that the G.L.O.V.E. devices function and appear as a normal pair of patrol gloves. They feature a small switch that can be pressed by the wearing agent that will activate their electrical mode. When the switch is activated and the glove makes direct contact with a person’s skin, it will deliver a painful shock that Compliant Technologies brags will induce compliance among combative victims within seconds.

John Peters, president of the Institute for the Prevention of In-Custody Deaths, who is personally studying the use of these gruesome devices, says, “It’s immediate and sharp, and it will distract you. I call it like a bee sting. If the officer is getting any type of resistance from the person, this is certainly an effective tool.”

Peters believes that ICE’s purchase will constitute the largest order for the company to date before going on to theorize that immigration agents will use the G.L.O.V.E. to remove combative subjects from cars and houses, as well as herding them in and out of detention facilities — bringing to mind a cattle prod, because that’s how we treat human beings under the reign of the Trump Administration.

ICE has a new game of fucked-up laser tag

Peters seems to believe that these devices will only be used as a humane tool: “For smaller officers or weaker officers or older officers, I think it has a great advantage,” resulting in faster takedowns with shorter, less physical confrontations.

Deputy Project Director on policing at the American Civil Liberties Union, Jenn Rolnick Borchetta, along with the rest of us, is calling bullshit.

Share

The manufacturer of the electrified glove device warns that their device is categorically not meant to be used as physical punishment against human beings who are simply exhibiting “verbal defiance or belligerence.” It is also not safe to use on high-risk individuals, such as children, pregnant people, or the elderly and disabled population.

But we all know damn good and well that this is shaping up to be ICE’s new game of fucked-up laser tag.

Borchetta warned the public that, as evidenced by immigration agents’ behavior thus far, we have absolutely no reason to trust or believe that ICE officers will use these gloves as anything less than a torture toy, openly questioning why such an inhumane device would ever be necessary for civil immigration enforcement.

“ICE spent the last year showing this country they are too quick to use force. Now they will be able to deploy electric shocks with the slight push of a button that maybe nobody else can see them do,” Borchetta said. “Introducing gloves that can so easily be used to deliver terrible pain in encounters is a recipe for harm to the public.”

So much cope

Compliant Technologies defends its product, stating that the devices have been safely utilized in situations where violent suspects are refusing to get into squad cars, inmates are harming themselves, or threats are being made against an officer. They are supposedly meant to be used only in very specific jail and transport situations, and not as a tool to broadly patrol the open streets.

Yet… Here we are.

Peters says he expects only a small number of immigration agents to misuse the painful devices, but claims they are unlikely to cause serious injuries or harm, as he notes the importance of a robust policy and training for any ICE agents utilizing the gloves. The manufacturer has claimed that officers will be required to complete a training course and recertification every two years to use the device.

But Peters’ rose-colored glasses frankly mean nothing when you’ve watched ICE agents quite literally execute humans in the street, verbally assault them with racial slurs, and openly, physically assault them without fear of consequence or accountability.

You really expect us to believe that taser gloves won’t be used like a schoolyard bully with a big stick?

Leave a comment

A series of newly uncovered court evidence just proved them all right.

Across the country, lawsuits against Trump Administration immigration agencies are emerging at a rapid pace, for a variety of reasons, but almost all of them seem to share one core point, backed by a trove of evidence ranging from body camera footage to personal text messages — agents are casting a dragnet filled to the brim with their own hatred, vitriol, and brazen racism as they indiscriminantly sweep up anyone with brown skin off the streets of LA, Cicago, Minneapolis, and countless other cities acorss the US.

Subscribe now

A new report from the New York Times confirms that multiple court filings have contained documents that show US federal agents using horrifying racist slurs against the people they are targeting. Several court filings show proof of agents calling their target “tonks," a deeply derogatory term for Mexican immigrants that is intended to mock the sound of an agent’s heavy flashlight striking an immigrant’s head. In countless instances, individuals who were suspected of being undocumented were openly described as “wet” by Donald Trump’s immigration agents, a shorthand version of the “wetback” slur, coined around the 1920s, based on the idea that Mexican immigrants got their backs wet when crossing the Rio Grande River from Mexico into Texas. One agent who spearheaded an operation in Southern California was found to be describing any individual whose appearance he deemed suspicious (i.e., brown) as “older Hispanic males.”

In the United States of America, law enforcement officers are strictly prohibited from targeting, questioning, or detaining any individual based solely on their race or ethnicity. This was supposed to be a long-settled law, quite literally set in stone within the US Constitution when the 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868.

Donald Trump’s Nazi-style approach to American immigration enforcement has managed to pull the rug out from under the Equal Protection Clause, turning the Constitution into an open-ended question and giving immigration agents not only the power to deny anyone they even think may be an undocumented immigrant the protection of the law that’s afforded to them by the Constitution, but actually going so far as to offer these agents a blank permission slip to target them, based on the way they look.

None other than Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh — who is certainly not known for respecting the basic human rights of anyone who’s not a rich, white man — led the charge in dismantling half a century of jurisprudence when he brazenly gave an open-ended racial profiling blessing to any agents hunting undocumented immigrants across the country.

The United States government, under Donald Trump’s purview, continues to maintain that its immigration enforcement operations and tactics are within the scope of compliance with the U.S. Constitution.

The original lawsuit that birthed Kavanaugh’s horrifying albeit temporary decision allowing for racial profiling within the Department of Homeland Security’s agencies, among dozens of other suits just like it, has yet to even fully work its way through the lower courts. It will take countless months to see a true resolution in any of these cases and literal years before the Supreme Court even considers throwing in an additional 2 cents on the matter.

In the meantime, immigration agents continue to behave with abandon while civil rights lawyers across the country continue to quietly collect evidence that they hope will one day serve to bury these monsters in their personal versions of the Nuremberg Trials, with proof that these agencies are openly employing racial profiling tactics in direct violation of the US Constitution.

