Trump corruption with a devil shadow

Originally published June 7, 2025. Rewritten and expanded August 29, 2026.

Asked in January what he had learned since returning to office, the president gave the most honest answer of his second term. “I found out that nobody cared.”

He was talking to the New York Times about the guardrails — the ethics norms, the disclosure regimes, the quaint idea that a president shouldn’t be selling things. Nobody cared. So he stopped pretending. In July, asked on CNBC about the billion-plus dollars his family has pulled out of crypto ventures his own administration regulates, he said “there’s nothing illegal, there’s nothing wrong with it,” and volunteered that his children have “inside information” on “almost anything they do” by virtue of the presidency. He has bragged about killing the investigations into his own industry: “You’re lucky I’m president!”

That is the tone now. Not denial. Not deflection. Ownership.

For years, Republican lawmakers and right-wing media outlets frothed at the mouth over Hunter Biden’s laptop and fabricated tales of Burisma “corruption” — stories so thoroughly debunked that the FBI informant who invented them, Alexander Smirnov, went to prison for his lies. The GOP knew the Burisma bribes were fake Russian disinformation from the start, yet they weaponized these fabrications to launch impeachment proceedings and relentlessly smear the Biden family. Meanwhile, they’ve maintained a deafening silence about the brazen, documented, and ongoing Trump corruption stench emanating from the convicted fraudster‘s second presidency. Maryland Representative and House Judiciary ranking member Jamie Raskin called it a “gangster state.” And that was before the president chartered his own bank.

The hypocrisy is breathtaking in its audacity. While Republicans manufactured outrage over phantom millions supposedly flowing to the Bidens — money that never existed, deals that never happened, corruption that was entirely fictional — they’ve turned a blind eye to the very real, very documented flood of cash pouring into Trump’s coffers from foreign governments, cryptocurrency schemes, and pay-to-play access deals that would make a banana republic dictator blush.

What follows is not speculation, not innuendo, not the fever dreams of political opponents. This is a meticulously documented catalog of corruption so vast and shameless that it dwarfs anything previously seen in American presidential history. And the numbers have changed by an order of magnitude since I first wrote this list. In June 2025 the headline figures were $346 million across two inaugural committees and a $400 million airplane. Fifteen months later: $1.4 billion in cryptocurrency income booked on his own sworn financial disclosure, a single month with 1,051 trades in his personal brokerage accounts, a federal bank charter granted to his family’s crypto firm by a comptroller he appointed, and roughly $1 billion drained out of the National Park Service to pay for monuments to himself. The presidency has been converted into a personal ATM with all the subtlety of a smash-and-grab robbery, and the alarm has been disconnected.

The Teapot Dome Scandal of the 1920s served as the quintessential symbol of government corruption for decades — over a mere $7 million worth of bribes to Interior Secretary Albert Fall. It was eclipsed and replaced by Watergate, shortly preceded by the resignation of Vice President Spiro Agnew over the discovery of his $300,000 operation that funneled cash stuffed into plain envelopes by bag men into the White House. Trump’s corruption represents a quantum leap beyond even these watershed moments in terms of sheer orders of magnitude, as well as the brazen manner in which the heists are being conducted in broad daylight.

The same party that spent years screaming about imaginary Ukrainian energy company bribes and fantasy Chinese business deals has remained conspicuously silent as their standard-bearer openly auctions off American foreign policy, drops federal investigations for donors, and literally sells dinner invitations for millions of dollars. The cognitive dissonance would be comical if it weren’t so dangerous to our democracy.

What is an example of political corruption in the United States? You cannot find a bigger collection of brazen examples. This is the story they don’t want you to focus on — the real corruption, the documented grift, the unprecedented monetization of the American presidency happening right before our eyes. Here is where it stands as of late August 2026.

1. The President’s Own Brokerage Account

This is the newest theater and the hardest one to explain away, because the documents are signed by him.

