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On Unseriousness: Digging More Bonkers GOP Holes
In a possibly more than averagely batshit news cycle, the apocalyptic clusterfuck of clowns "governing" this country got up to some serious weirdness last week. As the chief clown waffled on the best way to kill us all - AI, nukes, nukes in space, forever war, hissy fits, agitprop up the wazoo - his lackeys frantically gaslit us with brain-dead pols, high T warriors and drunken sheep fuckers. No wonder Americans are said to be dreading the fall - not autumn, but the fall of democracy and civilization (sic) itself.
With Trump's approval rightly cratering but his faithful flunkies inexplicably urging us to vote like he's on the ballot - umm, okay - he's so far gone he still giddily maintains the deranged fiction we "have the greatest economy in history," we're resplendent in "a Golden Age of America," and he's all good on shamelessly, unconstitutionally banning news outlets he doesn't like - "I don't want them in my (sic) office," aka, "I’ll take 'Something a dictator would say' for $1000, Alex" - because he evidently thinks "repressive" is a compliment, devoutly to be wished. Otherwise, heading into a mid-term election that promises ("Oh please, oh please") to be a GOP rout, he's doing nothing to drag them out of the deepening holes he's dug except flailing and digging more.
Historically, inanely dazzled by nuclear power - see his "irresponsible and dangerous and frankly incompetent" burbling about the "N-word" - he's now touting the option of a shiny new Space Force military "offensive." Never mind America's 1969 moon landing assurance from "Planet Earth," "WE CAME IN PEACE FOR ALL MANKIND"; the one relatively peaceable place in the galaxy, space-weapons free for 18 billion years, now faces possible invasion from "Mister Schlock, Trash Gordeon, Darth Hater, Puke Skyfucker." Or in the pointedly indecipherable jargon of Air Force Secretary Troy Meink, "The United States now has on-orbit space control weapons capable of defending the joint force against hostile adversary action." By more "aliens"?
Back on an increasingly fragile Planet Earth, the same dangers loom amidst an Iran debacle wherein the U.S. is committing war crimes, hiding deaths and shortfalls along with damage to buildings, equipment, vehicles - one active service member: "We’re standing with our eyes closed getting punched in the face" - lying about a vital Strait of Hormuz that remains "a parking lot" and spending up to $2 billion a month despite a third House vote to end the carnage and a defiant Iran insisting it will not reopen the Strait until “the criminal Trump and bloodthirsty Netanyahu” are gone. All as the mad child-king muses publicly about his "big decision coming up. Do I want to go in and annihilate them or do I not? Anything could happen with me."
Hence another equally incoherent whiplash on the hazards of AI: From unhinged denial spewed by the master of "Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV": the only guardrail needed is "a STRONG AND SMART (high IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S. has that, in spades!" - to tentative hedging - a supposed concept of a plan to create an AI Czar - with the moronic, "Only High I.Q. individuals need apply!” - and an AI Force - like his "tremendous SUCCESS" the largely illusory Space Force - back to a knee-jerk "SICK conspiracy" against AI and data centers like the "many Hoaxes generated by the Radical Left Dumocrats, for purposes of destroying our Country.” When in God's name will he learn: "It ill behooves a man to rave on at length."
Still nursing a long-held grudge against the elites of the arts world, especially the storied family who both embodied it and always outclassed him, he also remains obsessed with slapping his odious name on the Kennedy Center or, now, threatening to tear it down if he can't. George Conway: "To destroy things he can’t possess or control is his essential nature." After multiple losses in court - the most mortifying the forced removal of his name, which rankled so much he's lamely kept the facade covered with a tarp - he persists in arguing the flourishing-until-he-came-along Center is "a mess" that's lost "tens of millions" or maybe "hundreds of billions" and "I’m the one capable of fixing it." Otherwise, "The building is destined to doom (sic)."
Unsurprisingly, an emerging backstory is far seedier. The only thing straining finances is the arts world boycotting him and his own Treasury holding hostage hundreds of millions in funds. After a storm brought down some ceiling plaster, lackeys left it, posted photos - Trump will fix it! - mapped the “debris field” for a 55-page bullshit briefing, and voted to close down. Richard Grenell partly replaced the art collection, including African works honoring JFK, with MAGA "art," some from "the Tony Montana Meets Saddam Hussein Collection," and workers glitzed up Trump's theater boxes. After a judge again refused to restore his name, Trump threw a tantrum and brought in forklifts, prompting the judge to issue an emergency order forbidding any mob-like, midnight demolition.
Meanwhile, he whines - The Federal Reserve is raising interest rates “to make Trump do as bad as they can possibly do” (sic) - threatens - GOP-led North Carolina, whose streets are "blood-soaked killing fields" (LOL) may get no more FEMA funding after Helene, "the biggest water hurricane" - propagandizes - the Smithsonian's "Ideological Capture” - and a desperate GOP goose-steps along. Vance lies about immigrants, RFK Jr. blithers about "chemtrails," Melania sneers let them eat flowers, fabulist MAGA Mike, seeking to be raptured, boasts of an uber-productive House "almost unmatched in history." And Mitch 'Weekend at Bernie's - McConnell is outlandishly wheeled out, dead-eyed and smile-plastered, from a months-long stupor to cast a vital "vote." Mother Mary of God, make it stop.
Preening peacock Pete Hegseth, evidently thinking he’s still on TV, ordered commanders to choose only soldiers who meet “impeccable grooming and uniform standards (no exception)” to attend his upcoming “State of the Force” speech; if they’re really cute they may get to join one of his dorky workouts. He also revived testosterone screening for symptoms like low energy and “loss of spontaneous morning erections.” Rex Huppke: “OUR ENEMIES WILL QUAKE AT THE SIGHT OF AMERICA’S BONER WARRIORS!” No wonder Unholy Mike ran away - aka sent the House home early "to explain all the great things we’ve done" - so they couldn't vote on Rep. Thomas Massie's articles of impeachment against Hegseth for "high crimes and misdemeanors."