Racial profiling and immigration are not new legal issues

The Supreme Court opened an avenue for a degree of racial profiling with specific respect to immigration enforcement in 1975, when the Court ruled that race and ethnicity could be employed as one of the factors utilized by agents with regard to traffic stops for cars that were suspected of containing undocumented immigrants. The 1975 ruling was very clear that race and ethnicity could not be the only deciding factor in those cases.

Stanford law professor Jennifer M. Chacón, who specifically studies immigration law, is now questioning whether the US Supreme Court’s 1975 U.S. v. Brignoni-Ponce decision still holds in this modern-day onslaught of racial profiling cases stemming from Donald Trump’s DHS agencies.

Is this still good law, and even if it is, when does agency behavior cross the line of what is permitted?” Professor Chacón questioned.

The facts speak for themselves

In one of the latest batches of depositions connected to a case in Los Angeles, videos and surveillance records show that agents and officers with immigration enforcement were focusing their efforts on hunting out “day laborers.” However, civil rights groups argue that this vague explanation actually simply translates to anyone with dark skin and a non-English accent — a racially motivated move that resulted in countless American citizens also being unlawfully arrested and detained in these massive immigration sweeps.

One sworn declaration from a driver who was subjected to a traffic stop by immigration officials in San Bernardino, California claims that the officer outright told him that he was pulled over “because he looked like a ‘paisa,’” a slang term for a newly arrived immigrant.

In yet another sworn declaration, a dark-skinned, Latino US citizen of Anaheim, California, Angel Santiago Tafolla, said that he was relentlessly chased by immigration agents at the Orange County carwash where he worked, while those same agents outright ignored his light-skinned co-workers. One of the agents discharged a taser within inches of Tafolla, whose body and clothing were wet from his work at the carwash, before ultimately handcuffing him and loading him into a van.

California is far from the only place in America where immigration agents are employing their own racial hatred as a qualification for their targets. All across the nation, dozens of lawsuits are being filed by civil rights attorneys on behalf of predominantly Black and Latino clients who were allegedly targeted by Trump-era immigration agents based solely on their perceived race and/or ethnicity, skin color, accent, and even work attire.

Upwards of 65 American citizens have allegedly been stopped, harassed, questioned, and even detained by agents simply because they do not look white. According to their sworn statements, many of them were not even allowed to provide agents with their valid ID or passport to prove their citizenship. Many of them were physically assaulted, tased, handcuffed, and some were detained for endless hours before their release.

Mayra Joachín, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union who is working on the Los Angeles case, said, “For the individuals that they’re stopping, they don’t have any information about them other than the demographic profile that they appear Latino and working class.”

Attorneys for the U.S. government continue to assert that all immigration operations across the country are highly and specifically targeting, and any use of derogatory or inflammatory language is merely fringe, limited to isolated events which do not serve as evidence of an agency-wide issue. They continue to further cite broad, sweeping authority granted to agents by the federal government to question anyone they believe may not be a US citizen.

Deny, deny, deny and lie

Homeland Security spokeswoman Katherine Currie gave an emailed statement, in which she entirely neglected to address the racial slurs employed by agents and instead focused solely on the allegation that officials are engaging in racial profiling, calling the accusations “disgusting, reckless, and categorically false.”

“What makes someone a target for immigration enforcement is if they are illegally in the U.S. — not their skin color, race or ethnicity,” Currie said in her statement.

Nevertheless, there is cold, hard video footage of agents in Chicago pointing out people on the streets, referring to them as “wet” and “tonks.” In the Los Angeles case, more than a dozen videos, captured by both body cameras on the agents’ person and bystander footage, show officers bypassing people who appeared white while honing in to question and detain nearby men with dark skin.

In a video hailing from Aug. 6, 2025, a group of heavily armed, camouflaged, and masked agents can be seen huddled in the back of a moving truck where a backpack is visible on the floor. One agent can be heard asking, “Whose backpack is that? Tonk? Tonk backpack?”

In a June 19, 2025 video, one agent casually brags to another, saying, “They filled three vans,” as they drove through an LA neighborhood. One of those same agents, later in the footage, recalls seeing a man in a minivan whom he ultimately did not approach, telling his colleagues, “I’m pretty sure he was wet.”

Ultimately, these cases serve as just yet another piece of evidence pointing toward total anarchy within Trump’s federal government. These agents are being armed to the teeth, handed a badge and a mask, and being told with utter conviction that accountability simply is not in the cards for them. Under Trump’s reign of terror, the white man reigns supreme, and they know in their heart of hearts and soul of souls that there’s truly nothing they can’t get away with.

Leave a comment

Despite vicious public calls for accountability, ICE has long delayed and rejected the use of body cams within their agency. Following another round of brutal murders at the hands of ICE goons carrying out Donald Trump’s immigrant exodus across the country, the public pressure has reached a fever pitch, leading the agency to finally agree to equip their agents with body-worn cameras by the end of September. But do not for a second believe that accountability is actually what’s happening here.

Per the agency’s own new body-worn camera policy, taxpayers are soon to be footing the massive, multi-million dollar bill for body cams that they will likely never see genuine footage from.

As they attempt to give the outward appearance of transparency and accountability, tucked into the folds of their new body cam policy is a particularly convenient caveat: ICE will ensure the prompt release of body camera footage that captures shootings and any other encounters between agents and civilians that cause death or severe injury, but only if and when the agency has determined that the release of said footage will be in the “best interest of the agency.”

It certainly doesn’t take a genius to realize and understand that this caveat is nothing short of thinly-veiled permission for Immigration and Customs Enforcement to manipulate the American people, granting themselves blanket discretion to publicly release any footage that depicts a Brown person as the evil, murderous danger to society they want you to believe they are while quietly tucking away any footage that shows themselves to be the evil, muderous dangers to society they actually are.