  • On August 22, 2026, the Office of Government Ethics released the president’s periodic transaction report for June. One month. 1,051 transactions, worth between $78.1 million and $263.1 million. He signed it himself on August 12.
  • An index fund is one line on a disclosure. That is the whole test. On May 15, 2026, Eric Trump said on X that the family’s assets were “invested in a blind trust by the largest financial institutions in broad market indexes.” Four days later a Trump Organization spokesperson told the New York Times the family has no “role in selecting, directing, approving, influencing or soliciting specific investments.” The White House now says the accounts run on “computer-based model portfolios that automatically replicate recognized indexes, such as the Schwab 1000.” Those are not the same explanation. Broad-market index funds produce single line items; direct index replication produces thousands of individual trades. Both cannot be true, and across four months and three explanations nobody has named a single manager.
  • The June filing shows a purchase of $15,001 to $50,000 of SpaceX on June 23 — eleven days after the company priced the largest IPO in American history at a $1.77 trillion valuation. Algorithms replicating an index do not get in line for an IPO allocation.
  • The same filing shows Palantir sold twice in June — including up to $1 million on June 18 — and bought three times, including $100,001 to $250,000 on June 24. On August 4, Deputy Secretary of Defense Steve Feinberg signed a memo directing up to $243.9 million to Palantir without competitive bidding.
  • Ten days before the filing dropped, Senator Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Robert Garcia sent the president a 17-page letter enumerating more than 30 transactions that overlap official government actions, each footnoted to a row number in his own filing and a specific .gov announcement. The hard, primary-source counts from his own filings are 3,555 transactions in the first quarter of 2026 and 1,051 in June — an average approaching fifty trades for every day the markets were open, which is more trading than all 535 members of Congress did in 2025 combined. (The letter also cites an outside analysis putting 2025 at more than 14,000 trades worth up to $1.06 billion; Bloomberg’s tally of the same filing says 21,000. Those are estimates, not filing counts, and they should not be blended.)
  • A sample of the overlaps: a purchase of up to $5 million in Axon Enterprise roughly two weeks before ICE posted a $220 million contract notice for some 17,800 Tasers written to a specification only Axon can meet. Purchases of NVIDIA and AMD on January 6, shortly before the administration announced changes easing chip sales to China. Four purchases across BNY Mellon and Robinhood in March, before Treasury designated BNY as the government’s financial agent for the Trump Accounts program and Robinhood as its trustee.
  • Their deadline for answers was August 28, 2026.
Continue reading Trump corruption tracker
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congress ascii maps project

Who Runs Congress: An ASCII Maps Project

Here’s a paradox for you: the most powerful people in Congress are the ones most Americans have never heard of.

Cable news covers the floor — the speeches, the walkouts, the C-SPAN theater. But the floor is the last stop, not the first. By the time a bill gets a floor vote, the real decisions have already been made in committee: what gets a hearing, what gets marked up, what gets quietly buried, who gets subpoenaed, and who never has to answer a single question under oath. The committee gavel is where the power lives. Everybody in Washington knows this. Almost nobody outside of it does.

So let’s map it. All of it.

This is the full committee and subcommittee leadership of the 119th Congress as of mid-2026: both chambers, every standing committee, every select and special committee, the four joint committees, and — the part nobody bothers to compile — every subcommittee, with its Republican chair and Democratic ranking member. Over 100 panels. Because Republicans hold both chambers, every gavel is a Republican hand; every ranking member is a Democrat (or an independent caucusing with them — hi, Bernie!).

It comes in two flavors:

  • The infographic (above) — the visual overview for scanning who holds what.
  • The ASCII tree — a plain-text, monospace map with the complete roster down to the subcommittee level, including mid-Congress successions and the seats I couldn’t verify (flagged, not guessed). It’s diffable, terminal-friendly, and pasteable anywhere. Check it out below the break, and in my Github plain-gov repository where I’ll be adding more of these “just the facts, ma’am” maps.
Continue reading Who Actually Runs Congress?
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American election security has always been a bit of a mixed bag and, at times, a rogue's gallery

You learned the fairy tale in civics class. The ballot box is the one clean machine — the sacred mechanism, the great equalizer, the place where the powerful and the powerless cancel each other out one vote at a time. The peaceful transfer of power is American scripture. We even built a little ritual around it: the concession call, the inauguration, the loser standing on the dais clapping for the winner.

It’s a lovely story. The documentary record just doesn’t back it up — especially after the 2020 election and the events of January 6, 2021.