Finally, there was Kash Patel, lackiest lackey of all, with his "unbelievable" testimony before a Senate hearing on newly lowered standards to work at the FBI. First, Tom Wellborn's background on Patel, a grown, childless man who wrote a kids' trilogy about a wizard named Kash serving a king named Donald; sold Ka$h-branded merch and anti-COVID-vaccine supplements; compiled an enemies list of high-level anti-Trump conspirators; took a government plane to hear his SWAT-team-protected girlfriend sing at a wrestling match; long yelled for release of the Epstein files until he was in power and found nothing to see; likewise ignored ICE abuses, rampant corruption, right-wing extremism while purging the FBI of 1,100-plus "disloyal" agents; and abruptly lowered standards to stop losing candidates to "the rigors of the requirements from yesteryear.”
Last week, Patel defended a new policy that no longer automatically disqualifies people for several offenses: paying for sex, defrauding employers, and bestiality - having sex with animals. In the FBI's universe of moral relativism, now you're all good if you hired a prostitute fewer than three times or over ten years ago; stole from your employer at least three years ago, or did unspeakable things with a sheep, horse, goat, dog etc when you were young and presumably horny. Throughout his testimony - here starting at 5:25 - Patel, who's suing The Atlantic for $250 million for credibly charging he's often drunk on the job, frantically shuffled papers that turned out to be cheat sheets to trash Sen. Dick Durbin, who calls him "the least qualified and most partisan FBI director in U.S. history."
Patel's surreal, wide-eyed, often bellicose testimony on, say, goat-fucking rattled even Louisiana's fake-folksy GOP Sen. John Kennedy, who was trying hard to give him the bizarre benefit of the doubt. After Patel explained the earlier policy "automatically disqualified any individual who participated on either side of it," a confused Kennedy asked, "Which side of what, the bestiality?" Patel: "Yes." Kennedy: "So, you disqualified the animal?" Patel: "We have some great canines - we're not gonna disqualify them. Hang on, I'm trying to explain." Kennedy: "So if Joe participated in bestiality, not as the animal but as the human, don't you think he ought to be disqualified?" Patel: "If he voluntarily did it, sure, but if he was trafficked into it..." Kennedy: But how do you involuntarily do it?" Etc.
Bravely, Kennedy tried to understand Patel's response to what he assumed was an underling's report. "Why would you get into bestiality?" he asked. "When you saw bestiality, I say this with respect...Why didn’t you just say, 'What planet did you parachute in from?'" Smirking, Patel said that was his response until he learned people were often "trafficked (into) these awful heinous acts." Then, he summoned his best impersonation of self-righteousness. "We did not want to punish victims of bestiality," he intoned, with the once-clear word "victim" doing a ludicrous amount of work. "At this FBI, we're not gonna criminalize and prevent victims from serving (America) in the premier law enforcement agency in the world." Maybe it was, before him. Or not. Just sayin'.
Hacks, trolls, crooks, clowns. "This is what unseriousness looks like," noted one observer, "when it finally hits a wall." And when the edict, "Do not obey in advance" matters. Tolstoy: "The wicked become even worse when they are tolerated." Friday night, with a few hours' notice, organizers of a protest dubbed "Hands Around the Kennedy Center" hoped for a turnout of 400 to 800 people. They were pleased when 950 signed up. Then over 6,400 showed up. The mood was defiant. One longtime volunteer said she'd "stand in front of the wrecking ball." People formed a human chain around the concert hall an inept, vengeful narcissist had just closed and called "a dump," relishing what it felt like “to hold hands with somebody you don’t know for something you believe in.” Afterwards, they all sang America the Beautiful. There may be hope. (Or not.)
Sep 21, 2026
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'We Are Spending Our Reserves,' WMO Chief Warns as UN Drops Global Water Report
The world's water cycle "has become more erratic and unpredictable," and recent trends have "serious implications for people and economies in the future," the United Nations' weather agency said Thursday, announcing the release of its annual report on one of the planet's most important natural resources.
Speaking at the launch of the "State of Global Water Resources 2025," World Meteorological Organization (WMO) Secretary-General Celeste Saulo explained that "some parts of this cycle—such as precipitation, river flow, soil moisture—are fast. They respond to weather within hours, days, weeks. Others, like groundwater and glaciers, are slow. They accumulate or decline over seasons to decades or longer."
"Traditionally, these slow reserves have acted as the planet's savings account: a buffer that absorbs bad years so that a single drought or a single dry season does not translate directly into a water crisis," she continued. "One of the central stories of the 2025 report is what is happening to that savings account. And the simple answer is that we are depleting it. We are spending our reserves."
According to the WMO's new report, terrestrial water storage—or the total stored in groundwater, lakes, rivers, soil moisture, vegetation, ice, and snow—has been falling since the mid-2010s. Saulo stressed that "this is not a single bad year, but it is a persistent, decadelong signal."
The agency also found that 2025 was among the driest years for river discharge worldwide in more than three decades, with below-normal flows over a third of the global basin area—and for the seventh straight year in a row, the number of river basins with "normal" conditions was in the minority.
Last year was also the fourth straight to feature widespread glacier loss across all regions. The WMO noted that the losses from 2023-25 could fill about 560 million Olympic-sized swimming pools—or about a third of annual freshwater withdrawals.
The report also "shows that water-related extreme events continue to devastate communities and economies," Saulo noted, highlighting the Early Warnings for All Initiative. "Over the past five years, Asia and Africa have accounted for at least half of all reported hydrological extreme events and more than 80% of associated deaths. And precisely these regions often lack the observations necessary for forecasts and early warnings."
Her comments came a day after the death toll from the flooding disaster in Tibet and Nepal topped 1,400. Experts have emphasized that tragedy's connection to the fossil fuel-driven climate crisis, with University of Pennsylvania professor Michael Mann writing that the "glacial collapse and deluge... was not a freak weather event; it was the structural failure of a mountain itself, nature's latest commentary on the deadly consequences of human-caused planetary warming."