Christopher Schneider, a professor at Canada’s Brandon University and co-author of the book “Police Body-Worn Cameras: Media and the New Discourse of Police Reform,” parsed out the details of what this disturbing new policy really means.

Upgrade to paid

“In some ways, ICE is saying the quiet part out loud,” he warned. “Body-worn cameras are being used as contemporary image-work tools to present the police to the public in the most favorable way possible.”

In the body cam policy that was first issued in February 2025, officers are required to activate their cameras during all routine activities, including but not limited to arrests, search warrants, and emergency situations.

However, just because the camera is rolling doesn’t mean it will actually serve any purpose, in the grand scheme of things; outside of the agency’s efforts to protect and preserve its own public image as they continue to slaughter human beings in American streets.

The policy outlines the expected procedure in the wake of any ICE-related shootings or other serious confrontations: a committee consisting of top ICE officials and a variety of attorneys will convene, comb through the footage behind closed doors, and decide whether or not the footage should be promptly released to the American public, with the largest deciding factor being the effect that the footage could have on ICE’s public perception.

If the panel ultimately determines that the release of the footage is in the best interest of the agency, the video recordings will hit public news cycles within 72 hours of whatever incident it captured. But if ICE’s director determines that there are “specific and compelling circumstances” that justify withholding the footage from the American public under the language outlined in their new policy, then that footage will never live to see the light of day, much less a news cycle, as the policy gives the agency express authority to indefinitely delay or simply just block the release of any footage, at their own discretion.

The policy conveniently does not contain any elaborations on what, exactly, those “specific and compelling circumstances” could actually be.

It does, however, clearly note that, even when ICE does decide to release body cam footage to the public, all identifying features will be redacted, including agents’ faces, names, and badge numbers, to ensure that the privacy of their executioner goons remains their top priority.

Share

Essentially, they’re handing the American people a fancy little lock box labeled “Look! Accountability!” with the key tucked safely in their own pocket.

Schneider, who has dedicated his life to the study of body cameras since they began to spread into mainstream use over a decade ago, made it clear that he does not expect ICE to publicly release any footage that is connected to fatal shootings that garner national attention and public outcry, like the ones that took place last month in Maine and Texas. None of the agents involved in either of those shootings were wearing body cams.

He further noted that Customs and Border Protection, ICE’s sister agency responsible for the January murder of Department of Veterans Affairs ICU nurse Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, has still not released its footage of that incident, which ignited fury all across this country, despite the fact that the entire confrontation was captured on multiple agents’ cameras.

When pressed about that footage in February, Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Rodney Scott told lawmakers that the video footage, as well as other materials, were under investigation related to the incident and would only be made public “when appropriate.”

Katherine Hawkins, senior legal analyst at the nonprofit Project On Government Oversight, said what we’re all thinking with regard to ICE’s body camera policy: while having body cam footage is better than not having body cam footage, due to the court’s ability to ultimately demand it for review, Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s self-serving policy on the matter renders the recordings captured by these body cams “virtually useless.”

“Without any clear way for the public to get access to it, it doesn’t do much good,” Hawkins blistered. “It’s not unheard of for agencies to delay or withhold or selectively edit footage at all, but to say that explicitly just really gives the game away.”

As noted by Hawkins, virtually every law enforcement agency across this country has its own manner in which they handle body cams and their video footage. But while most of these agents do so quietly, with secretive policies or whispered “understandings,” ICE seems to be going out of its way to make the public aware that they are in full control of their own footage and you will only ever see what they allow you to see.

Leave a comment

That’s the promise of Liars’ Ledger — and we intend to keep it.

You subscribed because you know that political spin and media malpractice don’t expose themselves. Someone has to do the work. Track the lies. Source the facts. Call it out without flinching.

That’s what Liars’ Ledger exists to do.

But honest, independent accountability journalism takes resources — and we don’t have a billionaire writing the checks. We have you.

Subscribe now

Today I’m asking you to become a paid subscriber. We’re building toward our first 2,000 paid supporters — the foundation that lets us go deeper, move faster, and hold power accountable without compromise.

The mainstream press is spooked. Corporate media is compromised. And the people who most need scrutiny are counting on independent outlets like ours to run out of money and give up.

We’re not giving up.

Will you help make sure of that?

— John Amato & Karoli Kuns, Liars’ Ledger

Become a paid subscriber!

But James Talarico just gave it teeth, for the first time in a long time.

Subscribe now

Standing before 1,300 Texans in the city of Arlington, Democratic Rep. James Talarico pulled a sort of rabbit from his hat, invoking a confidential blueprint hailing from 1971 that many people perhaps have never even heard of to truly contextualize the crisis that is facing American voters.

Putting on his history teacher hat for a moment, Talarico offered Americans a lesson on just how deep this vein of Capitalism Hell runs in the United States of America. While most politicians play a modern-day blame game — with his opponent Ken Paxton pointing the finger at the Biden Administration for insurmountable rising costs across the country while many on the Left (rightfully) point the finger at the current Commander in Chief, who seems to be more obsessed with ballrooms and airplanes than his struggling nation — Talarico went deeper. Much, much deeper.

“This affordability crisis isn’t something that happened over the last five years. This affordability crisis has been 50 years in the making.”

Standing before his fellow Texans as he introduced his “New American Dream” economic platform, Talarico grabbed his audience and didn’t let go as he reached all the way back to the 1970s and pulled the Powell Memo out of the dust.

The Powell Memo

The Powell Memo — a document that was formally titled “Attack on American Free Enterprise System” — was penned in 1971 by Virginia-based corporate lawyer Lewis Powell in service of his client, the US Chamber of Commerce.