This is part of my daily Mini Histories series — 40-second tilt-shift AI-created video dives into the moments American memory conveniently misplaced, each one built around a thesis that runs against the grain of what you were taught. (You can find the whole archive on the channel.)

And the elections file is one of the thickest, because the thing the fairy tale leaves out is that American elections don’t get stolen on election day, via so-called voter fraud. They get stolen before it, broken around it, or bought after it — by the very elites who cry big crocodile tears about the unfairness of elections as they rig them in their favor (sometimes, with the blessing of SCOTUS including recently). Election denial becomes a whole grift in itself for the unpopular party that cheats. Using three failure modes, over two hundred years, one remarkably consistent cast of beneficiaries emerges again and again to wield power against the will of the people.

Let’s go to the tape.

Stolen: the backroom

Long before anyone “stopped the steal,” the steal was a gentleman’s arrangement — the proverbial smoke-filled back rooms where deals were made amongst men of influence.

The Corrupt Bargain (1824)

The first stolen presidential election happened earlier than you think — Andrew Jackson won the most votes and the most electors, and still walked away with nothing after the contest got thrown to the House and the runners-up cut a deal.

Reconstruction, Thwarted (1877)

A half-century later they did it again, only this time the price was an entire people’s freedom. To settle a disputed election, the parties traded away Reconstruction itself — federal troops out of the South, the door held open for Jim Crow.

Continue reading Stolen, Broken, Bought: A Short History of the American Election
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gerrymandering -- an illustrated guide to its effects

A new long-form data brief on how representativeness has been gerrymandered away — and the first installment of a series on how American democracy was engineered to stop being competitive.

In 2024, Americans went to the polls to elect 435 members of the U.S. House of Representatives. 366 of those races were over before a single ballot was cast.

Not “predictable.” Not “incumbent advantage.” Decided — by maps drawn years earlier, with software, by politicians choosing their voters instead of the other way around. According to the Cook Political Report‘s 2024 ratings, only 69 of 435 House seats — 15% — were genuinely competitive in the general election. The other 85% were already in the Republican or Democratic column before campaigning began.

That’s the headline of the new Doctor Paradox data brief, The Gerrymandered Republic, and it’s the launch piece for a new series: Structural Sabotage, on the ways American democracy has been engineered to stop being competitive.

This first installment is the receipt-collection edition. It covers:

  • The vote-share vs. seat-share gap in Wisconsin, North Carolina, Ohio — and Maryland as the Democratic counter-example, because honesty matters
  • Packing and cracking — the two techniques every gerrymandered map uses, unchanged since 1812
  • The efficiency gap — the metric that quantifies how badly a map cheats
  • The collapse of swing seats from 164 in 1999 to 82 today — a 50% loss of competitive districts in 25 years
  • What actually works — independent commissions draw 19% of America’s districts and produce 41% of its toss-up races, a four-to-one ratio in favor of taking the pen out of politicians’ hands
  • The Supreme Court’s 2019 Rucho v. Common Cause decision, which closed the only federal door left

Click the image below to open the new mini-magazine style format:

gerrymandering -- an illustrated guide to its effects

Stay tuned for part 2 of the Structural Sabotage series — on how primaries weaponize safe seats — that will be coming next. If 85% of seats are decided before the general election, then who actually decides them? The answer is a much smaller and more ideological electorate than most Americans realize.

Please share. The cover-up that worked is still working, and the least we can do is make sure people can see the map.

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Introduction to the Doctor Paradox Mini History Series

An Introduction to Doctor Paradox Mini Histories

On March 21, 1861, the Vice President of the Confederacy stood up in Savannah, Georgia and said the quiet part out loud.

Alexander Stephens told a packed house in his Cornerstone Speech that the new Southern government’s “cornerstone rests upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition.” He didn’t whisper it. He didn’t code it. He printed it. The newspapers carried it. The crowd applauded.

A century later, Americans were being taught that the Civil War was about states’ rights. That tariffs played a starring role. That slavery was, you know, part of it — but really it was about “Northern aggression” and economic anxiety and the noble agrarian way of life. The most explicit confession in American political history got memory-holed so thoroughly that to this day, polite people at dinner parties will tell you the war’s causes are “complicated.”