That warming has also intensified the naturally occurring warm phase of a key pattern in the Pacific Ocean called El Niño, according to a study published last month. The WMO chief warned in her Wednesday remarks that "the strengthening El Niño will increase the extremes—drought in some countries and floods in others."
The agency's latest forecast, also released Wednesday, anticipates an "exceptionally high likelihood of nearly 100%" that the warm phase will persist through to February 2027. UN Secretary-General António Guterres said that "El Niño is being supersized before our eyes. The science leaves no room for doubt: The planet is in uncharted waters, and those waters are heating up."
Only when the last glacier has melted and the last reservoir has dried up will you realize that you can't drink gasoline…#climatecrisis#climatecollapse
[image or embed]
— Jürgen Döschner (@jdoeschner.bsky.social) September 17, 2026 at 4:01 PM
While the related releases generated calls for action, Saulo said that "it is not all bad news. Some regions showed improvement in 2025," pointing out that "parts of South America saw a partial recovery in water storage during 2025 after a severe multiyear deficit," while "Central and Southern Africa maintained much-above-normal water levels across several major lakes."
Still, action is needed. As Saulo put it: "The State of Global Water Resources report calls for a sense of urgency, not panic. The buffers that have historically protected water security—snow, ice, groundwater—are eroding in many regions on a timescale of years, not overnight. We have a genuine window for action: expanding early warning coverage; investing in the hydrological monitoring infrastructure; and opting for water management policies to address both water supply and use/overuse."
"My concluding message is that this report exists because members share their data and their science," she said. "This level of understanding—global, standardized, comparable year to year—did not exist a decade ago. It is the product of sustained international cooperation under WMO's mandate. And my last call is for all of you to continue to invest in it."
Sep 17, 2026
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Paltry Concessions Given to Secure Paramount-Warner Merger Deal Decried as 'Meaningless Bullshit'
"A settlement that promises less than nothing."
That's how one critic of Paramount Skydance's planned acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery on Tuesday described the paltry concessions extracted by Democratic California Attorney General Rob Bonta and other state officials to enable the proposed $111 billion media megamerger.
Critics argue that the proposed settlement agreement lacks meaningful antitrust enforcement and hands control of major news and entertainment properties to a billionaire family closely aligned with President Donald Trump.
“Every! single! one! of these concessions is meaningless bullshit,” writer Cory Doctorow said Tuesday on Medium. “Bonta just handed the American movie and TV sector to two of the most odious creeps to draw breath, surrendering without firing a shot."
The settlement, which was announced Monday, clears a major roadblock to Paramount CEO David Ellison's takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns CNN, HBO, Warner Bros. Pictures, and numerous cable networks. The combined company would control nearly 30% of both US theatrical film distribution and basic cable channel licensing.
The agreement contains a pledge to distribute at least 30 films annually for the first two years, then 32 movies each year after, invest hundreds of millions of dollars in US film production, maintain existing theater rental terms for three years, not sell Paramount and Warner Bros. studio lots for five years, and create an editorial independence board for CBS News and CNN.
In a Monday Substack post, American Economic Liberties Project research director Matt Stoller pointed out an apparent loophole in the settlement's film distribution requirement.
“They only have to distribute that many films,” he wrote. “They can make half as many. And those can be co-produced. So in fact, if you add up the numbers, Ellison promised to make fewer films going forward than Paramount and Warner are putting out today."
The settlement's editorial oversight board for CBS News and CNN have also come under fire. The five-member board overseeing the two entities will be appointed and paid by the combined company. Reuters reported Tuesday that the board would have no explicit investigative authority and that the company would be empowered to fill vacancies.
“As we learned from the failed and widely panned Facebook oversight board, a fake bipartisan oversight committee won’t save CNN,” Jessica González, the co-chief executive of the advocacy organization Free Press, said Monday. “We have all the evidence we need from the Ellisons’ destruction of CBS about what they do to warp journalism at Donald Trump’s request.”
David Ellison's father, tech billionaire Larry Ellison, is a Republican megadonor.
Seth Stern, a media attorney and chief of advocacy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, said that "it's unclear how the attorneys general or courts can constitutionally hold Paramount accountable for the board's actions or inaction without themselves interfering in content."
Stoller noted that the agreement's force-majeure clause, which would reportedly allow Paramount-Warner to dodge its commitments in the event of economic recessions, strikes, and other labor disruptions.
Other opponents of the proposed deal bristle at the Federal Communications Commission’s approval of Saudi and Emirati investment in the new company that would be created if the merger is approved.
Alvaro Bedoya, a senior adviser to the American Economic Liberties Project, lamented that “today, billionaires have yet again bribed, censored, and bullied their way to the top."
“Layoffs will follow. People from [Los Angeles] to Atlanta will lose their jobs, small businesses will lose their contracts, your cable bill and movie ticket will be even more expensive,” he continued. “Dissent against money and power will be even harder to find.”
“This did not have to happen," Bedoya stressed. "Thanks to an extraordinary outpouring of grassroots anger against the merger, a coalition of 12 state attorneys general sued to block it. They beat Paramount in court, winning a court-ordered pause on the merger, and beat them again at the negotiating table, getting the conglomerate to agree to pause the merger until as late as next June.”
“But the Ellison family does not care about the law. Instead, they loudly threatened to leave California if their merger did not go through immediately," he added. "[Gov.] Gavin Newsom caved to that pressure. So did [former state Attorney General] Xavier Becerra. And eventually, so did Attorney General Rob Bonta, agreeing to a weak settlement that will be exceedingly difficult to enforce.”
Stoller said that "there are a bunch of reasons they cleared the deal, such as threats to move the studio out of California, corruption, and general incompetence."
"I personally think CNN is terrible, and I’m glad it’s going to be discredited," Stoller wrote. "I also find it embarrassing that the Democratic AGs used antitrust law in an attempt to shade news coverage. But it’s downright comical they demanded that David Ellison not corrupt CNN by having David Ellison appoint a board ensuring that David Ellison not do that."