Talarico explained to the crowd that the memo served as “a blueprint for how corporations could amass political power, reverse the gains of the Great Society and the New Deal, and rig the system for themselves.”

Tucked within the pages of the memo was an urgent message to corporate America, warning them that they were soon to lose the political and cultural war to the 1960’s rising of Leftists, progressives, and environmental movements.

Not only did Lewis Powell fear monger capitalists into believing that they were losing the culture war and must mobilize their financial power in defense of the free-enterprise system, he handed them a fine-tuned blueprint to do so.

Powell stuffed his memo full of instructions for burgeoning and established Capitalists, advising them to pore through college textbooks, heavily monitor professors, and install pro-Capitalist scholars throughout college campuses. He urged them to sink their capital into the media, advertising, and PR networks, allowing them to corner the market on the very core of information and knowledge made available to the American public, allowing them to mold and bend public perceptions to their agenda. And, perhaps most terrifying of all, he laid out instructions for harnessing the power of the court of law in their favor, using his years of experience as an attorney to outline strategic litigation and form powerful conservative legal organizations.

He gave explicit instructions to frame the interests of corporate, Capitalist America as “individual freedom” that the country must vehemently protect.

Share

It is the very blueprint that is still being utilized today as the foundation, the very building blocks of some of America’s worst and most terrifying hits, including the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, and even the infamous and horrifying Project 2025 plaguing this nation.

Talarico explained to his crowd, “The Powell memo outlined a strategy. Unite corporate special interests, privilege corporate perspectives in the media, appoint sympathetic judges to the court, and buy politicians in both political parties. And it worked. Republicans and some Democrats sold the false gospel of trickle-down economics.”

Powell wrote that private companies should “aggressively and with determination” harness their political influence to stop “the stampedes by politicians to support any legislation related to ‘consumerism’ or to the ‘environment,” and they must never show “reluctance to penalize politically those who oppose” their efforts.

“Strength lies in organization, in careful long-range planning and implementation, in consistency of action over an indefinite period of years, in the scale of financing available only through joint effort, and in the political power available only through united action and national organizations,” the memo reads.

Just months after penning and delivering his gut-churning memo to the US Chamber of Commerce, Lewis Powell was catapulted into the United States Supreme Court by President Richard Nixon.

“Trickle-down economics is not a theory; it is theft.”

Talarico explained that the current political system woven so deeply into the very fabric of America is a direct result of that “long-range planning” and “consistency of action over an indefinite period of years” outlined by Lewis Powell.

Corporations pour countless billions into elections to sway political power in their favor; Congress cannot produce and pass bills and policies fast enough to fill the coffers of billionaires with unfathomably massive tax breaks, all while regular Americans are left to choose between paying for their life-saving medications, putting their child in daycare so they can work to pay for daycare, or feeding their families even a basic meal — because in today’s world, almost no one can comfortably afford all three.

“Trickle-down economics is not a theory; it is theft,” the Texas Democrat thundered. “Since the late 1970s, megadonors and corporate special interests have been buying politicians in both political parties. And then those politicians turned around and rigged the economy to benefit their wealthy donors at our expense. We have an affordability crisis because we have a corruption crisis.”

Even now, 5 full decades after the infamous Powell Memo first came to fruition, “the top 1% put the American Dream behind a paywall,” taking a pointedly sharp stab at the likes of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and the world’s first trillionaire Elon Musk, while “one in five Texas children live in poverty.”

“People are working hard every day,” Talarico told not just his crowd of Texans, but Americans from coast to coast. “They’re playing by the rules. But those rules of today weren’t written for us. They were written for billionaires.”

This isn’t Left vs. Right anymore, and it hasn’t been for a very long time. This is a deep-seated and long-standing tradition of billionaires vs. us, with roots that stem back to well before many of us were even born.

They don’t care about you. And to this day, they are functioning on a blueprint that told them exactly how to fuck you over.

It’s time to wake up.

Leave a comment

The world’s first trillionaire is currently embroiled in a legal battle with the state of Minnesota after a federal judge slapped down the request sent up the chain by the Tesla CEO’s artificial intelligence company xAI looking to block the Minnesota law that would effectively ban nude deepfakes used to sexually harass women and young girls from taking effect. The Minnesota ban grew teeth after Grok, perhaps xAI’s most signature and widely known product, introduced a feature within its AI that allowed users to digitally undress people in images it found circulating through the World Wide Web. Back in March, three young girls launched a lawsuit against Musk’s AI company, alleging that Grok was being used to create child sexual abuse materials, highlighting the fact that not only did Musk’s product generate nude images of human beings against their will and without their consent, but didn’t even have failsafes in place to ensure that Grok would not complete the task with images of children.

Amid the legal mess, Minnesota Governor and former Kamala Harris running mate Tim Walz fittingly referred to Musk as a “creep.”

Elon Musk is fighting against a law that would prevent his AI product from hand-delivering child pornography straight into the hands of pedophiles.

While the child pornography aspect of this ordeal is undeniably the most serious and disgusting part of it all, it’s only a portion of much larger efforts spearheaded by Musk and other competing tech titans to corner an advantage on the regulatory terrain that is only just now beginning to creep into the environment of AI as the technology rapidly grows and outpaces current laws. Musk’s fight against the nude deepfake ban is only a fraction of his wide-sweeping campaign against “Woke AI,” as he desperately tries to keep the fingers of state laws out of his precious pie.

And now the big guy is getting involved.

Musk has once again aligned himself with President Donald Trump, despite their on-again-off-again history, who has spent his time in the White House issuing executive order after executive order in an attempt to mold and shape the development of AI and strip individual states of their power to regulate the technological monster. Because apparently, even with a raging forever war, a crashing economy, and polling numbers that likely have his father rolling in his grave calling him a loser, he has nothing better to do than play tech bro with his friends.

