Forget Law and Order — Trump’s Troop Deployments Are Dress Rehearsals for Nullifying Your Vote

Monday night, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker came right out and said it. Trump sending troops into American cities has nothing whatsoever to do with crime or policing but, instead, is all about stealing the 2026 election:

“Eight of the top 10 states with the highest homicide rates are led by Republicans,” Pritzker said bluntly. “None of those states is Illinois.”

In fact, the cities with the highest crime and homicide rates are Memphis, Tennessee and St. Louis, Missouri respectively, both in Red States.

A Reichstag fire is blazing in Trump’s America and we know exactly who is fanning the flames

US Border Patrol outside the Japanese American National Museum where Gov. Gavin Newsom was holding a redistricting press conference Aug. 14 in Los Angeles. Photo by Getty Images

As Gavin Newsom stood inside the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles to announce a California redistricting initiative aimed at countering gerrymandering in Texas ordered up by Donald Trump, federal agents in tactical gear massed outside. Helmets. Guns. Concealed identities. No clear explanation. Just presence.

Trump’s attacks on the Smithsonian come straight from the Nazi playbook

A sign marks the location of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History on the National Mall on Aug. 20. Photo by J. David Ake/Getty Images

“The Museums throughout Washington, but all over the Country are, essentially, the last remaining segment of ‘WOKE,’” President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social, the social media network he owns, on Tuesday. “The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL…. where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was.”

Trump's DC Occupation Costs 4 Times More Than It Would Take to House City's Entire Homeless Population

Last week, when Trump federalized Washington, DC's police force and deployed the National Guard to occupy its streets, one of his main orders was to "end vagrancy" by destroying homeless encampments and arresting and forcibly relocating the people taking shelter there.

From Public Citizen:

In response to our lawsuit, a federal court had given the administration until last Friday to restore a critical database about government spending that it had unlawfully taken down earlier this year. The information is now back online, and the American people can again see for themselves whether the regime is or isn’t spending money as directed by Congress.

Here’s more about the case:
  • In February, Donald Trump put a man named Russell Vought in charge of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).

    For-Profit Presidency: New Yorker Mag Reveals Trump Family’s Frenzy to Cash In on the White House

    “How much is Trump pocketing off the presidency?” That’s the question driving a major new investigation by journalist David D. Kirkpatrick in The New Yorker, which finds that the first family has been leveraging its place atop U.S. politics to rake in billions. According to Kirkpatrick, Donald Trump and his immediate family have made $3.4 billion from his time in the White House, including more than $2.3 billion from various cryptocurrency ventures alone.

    History, Sanitized, Coming to a National Park Near You

    As the National Park Service prepared to celebrate its 109th birthday this month, rangers and other staff members–already reduced in number by the widespread firings of federal workers–spent weeks scrambling to review signage and other materials for topics that may be considered “disparaging” or reflective of “corrosive ideology.” 

    The Men Trump Deported to a Salvadoran Prison

    On March 15, President Donald Trump’s administration sent more than 230 Venezuelan immigrants to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador. Without providing evidence, Trump has called the men “some of the most violent savages on the face of the Earth.”

    Last week, the men were released as suddenly as they'd been taken away. Now, the truth of all their stories — one by one — will begin to be told.

    Starting here.

    Israel to forcibly displace Palestinians from Gaza City, Putin courts Trump, Bolivia’s right-wing gains, U.S. stops medical treatment for Gaza’s children

    Since dawn, Israeli forces have killed at least 17 people in Gaza, with the Ministry of Health reporting five more deaths from starvation. Israel announces plans to forcibly displace hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza southwards as part of its Gaza City invasion.

    The Real Death Toll in Gaza

    Ralph devotes the entire program to challenging the “official” count of 60 thousand fatalities reported so far in the genocide Israel, aided and abetted by the United States, has perpetrated on the Palestinians in Gaza. First, Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, who volunteered twice in Gaza hospitals, presents the various studies that revise estimates into the hundreds of thousands. Then weapons expert, Professor Theodore Postol, backs that up with his knowledge of the destructive power of the weapons being used and the photographic evidence of the rubble.

     

    I’m finished: The end of writing

    I'm finished and I know it.

    Artificial Intelligence is the end of us writers, us scribblers who shove words at you and hope you'll give a shit.

    I imagine the artist who drew pictures 17,000 years ago on the walls of the caves of Lascaux being told, “Put away your brushes, Ug, we've got this new thing called ‘speech’ that makes your cave drawings kind of old-fashioned."

    There is nothing new under the sun. All forms of communication live and die, as all creatures live and die.

    How Trump is banning DEI at universities — except for Jews

    Students protest an pro-Palestinian encampment George Washington University on April 25, 2024. Photo by Photo by Amid Farahi/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images

    The Department of Justice declared it illegal last week for universities receiving federal funds to give “preferential treatment” to members of any protected class, including funding “safe spaces” like study spaces or dorms for specific groups or recruiting minorities by targeting institutions that they are likely to attend.

    What to Know About the Court Case that Could Decide Free Speech in Trump's America

    Protesters in Seattle rally against the targeting of pro-Palestinian international students. Photo by Jason Redmond/AFP via Getty Images

    A federal judge in Boston is currently weighing what could become one of the most consequential cases in Donald Trump’s effort to deport people for their speech.

    The Next Time Some Idiot Tries to Tell You the GOP is “The Party of Business”

    As predictably as the sun rises, every Sunday a commentator or politician on one of the Sunday political talk shows says — without being challenged —that the Republican Party understands and supports business better than Democrats. The weekend as I’m writing this chapter, it was CNN’s turn.

    All my life, the media has told us that the GOP is the “party of business.”

    It may have once been true under Eisenhower when I was a very young child, but today it’s a lie — and has been so in a huge way since the neoliberal Reagan Revolution.

    Media Sidelined Deadly Consequences of Trump’s Reconciliation Bill

    President Donald Trump on July 4 signed into law an omnibus reconciliation bill, branded in MAGA propaganda (and much of corporate media) as the “Big Beautiful Bill.” The legislation scraped up just enough votes to narrowly pass in both chambers of the Republican-controlled Congress, with 51 to 50 votes in the Senate and 218 to 214