Sep 22, 2026
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$2.2 Trillion: The Collective Net Worth of 'Big Tech Oligarchs' Invited to Trump-Xi Dinner
The combined net worth of the tech executives expected to attend US President Donald Trump's private dinner Thursday night with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, is around $2 trillion, underscoring the staggering wealth and political influence of the small group of moguls poised to profit immensely from rapid developments in artificial intelligence—which researchers and industry insiders say is a threat to humanity.
The dinner attendee list is expected to include Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, the world's richest man; OpenAI CEO Sam Altman; Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang; Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg; Google CEO Sundar Pichai; and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. A Forbes analysis released earlier this week estimated that the tech executives are worth a combined $2.2 trillion.
The Trump White House has published the dinner menu for the event but has not released any details on what will be discussed on Thursday night. Given the expected guest list—and intensifying competition between the US and China on AI development—artificial intelligence is expected to be a major topic of discussion.
Earlier this week, during a speech at the United Nations General Assembly in New York, Trump dismissed efforts to regulate AI and said he plans to "encourage" the technology, "not rein it in."
US Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who introduced legislation earlier this week that would ban AI superintelligence and pause advanced AI development, wrote in a social media post on Thursday that "the function of AI must be to improve life for all humanity, not just make a handful of billionaires even richer."
Sanders pointed to the guest list for the Trump-Xi dinner and noted that the expected attendees "have nearly doubled their wealth since Trump's election."
Trump invited 10 Big Tech Oligarchs to his private dinner with President Xi of China.
They have nearly doubled their wealth since Trump's election & are now worth almost $2 trillion. Here's how much richer each of them got since Trump was elected:
Elon Musk: ⬆️ $658 billion…
— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) September 24, 2026
Bloomberg reporter Jonathan Tamari argued that the Trump-Xi dinner shows how the US president has "treated Silicon Valley execs almost like an extension of his administration."
Other executives expected to attend the dinner are Citigroup’s Jane Fraser, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, and Apple's Tim Cook.
Sep 24, 2026
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As El-Sayed Champions Medicare for All, Michiganders Can't Afford Basic Needs Due to Health Insurance Costs
Nearly half of Michiganders surveyed for a poll published this week said they're struggling to pay for groceries and gas because of the high and rising cost of health insurance, underscoring an affordability crisis that Democratic US Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed has cited as one of the reasons why the United States needs Medicare for All.
Forty-nine percent of Michigan voters queried by Progress Michigan and Public Policy Polling said the cost of health insurance affects their ability to afford basic necessities at least some of the time. Twenty-four percent said it happens “all the time,” while another 25% said it happens “sometimes.” Among Black Michiganders, the figures were substantially higher, with 34% reporting the problem occurs all the time and 31% saying it happens sometimes.
“Half of Michigan is already struggling with the cost of health insurance,” Progress Michigan executive director Justin Mendoza said Thursday in a statement. “With everyday costs getting higher and higher, it is clear that we need a system like Medicare for All to help Michiganders improve their health and afford their lives.”
El-Sayed, a physician and former Detroit health official, has made universal healthcare one of the three policy pillars of his campaign, alongside getting money "out of politics” and putting it "in your pocket.”
At a Monday "Students vs. Billionaires" town hall at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, El-Sayed argued that healthcare should be treated as a basic public investment rather than a commodity.
"You need good healthcare. You need a good education. We need childcare. We need good roads and bridges," he said. "We don’t need to send our money to big corporations to subsidize them, we need to be invested in people so they have the human capital to be able to do all the things as they graduate and come out. That's how the system should work."
El-Sayed has also repeatedly highlighted the plight of families who are insured but still cannot afford care because their deductibles are prohibitively expensive, and others who worry what will happen to their families' healthcare if they lose their jobs—an increasingly likely prospect as artificial intelligence usurps human workers.
“Medicare for All would allow us to actually provide every single person cradle-to-grave insurance,” El-Sayed said in a recent CBS interview, “without having to worry about losing it” after changing jobs, losing employment, getting married, or reaching retirement age.
The health insurance affordability crisis is likely to worsen in 2027. Healthinsurance.org reports that insurers are proposing a median increase of roughly 15% for individual market premiums nationwide, with Michigan insurers seeking an average 14.2% increase. The final rates could change before approval.
“Imagine not having to pay that," El-Sayed told CBS.
A new New York Times/Siena poll of Michigan voters found that 57% of respondents believe El-Sayed would do a better job on healthcare than Republican opponent Mike Rogers. Only 33% said Rogers would do a better job. Among all surveyed women, 67% said El-Sayed would be better for healthcare.
The overwhelming majority of voters ages 18-29 (86%) and Black voters (82%) agreed. Just 4% of Black respondents said Rogers would be better on healthcare. Among young voters, none—0%—said Rogers is the better choice for healthcare.
Sep 24, 2026
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Macklemore Announces 'Free Palestine Tour' With Dates in Paris, London, and Dublin
Rapper Macklemore on Thursday revealed a new phase in his campaign to raise awareness of the plight of Palestinians.
Macklemore, whose pro-Palestinian statements got him removed as a supporting act for fellow musician Ed Sheeran’s stadium tour, announced a series of live shows aimed at raising money for organizations that provide aid to Palestinian civilians suffering under Israeli military occupation and assault.
Several other opening acts for Sheeran subsequently quit the tour in solidarity with Macklemore.
"What happened to me is bigger than one artist or one stage," Macklemore wrote. "When the billionaire class can decide which voices are allowed on stage and which ones are too dangerous to hear, everyone should be paying attention. So we're going on tour. All proceeds will benefit organizations supporting the Palestinian people and movement."
The "Free Palestine Tour" so far has concerts scheduled in London, Dublin, and Paris, and Macklemore said that additional musical guests would be revealed at a later date.
Earlier this month, Macklemore pledged to donate $1 million to six organizations who were aiding Palestinians: HEAL Palestine, Gaza Soup Kitchen, Medical Aid for Palestinians, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), and American Near East Refugee Aid.