Subscribe now

Now the Federal Trade Commission has thrown its hat in the ring in response to Trump’s orders, proposing a new policy last month that instantly raised the hackles of countless critics who are sounding alarm bells on the potential ramifications to the First Amendment as well as numerous civil rights laws, warning that the new policy will almost certainly incentivize AI companies into constructing AI models that prop up white nationalist narratives — a glaringly disturbing prospect in a world that has been all but taken over by AI, everywhere you look.

In a statement released on the matter, policy counsel at the digital rights group Free Press, Shilpa Jindia, said: “This tech-Trump alliance — far from bringing expertise to responsibly guide policy on tech and AI — has only furthered the administration’s corruption and enabled its campaign to censor and control our information ecosystem.”

Free Press is just one of many digital rights groups that have recently published public criticism of the Trump FTC’s proposed policy regarding “AI accuracy. The FTC invoked comments from Elon Musk and other right-wing tech giants on the topic of “woke AI.” The FTC’s disturbing statement claims that, if states are allowed to introduce regulations against AI companies, those companies may find themselves required by law, or even simply just “tempted” to train their large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and Claude to answer users with “ideologically motivated distortions” to straightforward questions that should have objective answers.

In short, they’re worried that state regulations would force AI models to answer people with the “woke” truth about things like slavery, social injustices, and civil rights (to just name a few), and they want to ensure that AIs are not only able but encouraged to put a racist, white nationalist spin on things without fear of repercussions.

The FTC claims:

The FTC states that the use of LLMs as a source of information is “becoming part and parcel of daily life,” and they’re making it crystal clear that they’re prepared to take legal action against any AI companies that do not plaster disclaimers about ideological “distortions” all over the answers their AI model provides.

And don’t think for a second that they can just bury it in the fine print, because the FTC covered that too: “An adequate disclaimer could not be buried in terms of service, for instance.”

If the Trump-era Federal Trade Commission has its way, AI companies will either give users the white nationalism laced answers that the FTC wants these AI models to give, or they’ll be forced into including a disclaimer that essentially says, “HEY! WOKE RESPONSE INCOMING!”

They’ve intentionally constructed a lose-lose situation, forcing tech companies into submission, no matter which direction they choose, successfully creating an environment where any information deemed “woke” is automatically discredited.

Jindia said in a recent interview that, at the core of the FTC’s threats is nothing more than the super scary concept of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). What was once an open pool of ideas developed by educators and meant to address discriminatory policies across schools and workplaces has now been turned into a dogwhistle by the far-Right to instantly discredit any policy that even bears the faint odor of anti-racism, pro-LGBTQIA, pro-women, or progressivism.

Jindia told Truthout, “This began with Trump’s executive order signed on day one against DEI, and it’s under that guise they are going after AI outputs, or basically the content of AI.”

Share

In March 2025, just shortly after he returned to the White House for his second, nonconsecutive term, Trump made a show out of firing the two Democratic members of the Federal Trade Commission, leaving two Republicans on what was meant to be a five-member, bipartisan panel. Trump’s newly molded FTC now warns that AI models could suppress “accuracy” in favor of “so-called equity,” claiming that the LLMs could reflect and produce the “ideologically motivated distortions” and beliefs of their creators, leading the AI itself to correct “what the developer believes are ‘historical injustices’ in the facts.”

Trump and his MAGA movement have continually not only outright denied the historical suffering of Black and Indigenous people, but pointedly worked to erase even the mere whisper from every nook, corner, and cranny of the United States federal government.

Jindia says:

It’s really a way for them to try to pressure private companies to suppress certain viewpoints, the viewpoints the Trump administration disagrees with, which is anything about diversity, equity, inclusion — and truth it wants to deny.

In their new proposal, the FTC is now threatening to legally punish companies for “deceptive advertising” unless they label their content woke, or give the racist answers they want them to give, a tactic that Jindia describes as “jawboning” — the use of public appeals or informal but intense pressure by public government officials to persuade and influence private companies, often at the expense of the First Amendment right to free speech. Ironically enough, Republicans openly accused the Biden Administration of employing those same “jawboning” tactics after the administration pressured private social media companies to enforce their own content moderation rules and policies surrounding disinformation amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, the Trump Administration is not only hypocritically using the same tactic, they’re attempting to force it into official federal law.

John Coleman, the legislative counsel at the non-partisan free-speech group, Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), said the FTC’s proposal is really nothing more than a vehicle for the federal government to control AI-generated expression, in direct violation of the First Amendment.

“AI developers shape their systems through choices about training data, system prompts, alignment, and other design decisions — editorial judgments protected by the First Amendment. The FTC’s proposal assumes there is one ‘best output’ and one set of user expectations.”

The FTC is citing Section 5 of the FTC Act as authority to legally punish AI companies that “deceive” users with “woke” content. However, FIRE sharply points out to the FTC that consumers do not hold static or uniform views and expectations. In reality, AI users will likely choose their AI models in the same way they choose their news outlets: choosing a company that maintains values that most align with their own.

FIRE maintains:

Again, the First Amendment protects from government encroachment that freedom to choose where to share and receive information, and the Commission has no authority to recharacterize protected editorial decisions as “deceptive” based on a declaration that AI users monolithically desire to, as the Statement suggests, ‘feel that their values are being respected.’ The Commission has no authority to define Americans’ values.

At the core of it all, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) asserts that the FTC’s proposed policy is no more than an attempt to dismantle and undermine any state regulatory powers against AI so that the federal government, under Donald Trump’s purview, can corner and control the market.

Big Tech has long been fighting against state regulations with specific regard to the rapidly growing subset of artificial intelligence and they’ve now conveniently found themselves bearing the full weight of Donald Trump’s federal government in their pocket.