That isn’t historical drift. That’s organized forgetting.

And it’s the reason this series exists.

The lie at the foundation: The Lost Cause

The Lost Cause wasn’t a passive misremembering. It was an active, well-funded, multi-generational rewriting project — pushed by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, baked into Southern schoolbooks, cemented in marble on courthouse lawns, sentimentalized by Hollywood from Birth of a Nation to Gone With the Wind. They built the cover-up the same way you build any successful piece of infrastructure: deliberately, expensively, and over a long enough timeline that most people forget it was ever built at all.

Continue reading The Cover-Ups That Worked: Doctor Paradox Mini Histories
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Results from the Kansas experiment with SAVE Act rules -- 99.9% of the voter registrations blocked were US citizens

The Kansas Prophecy: We Already Ran This Experiment and the SAVE Act in Kansas Was a Disaster

When Kansas tried its early version of the SAVE Act, a whopping 31,089 eligible American citizens were blocked from voting. Meanwhile only 39 noncitizens were “caught”… over 19 years. And many of them turned out to be administrative errors.

That’s the final score from Kansas’s proof-of-citizenship experiment — the same core policy the SAVE America Act would impose on all 50 states. Republicans are selling it as “election security.” Kansas already has the receipts on what it actually is.

Been There, Done That

In 2011, Kansas passed a law requiring documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote — a birth certificate, passport, or naturalization papers. It was the brainchild of then-Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who styled himself as America’s foremost crusader against the specter of rampant illegal voting. The law went into effect in 2013 and immediately went sideways.

DMV clerks weren’t allowed to request the new documents — or even tell people the requirement existed. Voter registration drives cratered: one effort at Washburn University collected 400 applications but managed to fully register roughly 75 people. A process that used to take five minutes stretched to an hour. Steven Fish, a warehouse worker born on a now-closed Air Force base in Illinois, couldn’t produce an acceptable birth certificate. Multiple plaintiffs in the lawsuit that followed were military veterans. All were U.S. citizens. None were the noncitizen bogeymen the law was supposed to stop.

The federal courts annihilated it. A 118-page district court ruling struck it down as unconstitutional. The 10th Circuit affirmed. The Supreme Court declined to hear it. The judge sanctioned Kobach personally and ordered him to take remedial legal education — a humiliation nearly without precedent for a sitting state official. Kansas paid $1.9 million in attorneys’ fees to the winning parties. The state’s current Republican Secretary of State, Scott Schwab — who voted for the law as a legislator — delivered the epitaph: “It didn’t work out so well.”

The “Problem” Rounds to Zero

And it’s not just Kansas. Everywhere officials have looked for the noncitizen voting crisis, they’ve found a rounding error:

The Heritage Foundation itself — which advocates for the SAVE Act — found 68 documented cases of noncitizen voting since the 1980s out of over a billion ballots cast; a rate of 0.0000001% (!). Utah reviewed its entire voter list of two million registrants and found one noncitizen registration and zero noncitizen votes. Georgia audited 8.2 million voters and found 20 noncitizens. The Brennan Center found 30 suspected cases across 23.5 million votes. This isn’t a policy responding to a problem. It’s a solution in search of a pretext.

The bill is also set to take effect immediately, which is fairly insane to think about such a radical change to the rules of voting mere months before an election. I’m old enough to remember when supposedly Good Governance dictated that we leave a Supreme Court seat empty for an entire year — allegedly so “The People” could have their say on this important lifetime appointment. If the precedent is supposed to be that no major structural changes happen during an election year, then how does the right wing justify the sudden about face? It’s okay only when a Republican is in office, no doubt.

Kansas at Scale

The SAVE America Act is Kansas’s disaster, federalized and supercharged. In addition to the proof-of-citizenship registration requirements, it would force states to hand voter roll data to DHS with no safeguards on how it’s used, criminalize election workers who register someone without the right paperwork — even if that person is a citizen — and effectively eliminate online registration, mail registration, and automatic voter registration programs used by millions.

It passed the House in February 2026. The Senate opened debate March 17. Prediction markets give it roughly an 11% chance of becoming law. Trump has threatened to block all other legislation — including DHS funding during a partial shutdown — until it passes. A leaked 17-page executive order draft would require all 211 million registered Americans to re-register in person if the Senate doesn’t comply.