Those groups will also be beneficiaries of the upcoming tour, as will organizations such as Jewish Voice for Peace and the Institute for Middle East Understanding.
Rachel Griffin Accurso, the YouTube star and child educator known popularly as Ms. Rachel, last week pledged to match Macklemore's $1 million donation to Palestinian aid groups, and encouraged "every wealthy white celebrity to match it and speak out against the genocide in Gaza."
“Over 20,000 precious Palestinian children have been killed and children continue to be killed every day,” Ms. Rachel said. “We have a moral obligation to use our privilege and platforms to protect children and human rights.”
Sep 24, 2026
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Watchdog Says Trump Control of $400 Million Political War Chest a 'Clear-Cut Violation of Campaign Finance Law'
"President Trump, MAGA Inc., and anyone else who breaks campaign finance laws must be held accountable to help ensure that our political system is free of corruption."
Sep 25, 2026
An election spending watchdog on Friday accused President Donald Trump of committing a "clear-cut violation of campaign finance law" through his stated control over spending decisions made by the MAGA Inc. super political action committee.
Citing decades of legal precedent, the Campaign Legal Center (CLC) argued that federal office holders are prohibited from directing spending for super PACs, which raise money outside the scope of federal campaign laws.
Saurav Ghosh, director of federal campaign finance reform at CLC, noted that Trump has stated publicly on multiple occasions that he will decide where MAGA Inc.'s $400 million war chest will be deployed in the 2026 elections—which Ghosh said would be flatly illegal.
"Our laws are clear: No federal officeholder or candidate is allowed to direct the money raised or spent by a super PAC," said Ghosh. "President Trump, MAGA Inc., and anyone else who breaks campaign finance laws must be held accountable to help ensure that our political system is free of corruption."
Last week, CLC filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) that cited statements Trump made to reporters, whom he told funds raised by MAGA Inc. were "my money that I control."
This statement alone, the group said, was "a remarkable admission of a serious campaign finance violation."
The complaint then asked the FEC to seek "appropriate sanctions for any and all violations" of campaign finance law committed by Trump and MAGA Inc., "including civil penalties sufficient to deter future violations and an injunction prohibiting the respondents from any and all violations in the future."
While MAGA Inc. has a formidable stash of campaign cash at its disposal, it is unclear how much of an impact it will have on the 2026 midterms given that polls show the president and his party are in a deep hole with voters.
A report from The New Republic published last week revealed that the pro-Trump super PAC is plugging significant money into at least 17 districts that the president won by more than five points in 2024, and six districts that he won by more than 10 points.
David Wasserman, elections analyst for Cook Political Report, told The New Republic that this spending in pro-Trump districts is "an acknowledgment that things have shifted in a huge way since 2024."
"Republicans have hemorrhaged support among independent voters, they’ve got a real enthusiasm problem," said Wasserman, "and as a result, districts that ordinarily would vote handily for Trump and Republicans are now in play."
A Friday report in The Washington Post examined the states where Trump is preparing to campaign in the coming days, and found the president is being deployed in deep-red states such as Alabama and Oklahoma.
"Oklahoma is a state Trump won in 2024 with 66% of the vote—and won all 77 counties," the Post reported. "In Alabama, Trump won with 65%."
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Fresh Calls for Trump Removal as Tucker Carlson Claims He Said 'In the End, We All Die, Anyway' Ahead of Iran War
Carlson's account of his conversation with the president days before the US and Israel attacked Iran was "extremely disturbing," said one journalist.
Sep 25, 2026
New revelations from right-wing political commentator Tucker Carlson about President Donald Trump's push to wage war on Iran earlier this year prompted the latest calls for Cabinet members to invoke the 25th Amendment and force Trump out of office on the grounds that he is unable to fulfill the duties of the office—namely, to protect the security of the people of the United States.
"Days before the war began," Carlson told Steve Inskeep of NPR on Thursday, the president explicitly said that the outcome of the conflict didn't matter, because "in the end we all die, anyway."
Carlson revealed that he visited Trump in the Oval Office of the White House in late February, after having gone to Tel Aviv and interviewed Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador to Israel.
Trump expressed annoyance at Carlson, an on-and-off ally of the president over the years who claimed in April that he had "regrets" about supporting him, for challenging Huckabee on the US relationship with Israel.
Carlson had pressed Huckabee on his comment that "it would be fine if Israel took" over huge swaths of the Middle East, including parts of Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, and Türkiye.
The host of "The Tucker Carlson Show" said he told Trump he had come away from his two-hour discussion with Huckabee understanding that the unprovoked war the US and Israel was days away from started was not aimed at ending Iran's nuclear program—which the president had claimed was taken out of commission in June 2025 by US strikes.
The Israeli threats against Iran, said Carlson, were actually aimed at ending Iran's "regional power," "diminishing the power" of the Gulf Cooperation Council, and ultimately "getting the US out of the Middle East because we constrain their ambitions" by maintaining a presence in countries in the region.
As the podcaster warned the president not to be manipulated by the Israeli government into taking military action against Iran, according to Carlson, "he looked at me and said, 'Yes, you're right, but in the end we all die, anyway, so it doesn't matter."
This is also 25th Amendment stuff. Extremely disturbing. pic.twitter.com/SnyqCwI3fL
— Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) September 25, 2026
"That's exactly what he said," said Carlson. "I said to him, shocked, ''But what about our kids and our grandkids, and like, our country?' And he goes, 'Argh!'... That's a verbatim exchange."
"I was shocked by that," he added. "Who lives or dies does matter, the future does matter."
The president's assertion that allowing Israel to push the US into war—something Secretary of State Marco Rubio also openly acknowledged had happened after the conflict began—could be disastrous for the US and lead to an untold number of American deaths, was called "extremely disturbing" by Drop Site News journalist Ryan Grim, who suggested Carlson's revelation should prompt the use of the 25th Amendment.
Journalist Pedro L. Gonzalez expressed wariness at the thought of taking Carlson at his word regarding his exchange with Trump and his current opposition to the president, while Carlson said he believed the need for Cabinet members to push Trump out of office predated the interview.