Jindia warned:

They are also trying to tell the states: Don’t pass laws that attempt to address racist algorithmic bias, even though everybody understands that it’s been a documented problem in the rise of machine learning. This is part of the same censorship campaign that has been in place since day one of the Trump administration, and just expanding it to AI.”

At the end of the day, though, don’t forget that Elon Musk defended the production of kiddie porn with his whole chest.

Leave a comment

Carlson has a long history of being wishy-washy and overall spineless with regard to the current US president.

Back in 2022-2023, when the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit was in full swing against Fox News, his then-employer, Tucker was busted privately calling Donald Trump a “demonic force,” saying “I hate him passionately.” Yet when it came to his public persona, Carlson went the way of the stereotypical MAGA talking head — see Lindsey Graham and J.D. Vance — repudiating his personal feelings regarding Donald J. Trump and promptly falling in line, in hopes of being spared the president’s vitriol and proclivity for revenge.

Subscribe now

But despite Tucker’s best efforts to stay together for the kids, the breakup blew up in the end, and Carlson is firmly planted in the anger stage of his grief.

The washed-up former Fox talking head ramped up his public disparaging of Trump this week with the unveiling of a 10-point manifesto meant to rebuild an ideal United States of America once Donald Trump finally falls from grace.

Carlson has spent months now working behind closed doors with his fellow MAGA rejects — including former Georgia GOP House Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who experienced her own bitter and dramatic split with the president earlier this year over what she called “broken campaign promises” that led to her sudden resignation from Congress after Trump set his sights on her — to build a dissident offshoot of the MAGA movement.

Trump stands accused by this new collective, with Carlson at the helm, of unceremoniously abandoning his “America First” principles and campaign promises by throwing this country headfirst into yet another nonsensical war with Iran, seemingly allowing the Israeli government to call his shots, and blatantly mishandling the release of the Epstein files to protect a class of billionaire predators that Carlson just openly accused Donald Trump of belonging to.

Tucker made sure the world knows he means business this time when he opened his 10-point manifesto, delivered on livestream, with his sharpest and most deadly spear by invoking the now-deceased, infamous financier and child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Carlson openly demanded that the law should apply to every citizen of this nation equally, including but not limited to the president and his personal friends. Pointing the finger at Epstein’s long-running history of impunity, including Sweetheart Deals for heinous sex crimes against literal children, Carlson held a verbal knife to the throat of the “Epstein Class,” a subset of sickeningly rich people who seem to always manage to evade consequences for their horrifying actions, using their wealth, power, and connections as a vehicle to assured freedom.

Carlson took pointed aim at Israel’s apparent grasp on the puppet strings of America, claiming that Israeli leadership essentially bought a war between the US and Iran via “bribery or threat, or both,” as he compared high-interest debt, corporate government influence, and foreign lobbying to “slavery.”

The remainder of Carlson’s manifesto was littered with a variety of points and grievances, touting his ideal economy built around good old-fashioned skilled labor, farming, and manufacturing in lieu of tech bros and widespread surveillance. But despite his clear hatred for Donald J. Trump, he made sure to let RFK Jr. know that he still had a spot in the Cool Kids Club, as he hailed the Health Secretary’s MAHA agenda and echoed his criticism of widespread medication use, namely antidepressants.

He demanded compensation to civilians killed in useless foreign conflicts, a scrapping of Trump’s weird “Department of War” rebranding, a freezing of immigration until AI’s impact on American jobs can be thoroughly assessed, and an immediate cut of all ties with allies accused of genocide, namely Israel.

He openly shouted in favor of declassifying old government files that have been rife with conspiracy theories for decades, ranging from 9/11 to the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and demanded harsh punishments for any government official caught telling a lie.

But if you find yourself wondering if Tucker Carlson has somehow morphed himself into a halfway decent human, I’d advise you to pump the brakes.

The washed-up talking head went on to declare having children as a biological duty, openly trashed childless elites, and called for schools across the country to be forced to teach “fixed truths” regarding gender and the differences between boys and girls.

Carlson has spent some time now floating the idea of pioneering a third party in the American system and serving as its obvious leadership, saying, “there's going to be a third party, and I'm going to do everything I can to bring that about."

While his livestream diatribe certainly pointed to that same end goal, he did stop short of announcing an official party or candidacy. However, he specifically framed his manifesto as the building blocks for “whatever comes next.”

It’s important to remember that even a broken clock is right twice a day. And while I’ll never grow tired of watching these fools eat their own, allow me to make one thing clear: I’ll be damned if Tucker Carlson is ever welcome over on this side of the fence.

Leave a comment

The brutal ICE shooting in Maine last month drew an influx of newly revitalized scrutiny into the individuals being hired into these armed positions by the Trump Administration after it was revealed that David Brouillette, the ICE agent who brutally murdered 25-year-old Colombian immigrant Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, had a long-running history of severe domestic violence, which seemed to do absolutely nothing to deter the United States government from giving him a job, a badge, and a gun.

But to absolutely no one’s surprise, Brouillette is far from the only one.

The Ohio Immigration Alliance has constructed an in-depth report titled “They Walk Among Us: A List of 59 Sexually and Physically Abusive ICE and Border Agents” that will genuinely make you physically sick to your stomach.

Subscribe now

The analysis examined a total of 59 cases of Department of Homeland Security employees who are directly involved in hands-on, face-to-face immigration enforcement and have a documented history of domestic and sexual violence, predatory actions against children, and abuse of authority.

OAI’s Sickening Stats:

The scale of sexual violence is staggering. Of the 59 individuals, 50 (84.7%) have been charged with or convicted of sex offenses, and 37 (62.7%) committed crimes targeting children. Taken together, 35 individuals (59.3%) committed sex offenses against children — the single largest category on the list.

The problem is getting worse, not better. Cases documented in 2025 and 2026 alone account for 42.4% of the entire list — 25 out of 59 cases. The year 2025 saw 13 cases, and 2026 has already logged 12, with more than five months remaining. Compare that to 2020, the previous peak year, which had just 6.