SAVE Act Network Graph Explorer

Explore the web of people, organizations, and money behind the push.

Open full screen ↗

The Quiet Part Out Loud

Kansas proved that proof-of-citizenship laws don’t catch noncitizen voters. They catch citizens. The 31,000-to-39 ratio isn’t a bug — it’s the feature. And the bill doesn’t need to pass the Senate to serve its real purpose: manufacturing a narrative that “Democrats are blocking election security,” setting the stage for executive overreach, filibuster destruction, or post-election delegitimization.

The Kansas cautionary tale isn’t that the policy is flawed. It’s that it works exactly as intended — just the opposite of the way they’re selling it.

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The SAVE Act explainer -- voter suppression disguised as "integrity," delivered by people with no integrity

In this video, we break down the SAVE Act (H.R. 22) — a bill that demands documentary proof of U.S. citizenship just to register to vote in federal elections. It sounds reasonable for about 3 seconds, until you realize it’s a voter suppression machine dressed up in a flag pin. It is the legislative endrun around democracy that Trump promised when he told voters on the campaign trail that “you won’t have to vote anymore!”

What is the SAVE Act?

The “Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act” amends the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 to require a passport or birth certificates paired with photo ID before you can register. For the roughly 21 million eligible citizens who don’t have easy access to those documents — disproportionately elderly, low-income, rural, Indigenous, and minority voters — it’s a wall. By design.

The problem it claims to solve doesn’t exist

Continue reading Watch: The SAVE Act — Solving imaginary voter fraud with very real disenfranchisement
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The nation’s top law enforcement officer is supposed to be the people’s lawyer. Instead, we got a corporate lobbyist who spent six years at Ballard Partners repping Qatar, Amazon, GM, private prisons, and Pfizer — then waltzed into the DOJ without disclosing any of it as a potential conflict. She listed exactly two conflicts on her committee paperwork: a policy institute gig and her brother’s law practice. That’s it. Thirty-plus clients and the government of a foreign nation, and Pam Bondi basically said “nothing to see here.”

Since her confirmation, Ballard Partners has become the highest-paid lobbying shop in D.C. and taken on ten new clients with business directly before Bondi’s DOJ — more than they had in the first Trump and Biden administrations combined. One of those clients, American Express Global Business Travel, paid Ballard $200K to lobby Bondi’s DOJ — after which the department conveniently dropped its challenge to a $540 million merger that would have let Amex GBT devour its biggest rival.

Then there’s Qatar. Bondi lobbied for the Qatari government. Then as AG she personally signed a DOJ memo blessing Qatar’s $400 million luxury jet gift to Trump. When the Freedom of the Press Foundation sued for that memo? Her DOJ stonewalled. Meanwhile, Trump announced a shiny new golf resort deal with a Qatari government-owned company. Totally unrelated, surely.

Oh, and remember the Trump University $25K donation her Florida AG office received right around the time fraud complaints landed on her desk — after which she declined to investigate? The IRS literally penalized Trump’s foundation for that one, and yet here she sits.

This isn’t a conflict of interest. It’s a business model.

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Alex Pretti just before he died at the hands of federal agents in Minneapolis

There was a weird controversy that set in after the events of the white nationalist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, VA in which a neo-Nazi 8chan bottomfeeder killed Heather Heyer by running her over with his car, while injuring 19 others. It was a shocking moment for the nation and all Trump had to say about it was they condemned violence “on many sides, on many sides” — though there were only two sides, and only one of those two sides had killed someone.

A couple of days later he managed to get through a scripted teleprompter statement explicitly condemning white supremacists and neo-Nazis only to walk it back again and then double down on it the following day, saying “The statement I made on Saturday, the first statement, was a fine statement… What I’m saying is this: You had a group on one side and you had a group on the other, and they came at each other with clubs—and it was vicious and it was horrible. You had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides.”

First of all, both sides did not have clubs. One side had tiki torches and a car that killed someone while the other side was armed with hymnals and homemade signage. Secondly — where were those “other” fine people? The vagueness allows for almost any interpretation — were some of the people with clubs “very fine” despite beating others about the head? Were some of the people who didn’t have clubs themselves but were cheering on the people with clubs “fine people”? Maybe there was a gathering of small invisible fairies merely caught up in the shuffle and Trump wanted to just make sure that possibility didn’t get overlooked and this innocent group of delicate souls unnecessarily besmirched?