He said that Trump's threat of nuclear war in April, when he threatened to annihilate the "whole civilization" of Iran, "never to be brought back again," was grounds for invoking the 25th Amendment, with a majority of his Cabinet members voting to remove him from office.
Tucker Carlson: Trump should have been removed from office immediately when he threatened nuclear war pic.twitter.com/eYPbYBRsta
— FactPost (@factpostnews) September 24, 2026
"He should have been bundled up and taken out," said Carlson. "That's a crime."
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US Citizens 'Could Lose Their Right to Vote' After Supreme Court Gives Green Light to Trump's Voter Purge Database
"The SAVE database has known errors, including incorrectly flagging numerous eligible citizens... as noncitizens," an election security expert told Common Dreams.
Sep 25, 2026
Many eligible voters may be at risk of having their voter registrations wrongfully canceled just weeks before the midterms after the US Supreme Court cleared the way on Friday for the Trump administration to screen voters using a database known for flagging naturalized citizens.
In a 6-3 decision, the court's conservative majority lifted a lower court order that blocked the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) from using and expanding the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database—whose original purpose was to check if noncitizens qualified for government benefits—to trawl through state voter rolls and link them to information supposedly confirming citizenship.
The expanded SAVE system relied upon by the Trump administration has also incorporated federal immigration and Social Security records that can be outdated.
"Because Social Security data was never intended for verifying voter eligibility, [the Social Security Administration] has no reason to keep people’s immigration status up to date in cases where it isn’t relevant for their benefits," explained Nancy Altman, president of Social Security Works, on Friday.
"As a result," she said, "US citizens could wrongfully lose their right to vote."
Investigations and court records have documented eligible US citizens being wrongly targeted by voter-purge systems using flawed citizenship data. In Missouri and Texas, for example, investigations have found that the system wrongly flagged hundreds of eligible voters as noncitizens, often those born outside the US who have since become naturalized.
Halting the SAVE system's implementation in June, Judge Sparkle Sooknanan of the US District Court in Washington, DC, wrote that the Trump administration had “haphazardly combined and repurposed the private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data that they knew to be unreliable."
But the Supreme Court's conservatives wrote on Friday, in an unsigned majority opinion, that the lower court's block on the use of SAVE impeded “the federal government’s efforts to assist state and local agencies in the proper administration of the midterm elections.”
In her dissent, the liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson emphasized that "the harm caused by burdening or disenfranchising even a few lawful voters outweighs the nonexistent harm that the government experiences when it is prevented from taking an action that it likely lacks the authority to take."
The court did not issue a final ruling on SAVE's legality to scrutinize voting rolls. But the timing—less than six weeks before the November 3 midterm elections—means the administration can potentially use it to direct states to identify and purge purported noncitizens on their voter rolls.
"The Supreme Court’s decision today wrongly lifts the burden from DHS and puts it on the shoulders of voters," Pamela Smith, president and CEO of the election security nonprofit Verified Voting, told Common Dreams. "The SAVE database has known errors, including incorrectly flagging numerous eligible citizens, such as recently naturalized citizens, as noncitizens."
"Now more than ever," she said, "voters must check their registration well in advance of Election Day to ensure they are not swept up in a flawed system through no fault of their own."
Jon Sherman, the litigation director for the Fair Elections Center, told Common Dreams that the court's ruling did contain a "silver lining." It "acknowledged that the National Voter Registration Act cuts off systematic voter removal programs 90 days before a federal election." However, voters could still be individually flagged as potential noncitizens.
The use of citizenship data is part of a larger effort by Trump to "nationalize" voting to clamp down on what he claims, without evidence, is a rash of noncitizens voting. He has used unsubstantiated claims of mass illegal voting to justify his efforts to overturn his loss in the 2020 election to former President Joe Biden.
Earlier this month, the Supreme Court refused to let Trump enforce another portion of his voting executive order, which would have had the US Postal Service block mail-in ballots in states that did not turn over information about mail-in voters to the federal government.
There is little evidence that noncitizen voting, or voter fraud more generally, is a significant problem: The right-wing Heritage Foundation's nationwide database of alleged instances of voter fraud identifies just 99 total cases of suspected noncitizen voting dating back to the year 2000.
A Brookings Institution review of that data in 2024 found that across several swing states, all forms of fraud impacted less than one vote for every million, far below what would be needed to swing an election.
"The Supreme Court’s decision to allow DHS and states to use an error-ridden system is completely unacceptable and didn’t need to happen this close to the election," said Virginia Kase Solomón, the president and CEO of the watchdog group Common Cause. "This DHS system, which the federal government itself admits is flawed, has always been part of the Trump administration’s campaign to interfere in our elections and sow distrust—and it will fail."
The legal challenge to the SAVE database was brought by the League of Women Voters and several state affiliates, along with the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), who are represented by Democracy Forward, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), and the Fair Elections Center.
The coalition said Friday's decision was "profoundly disappointing, as it puts millions of Americans at risk of being unlawfully targeted by the administration’s unreliable voter purge database weeks before the midterm elections."
"However, this case is not over," it said. "The DC District Court ruled that the expanded SAVE program violated multiple laws. We will be doing everything in our power to protect Americans’ voting and privacy rights by ensuring that the district court decision stands."
Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-Ill.) said that with Friday's ruling, the Supreme Court had upheld a "Trump administration voter-suppression tactic."
"It's disappointing that the Supreme Court decided to capitulate to and enable an authoritarian, again," she said. "States must hold the line and do everything in their power to protect voting rights and our democracy!"
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Ad for US Senate Seat in Kansas Pillories Roger Marshall for Having Pregnant Mom Arrested Over $50 Medical Payment
'The healthcare system is broken, but not for Roger Marshall. He's absolutely profiting from it."
Sep 25, 2026
The campaign of Kansas Democratic US Senate candidate Adam Hamilton on Friday released an ad highlighting incumbent Republican Sen. Roger Marshall's history of having patients arrested for medical debt.