CBP dominates the list. Customs and Border Protection accounts for nearly three-quarters of all cases — 42 out of 59 (71.2%). Both agencies show high rates of sex offenses (CBP: 86%, ICE: 81%), but ICE cases are more likely to involve underage victims — 69% of ICE cases involve children, compared to 62% for CBP.

The analysis proves with cold, hard, irrefutable numbers that under Trump’s current administration, more and more heinous monsters are being handed weapons and free range under orders to, ironically enough, rid this nation of what Trump’s Department of Homeland Security wants you to believe is the “worst of the worst.” In essence, they’re giving rapists, abusers, and pedophiles guns and “Get Out of Jail Free” cards while trying to make you believe that Brown people are the real problem.

The situation first garnered the attention of the Ohio Immigrant Alliance after Cincinnati assistant ICE field office director Samuel Saxon was arrested last December for brutally assaulting and strangling his partner. It was later revealed that she was a non-citizen who was less than half of Saxon’s age when they first met.

A federal prosecutor who argued for Saxon’s pretrial detention presented a trove of evidence that revealed years of horrific physical abuse and threats against his partner of 8 years.

In one video presented in court by the prosecution, a man believed to be Saxon can be heard screaming at a woman, “You stupid f------ b----. You got a fat lip, b----. If I see you here in three days, you will be executed.”

Police and EMS had responded to 911 calls at the address where Saxon lived with his partner in Cincinnati upwards of 22 times, according to the prosecutor in this case. Emergency crews responded to a call in April 2025, when they had to transport Saxon’s partner to the hospital, where she was discovered to have a fractured hip, bruises covering her entire body, and ligature marks around her throat. The prosecutor explained that doctors warned she very easily could have died or become permanently disabled as a result of Saxon’s abuse.

The prosecution’s evidence made it undeniably clear that ICE had either missed or just blatantly ignored the blaring red flags surrounding Samuel Saxon.

Saxon had previously worked in the San Diego ICE field office, prior to his move to Cincinnati, where his unbridled torture of his immigrant partner took place. According to police reports, Saxon’s San Diego boss called the police to conduct a welfare check on him 16 hours after he failed to show up for work one day. The report reveals that police discovered Saxon sitting on his toilet, naked, with a knife held to his own throat. Saxon’s Cincinnati supervisor allegedly told prosecutors that he was known to have a “bad temper” and would often “go off” for no discernible reason, describing Saxon as a “loose cannon.”

OIA Executive Director Lynn said, “There’s no way ICE was unaware of Saxon’s history of violence. His victim had broken bones that required surgery…. The police came to his home 23 times in less than a year and a half. He had a DUI.”

“This went on for years, ICE knew about it, and they kept promoting Saxon instead of firing him. That’s not how a law enforcement agency should operate.”

Saxon will face sentencing for a felony charge of lying to a federal official who was investigating his domestic violence arrest on October 20th. He pleaded guilty to that charge and faces up to 5 years in prison for that felony offense. He continues to face state charges of domestic violence, felonious assault, and strangulation, all of which he continues to plead not guilty to. If convicted on all of the state charges lodged against him, he could face decades in prison.

Share

Just prior to Saxon’s disturbing arrest, former Columbus ICE deportation officer Andrew Golobic had come under federal prosecution for abuse of authority, after he was found to be raping undocumented women who were under his direct supervision in an alternatives-to-detention program. Golobic was ultimately sentenced to 12 years in prison for those crimes.

Tramonte said, “After noticing a trend of Cincinnati ICE agents committing sexual or violent offenses against women, the Ohio Immigrant Alliance began looking deeper into the criminal backgrounds of other agents. An inordinate number of ICE and Border Patrol agents committing sex offenses against children. Rampant domestic violence. Oftentimes, these acts were committed by agents with 10 and even 20 years on the force. There’s been something rotten at these agencies for a long time.”

While the country as a whole sharpens its focus on ICE, specifically, as the face of Donald Trump’s immigrant extinction ploy — and rightfully so, as Immigration and Customs Enforcement has been responsible for almost all of the brutal murders that have dominated media headlines, including the recent Maine ICE shooting, as well as the killings of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston and Renee Good in Minneapolis, among others — ICE is not a rogue, stand-alone offshoot of Homeland Security. In fact, OIA’s analysis found that nearly three-quarters of the agents who boast serious, violent criminal histories are actually employed by Border Patrol, a sister agency to ICE, alongside Customs and Border Protection, all of whom operate under the umbrella of the Department of Homeland Security, which is, of course, under the purview of Donald Trump. When it comes to the murder of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, it was actually a Border Patrol agent and a Customs and Border Protection agent who shot him to death in the street as he attempted to protect a fellow protester who was recording the agents during the uproar.

Countless agents have committed countless heinous crimes over the course of Border Patrol’s sordid history, ranging from serial rape to cold-blooded murder to molesting and raping children.

• In Texas, 2018, Juan David Ortiz confessed to murdering four sex workers.

• John Daly III - ultimately dubbed the “East Valley Rapist” — was arrested in 2021 on charges related to the rape of 8 Arizona women between 1999 and 2001.

• Dana Ray Thornhill was handed a 40-year prison sentence in 2020 for the repeated molestation of two children between 1995 and 2007. Thornhill pleaded guilty to those charges. He was hired by Border Patrol despite having been arrested at the young age of 13 for brutally sexually assaulting a young girl.

• As recently as May of this year, Border Patrol agency chief Michael W. Banks resigned just 6 weeks after the Washington Examiner released a story citing allegations made by numerous Border Patrol employees, claiming to have personally witnessed Banks “bragging” to his colleagues about paying for sex with prostitutes while traveling in Colombia and Thailand, both places infamous for deep-seated poverty that drives underage sex work.