The primary chosen “debunk” that detractors ended up going with from the wet clay of Trump’s stilted statement alleges that the *other* side Trump meant by “both” were simply innocent local townsfolk objecting to the removal of a statue of their beloved hero Robert E. Lee. Besides the fact that the right-wing has failed to this day to produce a shred of evidence that such people were even there, and the inconvenient reality that the rally was openly marketed as a white supremacist event, organized by avowed white nationalist organizations, it doesn’t even matter if they could produce such evidence — because those people are still not very fine! Robert E. Lee was a traitor to the United States and exalting him is not good!

Robert E. Lee Was Not a Fine People

In fact, Robert E. Lee was a terrible human being whose noble cause was maintaining his ownership of other human beings — as well as a shitty general who paid zero attention to the battle after giving a set of static orders and hoping God would sort out the rest. All he had to do was defend the borders of his baby white homeland, but he was an arrogant showboat who couldn’t keep it in his pants and had to go attacking Pennsylvania for no good reason.

He was also a senseless butcher who had the highest casualty rate of the entire war, being so reckless with his soldiers’ lives that he may as well have fed them into a woodchipper. He chewed through his entire army of 100,000 only 14 months into the campaign and by the war’s end had effectively annihilated his original army multiple times over through cumulative losses, as well as obliterating a whopping 30% of the total Confederate forces overall despite leading only one army in one theater.

Continue reading There aren’t plenty of fine people on both sides
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Kristie Noem in her ICE Barbie cosplay outfit, between 2 thugs, saying "The only thing I regret is not being there to shoot the bitch myself"

The shooting in Minneapolis last week of Renee Good, a 37-year-old wife and mom to 3 kids, hit me really hard. It’s not just that she was in a lesbian couple like me, with kids from previous husbands — and that I would be the one in the passenger’s seat. It’s because of the brazenness — pride, even — of the officer who ended her life cavalierly and without remorse.

The smear campaign about this woman nauseates me deeply — it began mere milliseconds after her death when the officer who shot her at point-blank range yelled “fuckin’ bitch!” after her vehicle and escalated extremely quickly to the sitting President, Vice President, and Homeland Security Secretary calling her a “domestic terrorist” despite the physical impossibility of being able to confirm that kind of information so quickly.

It is clear that agent Jonathan Ross escalated the situation himself. He broke DHS policy by putting himself in the path of a moving vehicle. And he should not have had his cellphone out, occupying his other hand, when he drew his weapon — you need the hands to be unobstructed to maximize your ability to handle any situation that may emerge.

He claimed he was afraid for his life — when? Show me on tape at which moment(s) in time this agent appears to behave an a fearful manner, because I do not see it. There are the moments when he’s calmly walking around the entire vehicle recording on his cellphone, moments when he has calmly drawn his gun and is pointing it at Renee Good, and moments where he is shouting and shooting bullets into her head. Where is the fear? He doesn’t run or dive; he doesn’t scream; he doesn’t call for help; he doesn’t show any surprise. He doesn’t seem fearful — he seems in control of the situation at all times, including when he pulls the trigger 3 times to take someone’s life as punishment for being cheeky.

Continue reading The killing of Renee Good
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They do not care about you — you are expendable to them. They do not GAF. Especially now with AI — they are gonna replace you anyway brah! At best they are biding time putting you on a drip feed of murder porn and revenge fan fic until the moment they are completely certain they’ve hijacked the electoral system at which time you too, buddy, will be shown the airlock into a deep space void no one will ever hear you from because they have all the powers of the earth to override whatever puny narrative you may have had for yourself.

You will be crushed like a bug 1000x tinier than Kafka’s roach — millions at a time under the heels of casually sadistic billionaires many of whom were Democrats up until 5 minutes ago when someone offered them a deal to cut their tax bill in exchange for a measley few million dollars. It’s “irrational” to not take the deal. You have to take the deal. Your competitors have taken the deal. You’d be the only chump not taking the deal. It’s the Art of the Deal, right?