The ad features Meischa Zimmerman, a one-time patient of Marshall, who prior to running for political office had a long career as an obstetrician-gynecologist.
Zimmerman begins the ad by recounting her 2011 arrest.
"One evening, I see [police] lights, I open the door, and it's a police officer," Zimmerman explains. "They arrested me because I didn't make a $50 payment to Roger Marshall."
"I was eight months pregnant," she continues. "And I said, 'Please do not handcuff me in front of my two-year-old daughter.'"
At the end of the ad, Zimmerman turns Marshall's aggressive debt collection tactics into an indictment of the for-profit US healthcare system.
"Roger Marshall preyed on the low-income families of Kansas," she says. "The healthcare system is broken, but not for Roger Marshall. He's absolutely profiting from it."
Meischa was Roger Marshall's patient. This is her story. pic.twitter.com/M6bmqK92gm
— Team Hamilton (@TeamHamiltonHQ) September 25, 2026
Zimmerman's story was highlighted earlier this month in a report from The New York Times, which found that Marshall filed lawsuits against more than 700 patients for medical debt, leading to at least 81 of them getting arrested.
Zimmerman owed Marshall $3,596 for a C-section her performed while delivering one of her children and, after his office sued her for outstanding medical debt, she agreed to undertake a monthly $50 payment plan.
Zimmerman told the Times that, while she tried to make the monthly payments, there were times when she couldn't keep up.
"I had to choose whether I’d pay my electricity," Zimmerman said, "or pay $50 to a doctor who didn’t need it."
Additionally, the law firm representing Marshall began charging 18% interest on her unpaid bill, which she said nearly doubled the total value she owed.
The Times story found that many patients Marshall sued didn't have anywhere close to the thousands of dollars in medical debt owed by Zimmerman, and that one of his patients was arrested for owing as little as $114.
The anti-Marshall ad drew praise from many political observers, who described it as a searing indictment of the Kansas Republican's character.
"This is a killer ad," wrote Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics, in a social media post. "If Hamilton defeats Marshall for Senate in Kansas, include it in your analysis."
Bloomberg columnist Francis Wilkerson similarly described the ad as "among the best... I've seen."
Amanda Litman, president of Run for Something, declared after watching the ad that "Roger Marshall is a real piece of shit."
James Goodwin, policy director at the Center for Progressive Reform, argued that the ad was so strong that it could break through a key barrier progressives have long faced when challenging right-wing politicians.
"One of the structural advantages that Republicans have enjoyed the last 10 to 15 years is ordinary people didn't believe you when you told them how evil they were," Goodwin wrote. "After all, how could anyone be that evil? That's just the left exaggerating again, right? It feels like that is starting to fall apart."
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'Every Taxpayer... Should Be Outraged': Anger Spreads Over 'Illegal' US-Funded Pro-Trump Ad
“This is the sort of government propaganda one might expect in North Korea, not the United States of America, and it is an egregious and utterly illegal misuse of Americans’ hard-earned tax dollars,” said four lawmakers.
Sep 25, 2026
Outrage mounted Friday over a taxpayer-funded television advertisement glorifying President Donald Trump, with critics describing the 30-second spot as self-aggrandizing propaganda and questioning whether the administration violated federal law restricting the use of public money for partisan communications.
The ad—which aired this week on outlets including Fox News, Newsmax, and CBS—features a dizzying montage of Trump at rallies, White House events, sporting events, and alongside military personnel, captioned, "AMERICA WILL NEVER BE A COMMUNIST COUNTRY."
The refrain of R&B singer JMSN’s “Love Me” plays over the rapid-fire images. The spot concludes with a voiceover from Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White praising Trump as “the toughest, most resilient person that I’ve ever met.”
At the bottom of the screen, an alarming disclosure appears, reading, "Paid for by the US government."
The White House dismissed criticism of the ad—which aired ahead of November's midterm elections—by calling the spot a "public service announcement" intended to remind Americans “to love their country and understand what makes it worth defending.”
However, on Friday, US Sens. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and Jack Reed (D-RI), along with Reps. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) and Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), excoriated the clip.
“This is the sort of government propaganda one might expect in North Korea, not the United States of America, and it is an egregious and utterly illegal misuse of Americans’ hard-earned tax dollars,” the four senior congressional appropriators said in a joint statement.
“The law is not complicated," the lawmakers added. "You cannot use taxpayer dollars for political advertisements.”
Federal appropriations law—including the funding bill Trump signed earlier this year—prohibits the use of government funds for unauthorized “publicity or propaganda purposes,” while the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has interpreted the prohibition to encompass communications whose obvious purpose is “self-aggrandizement” or “puffery,” as well as “purely partisan” communications.
The consumer advocacy watchdog group Public Citizen on Friday filed a complaint with the GAO alleging the ad "violates laws prohibiting the use of government resources for propaganda, the Hatch Act, and other related laws."
"Whether or not President Trump was personally involved in the ad, it was conceived, produced, and distributed by Trump’s White House staff," Public Citizen said.
US Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said Friday on social media that "every taxpayer, no matter your party, should be outraged by this."
"Your money is being used to fund campaign ads for Trump," the senator added. "It’s totally, completely [illegal]. He’s stealing your money for his campaign."
"The advertisement raises deep concerns about the Trump administration’s use of taxpayer dollars and its compliance with federal laws that prohibit the use of appropriated funds for the promotion of a political party or candidate," Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-NH) said Thursday.
“This taxpayer-funded political advertisement serves as yet another troubling example of President Trump’s growing list of expensive vanity projects—including the White House ballroom—that are estimated to cost over $1.8 billion, money that could have instead [been] spent lowering costs for Americans.”
Sam Stein, co-host of "The Bulwark Podcast," said, "What possible rationale could there be for using tax dollars to play that ad? This is just pure cult propaganda paid for by us."
@timmiller.bsky.social and @samsteindc.bsky.social react to a taxpayer-funded TV ad praising Trump, complete with “Love Me” playing over footage of the president.“This is just pure cult propaganda paid for by us.”