Donald Trump’s second presidential term has been rife with federal immigration agents and contractors who have faced deeply disturbing criminal charges. Border Patrol agent Luis Uribe was accused of forcing his way into numerous hotel rooms to rob and rape Chinese women in Chicago suburbs. Vermont Border Patrol agent Malik Daley was charged with sexual assault of a girl under the age of 16. David Courvelle, who was a contracted detention officer at the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center, pleaded guilty to having sex with a female detainee.

The Ohio Immigrant Alliance is vehemently calling on Congress to freeze all funding to ICE and Border Patrol amid this pandemic of criminals getting government-sanctioned guns, and demanded that their workforce be heavily scrutinized and re-screened for histories of domestic abuse, violence, and extremist ideologies.

OIA’s report reads, “Officers who abuse women at home are not safe to carry guns in public. Officers who prey on children are not safe to interact with communities. Officers who use their authority to coerce sex cannot be trusted to hold any authority at all.”

Concerns truly hit a terrifying fever pitch when it was revealed that this problem is truly coming from the top down, after a Department of Defense contract worker whose job it was to perform background checks for ICE and Homeland Security investigations was charged with solicitation of prostitution after he fell for a decoy ad on a website that was connected to a sting operation being conducted by the local police force in the suburbs of Minneapolis.

To say that the call is coming from inside the house would be a grievous understatement.

I want you to truly understand that the United States government, under Donald J. Trump’s purview, has formally asserted that even murderers, domestic abusers, and child rapists are inherently superior human beings to Brown people, so long as the murderers, abusers, and child rapists were born on American soil.

Sit with that however long you need.

Leave a comment

A crew that totals more than 5,000 personnel, sailors, and Marines has been stuck aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln for three-quarters of a year now, and their family members are finally beginning to scream for help, raising urgent alarm bells as the conditions on the aircraft carrier deteriorate to terrifyingly dangerous levels, according to a disturbing report from MS Now.

Crew members are facing down a severe lack of basic necessities such as toothpaste, soap, and deodorant; their showers have grown infested with mold, and they’re rapidly running out of food.

But for the family members here on land, that’s not even the most terrifying part.

The crew aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln is excruciatingly exhausted, working endlessly long shifts with virtually no days off or time to rest, which has led even military experts to speak out, warning that the dismal conditions are a prime breeding ground for fatal mistakes in an environment that is already one of the world’s most dangerous workplaces, on a good day.

Subscribe now

Bonnie York, whose stepson is currently aboard the Lincoln, said, “The morale is not good. Apparently, the ship’s doctor or therapist said they need to hit port soon, or people are going to start, you know, losing their minds.”

The Lincoln left its home port in San Diego back in November 2025. Since its original departure, the crew has had a grand total of two days off the carrier and on solid ground. The ship made a very brief port call in Guam in December 2025, and the crew did not touch land again until July 7, 2026. The Lincoln pulled into Oman after a consecutive 208 days at sea, constituting a modern-day record for an American Navy aircraft carrier.

Sailors are expected to operate high-speed aircraft on the flight deck of the ship, constantly circumventing spinning propellers while loading bombs and missiles into jets. The job is incredibly dangerous in and of itself, under the most pristine of conditions. To call this torturously extended deployment, under conditions that most prisoners aren’t even subjected to, especially hazardous would be the understatement of the century.

Ultimately, MS Now spoke with a dozen family members of individuals who are stuck on the USS Abraham Lincoln, some of whom spoke under the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution against their loved one, all of whom expressed genuine fear over safety, morale, and the overall condition of the ship. Every one of them fears that the crew has been stretched to the point of breaking as President Trump continues to steamroll his elective war with Iran into oblivion, with no semblance of a clear and true end in sight.

Family members of the crew gave secondhand descriptions and photographic evidence of broken and nonfunctional toilets, showers, and laundry facilities, extended periods with no hot water, showers overtaken with mold, and minuscule portions of food that are described as inedible.

Nicole Conrad’s son is serving aboard the Lincoln, and she said he has described days to her where the showers are locked and inaccessible, and his meal consisted of a half cup of rice and two plain tortillas.

Share

Brett Snow, a Navy veteran himself, whose son is on the aircraft carrier, warned that the never-ending expectations of the sailors with no breaks or reprieve are creating an environment that is “ripe for accidents.”

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth says it’s all “fake news.”

Coincidentally enough, the USS Abraham Lincoln is playing a crucial role in Donald Trump’s ongoing war with Iran, serving to enforce naval blockades, intercept foreign vessels, and support airstrikes against Iranian targets. As Trump desperately struggles to get a handle on the mess he has made, he’s forced a crew of 5,000 people to pay the price.

“I don’t know if we’re ever going to be able to achieve any kind of reasonable — anything that even comes close to what Americans might consider a victory,” Snow said, who admitted that he personally voted for Trump because of his campaign promise to keep the US out of foreign wars — a promise that he has effectively done the exact antithesis of.

Bonnie York agreed that military members and their families were stuck “sacrificing for something that none of us want to be a part of, essentially.”

“I don’t think we’re safer,” she said. “I think we’ve depleted a lot of things. I think we’ve pushed our military to the edge.”

Conrad, who also admitted to voting for Trump but now finds herself frustrated with his decision to enter this war and his subsequent handling of the unnecessary conflict, told reporters of the ship’s conditions, “Go visit. If you want to sit here and you want to say that Trump is taking care of the soldiers, go yourself.”

I truly question how much further Donald Trump will have to go for these people to actually understand that he could not possibly care less about them if he tried.

He stripped away your healthcare. He killed your parents and grandparents and children with COVID. He sent your sons and daughters headfirst into a forever war.

What is it going to take?

Leave a comment