Deals are all that matter. Transactionality is all there is — including reducing the beautiful, awe-inspiring teachings of Jesus to a mere materialistic creed, draped in a flag, shouted from a bullhorn, fired into an already capsized boat, and shot into the heads of innocent bystanders if they don’t comply with conflicting directives.

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Jack Smith, Special Prosecutor in two federal cases brought against Donald Trump

Five years ago today, a violent mob stormed the United States Capitol in an attempt to overturn a free and fair election. The man who incited them has since been re-elected president, which scuppered the investigation into him by Special Counsel Jack Smith. If that whiplash isn’t enough to give you vertigo, consider this: we now have sworn testimony, under oath, from the prosecutor who investigated Trump laying out exactly why his office believed they could convict Trump for breaking the law—and why they were stopped.

Former Special Counsel Jack Smith’s December testimony before the House Judiciary Committee is the closest thing we’ll get to the trial that should have happened. In it, Smith methodically dismantles every defense Trump and his allies have offered, explains how the case was built on testimony from Republicans willing to put country over party, and makes clear that the evidence of Trump’s guilt wasn’t circumstantial—it was direct.

In this post, I’m breaking down the key takeaways from Smith’s testimony, sharing one of my AI #MiniHistory videos marking the anniversary, and giving you a way to interrogate the evidence yourself through an interactive NotebookLM bot. Because if there’s one thing the incoming administration is counting on, it’s that you won’t have time to read 255 pages of testimony. Let’s make sure they’re wrong.

January 6 in 40 seconds

But first, a J6 refresher course — again, for busy folks.

I’ve been into making these little AI #MiniHistory videos with Glif agents, trying to tease out important signposts along our road to dictatorship and other interesting moments in history to highlight. Here’s the one I did for today and the 5th anniversary of January 6, 2021:

Continue reading Remembering January 6: Here’s how Jack Smith saw it
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Liberal Tears illustrates the sneering cynicism of the right wing who refuse to articulate political values

There’s something conspicuously absent from American political discourse: actual discussion of values and the morals, ethical choices, and beliefs that go into the creation of good government policy.

Think about the last major political debate you watched, or the last campaign ad that stuck with you. How much of it was about what government should do versus who you should hate? How much was articulating a vision for society versus performing dominance over the out-group?

This isn’t an accident. It’s a strategy.

When your policy positions are wildly unpopular — when majorities oppose you on healthcare, taxation, abortion, climate change, guns, and wages — you don’t engage on the substance. You change the subject. You make politics about identity, grievance, and tribal belonging. You turn every election into a referendum on vibes rather than vision.

The American right has become extraordinarily sophisticated at this evasion. They’ve built an entire media ecosystem designed not to argue for right-wing values, but to ensure those values never have to be argued for at all. And the Trump administration is chock full of people from that media ecosystem.

The Polling Problem

Here’s the uncomfortable reality the modern right has to navigate, and we need to trumpet: their actual policy preferences are not popular.

Exposed to the individual provisions of the Affordable Care Act, majorities supported them — even among Republicans. Majorities support raising taxes on the wealthy, protecting Social Security and Medicare, acting on climate change, keeping abortion legal in most cases, and implementing universal background checks for gun purchases. On issue after issue, when you strip away the partisan framing and ask people what they actually want government to do, the “conservative” position loses.

This creates a strategic problem. You can’t win elections by articulating positions most people reject. So you articulate… something else.

The Retreat from Argument

Meanwhile, the right-wing has indefensible values, which is why they no longer even bother to try to articulate them. Instead, they express them obliquely through “memes” and mores that evince cruelty, bigotry, narcissism, domination, supremacy, greed, selfishness, and contempt for vulnerability — all while maintaining plausible deniability through irony, “just asking questions,” and the ever-ready accusation that anyone who names the pattern is being hysterical or unfair.

This is the function of the perpetual rhetorical shell game: you can’t pin down a position that’s never stated plainly. The cruelty gets expressed through policy and aesthetic, but when challenged, retreats behind procedural objections or “economic anxiety.” The bigotry shows up in who gets mocked and who gets protected, but is never admitted as such — it’s always reframed as “common sense” or “tradition.”

Continue reading The Quiet Part Loud: Why the right stopped talking about values
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Wealth Cult -- rich men behaving badly, by Midjourney

A network of exceedingly wealthy individuals and organizations have channeled their vast fortunes into influencing American politics, policy, and public opinion — they’ve formed a wealth cult. And they’ve leveraged that cult and its considerable fortune to influence and in many ways dramatically transform American politics.

The most succinct way I have come up with to explain American politics is that the wealthy are dividing us over race and religion. Today far more openly than in the past, where much oligarch shadow influence was delivered via dark money kept intentionally untraceable back to its origins.

The term “dark money” refers to political spending meant to influence the decision-making and critical thinking of the public and lawmakers where the source of the money is not disclosed. This lack of transparency makes it challenging to trace the influence back to its origins, hence the term “dark.”

And, it is dark indeed.

Wealth cult anchors the trench coat

The Wealth Cult is one of 3 primary groups or clusters supporting the right-wing and generally, the Republican Party. It anchors the trench coat by funding the 2 cults above it: the Christian Cult, and the White Cult.

Its story is stealthy and significant.

A bunch of billionaires toast themselves to themselves, by Midjourney

The wealth cult has funded disinformation campaigns, the spread of conspiracy theories, created fake social movements through astroturfing, enabled violent extremists to attack their country’s capitol, aided and abetted a convicted felon, cruelly deprived vulnerable people (especially immigrants, poor people, and women) of the kind of state aid granted generously throughout the developed world, bribed regulators, rigged elections, crashed economies, and on and on in service of their extremist free market ideology beliefs (which, by the way, have resulted in catastrophic market crashes every single time).

They believe in “makers and takers,” or Mudsill Theory, as it was once called by pedophile and racist Senator and slavery enthusiast James Henry Hammond. Some people were born to serve others, they say. Hierarchies are natural, they claim. Wealthy men should make all the decisions — because that’s what’s best for everyone, they say in paternalistic tones.

I don’t buy it. I believe all men are created equal. So did a certain Founder of our country.

Continue reading Wealth Cult: The oligarchs influencing American politics from the shadows
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progressive capitalism as articulated by Ro Khanna as interviewed by Heather Cox Richardson

After last night’s solid trouncing of the entire GOP steez by the Democrats in elections coast to coast (p.s. don’t miss Zohran Mamdani’s victory speech — it’s a banger), the time is ripe for articulating a new vision of the American Dream. And the vision of progressive capitalism is sounding like the right tone for a nation state that wishes to remain the leader of the free world.

I believe there is pent-up energy in the Democratic reservoir — with a deep bench of political talent of people who actually seem to care about other people. And who actually understand and exalt the real promise of America — as a beacon of hope for a new experiment in self-governance — if we can keep it.

One of those politicians is Ro Khanna, who represents the bulk of Silicon Valley in his California district. He recently sat down with my favorite historian of all time, Heather Cox Richardson, to talk about the vision of progressive capitalism for lifting us out of this moment of reactionary pessimism and “nostalgia populism” — a promise he says is fake in the age of AI because it won’t generate real opportunity (I agree). The following video is a great introduction to this promising vision for a way out of the quagmire we feel ourselves in.

What is progressive capitalism?

Progressive capitalism summary

1. What Khanna means by “progressive capitalism”

  • Khanna argues that place matters: for decades, US policy has let capital go wherever it wants and told people in hollowed-out towns, “move if you want opportunity.”
  • His version of progressive capitalism says:
    • Markets and free enterprise are valuable for freedom and innovation, but
    • Government must intentionally invest in people’s health, education, and communities so they can actually develop their capabilities where they live.
  • He calls for a national economic development strategy — a kind of “Marshall Plan for the United States” — tailored to each region:
    • Advanced manufacturing in some places
    • Trade schools and tech institutes (AI, data, cyber) so people don’t have to leave small towns
    • Jobs in healthcare, education, childcare, and elder care

2. Care economy and tech economy, not either/or

  • Heather Cox Richardson pushes him on care work (childcare, elder care, education), noting it’s already present in every community, dominated by women and immigrants, and chronically underinvested in.
Continue reading Progressive Capitalism: A vision for the future
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