[image or embed]
— The Bulwark (@thebulwark.com) September 24, 2026 at 6:46 PM
Noting that Trump's approval rating has plunged below 30%, Stein added: "People are abandoning him... members of his own party are starting to distance themselves from him, and he uses that moment to have an ad [saying] please love me... It's desperate."
Tim Miller, Stein's co-host, called the ad "alarming" and "Orwellian."
Virginia Kase Solomón, president and CEO of the advocacy group Common Cause, said Friday in a statement that “taxpayer dollars should never be used to bolster the president’s self-esteem because his ego has been damaged."
"Running political messaging stamped with ‘Paid for by the US Government’ dangerously crosses the line from public service into authoritarian self-promotion," she added. "It also raises serious questions about whether it violates federal law barring tax dollars from being used for publicity or propaganda."
Others noted that the ad blasted communism as Trump rolled out the red carpet at a state dinner for Chinese President Ji Xinping, who is also the secretary general of the Chinese Communist Party.
"The clip’s heavy-handed anti-communist messaging also strikes a wildly hypocritical note, if not for anything but the fact that the Supreme Leader that ran it followed up by hosting China’s Xi Jinping with open arms, a flyover of US military planes, and a statue of a bald eagle," Jezebel's Danielle Han wrote on Friday.
Meanwhile, the controversy has spread beyond politics. JMSN—whose real name is Christian Berishaj—said that he never authorized Trump to use “Love Me,” writing that he would “never authorize my music to be used for ANY political agenda or campaign.”
"I am looking at lawyers," he added, "and handling this internally.”
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'We Won't Let Him': Efforts to Stop Trump Grow as Work Observed at 'Illegal and Immoral' Arch
"I will continue doing everything in my power to stop this illegal and reckless attempt to turn our nation's capital into a monument to Donald Trump," vowed Rep. Don Beyer.
Sep 25, 2026
While Americans are stressed about the economy and President Donald Trump's approval rating has hit a historic low, the second-term Republican is focused on vanity projects like his proposed 250-foot "Triumphal Arch," which opponents are trying to block.
The watchdog group Public Citizen is planning a protest and press conference for the morning of October 1 at Memorial Circle in Washington, DC. Speakers include Congressman Don Beyer (D-Va.), military veterans, and other critics of the "self-indulgent project" that lacks congressional approval—and which Trump is now trying to push as a national security project.
"Trump's planned construction is not only illegal," Public Citizen said in a Thursday statement, pointing to the lawsuit it filed on behalf of three Vietnam War veterans and an architectural historian. "It is an affront to American veterans and their families."
"The arch will sit on Memorial Circle along the Potomac River, impeding the symbolic line-of-sight between the Lincoln Memorial in DC and Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia, where hundreds of thousands of our nation's military members have been laid to rest," explained the group, which has secured from a federal judge temporary restrictions on work at the site.
Beyer—whose district includes Arlington National Cemetery—headed to the site on Thursday. He said in a statement that "after hearing from constituents who saw construction equipment at the site of Trump's proposed vanity arch, I drove down to Columbia Island to see for myself. When I arrived, I found workers operating heavy equipment who told me they were conducting archaeological work to evaluate the composition of the soil."
"When I asked whether this work was a precursor to construction of the arch, they said that they could not answer," the congressman continued. "The logical conclusion, however, is that the presence of this heavy equipment and additional surveyors is a clear indication that the Trump administration is preparing to move forward with construction. That would be deeply troubling. Trump's arch is illegal and immoral, and the administration is also under court order requiring 48 hours' notice before work proceeds."
"Yet, the administration appears to be pushing ahead with activity at the site even while it still has not done the basic work necessary to understand the consequences of this project," Beyer warned. "There has been no adequate assessment of the regional impacts of this 250-foot structure on public safety, vehicular traffic, air traffic, or historic sites, including the implications of Trump's latest ravings about using the arch as a base for drone and sniper operations."
Beyer, who also shared video of his visit to the site on social media, added that “Donald Trump and his administration are determined to find a way to push this project through by any means necessary, regardless of the law or the concerns of the people who live here, but my constituents have made their views abundantly clear: They do not want this project. Neither do I. I will continue doing everything in my power to stop this illegal and reckless attempt to turn our nation's capital into a monument to Donald Trump."
In May, Beyer and Dina Titus (D-Nev.)—who, as co-chair of the Congressional Humanities Caucus, led challenges to the administration's illegal attempts to fund the arch using the National Endowment for the Humanities budget—introduced the Arlington National Cemetery Viewshed Protection Act, which would explicitly prohibit construction of Trump's project.
"As President Trump strips away the necessary safety nets from Americans who are struggling to afford their basic needs like groceries and healthcare, he builds his unauthorized, grandiose Triumphal Arch. While destroying historical monuments and artifacts important to our American identity, he is erecting monuments to honor himself," Titus said at the time. "The American people deserve a leader who is responsibly using federal funding for critical government services, not for self-promotion."
After months of pushback over the project, Trump announced last Sunday that "at the strong request of the United States Military, and for National Security purposes, I have agreed to convert the magnificent Triumphal Arch, planned since the Civil War Era many years ago, at the Receptive Circle adjoining the Arlington Memorial Bridge, into a top grade Military Complex/Triumphal Arch, to house, store, and have the rapid ability to use large numbers of drones, plus Snipers, on both the roof and plaza areas, and additionally have and hold large quantities of sniper ammunition in storage."
"There will be no facility like this anywhere in the World," the president wrote on his Truth Social platform. "Out of the 59 top cities and Capitals, Washington, DC, IS THE ONLY ONE IN THE WORLD THAT DOES NOT HAVE A TRIUMPHAL ARCH, but it will now and, by far, the greatest of them all!"
The Hill reported Friday that analysts and lawmakers "are perplexed by President Trump’s surprise declaration," with Michael O'Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution think tank, telling the outlet that adding military elements to the arch "is not totally fictional or crazy—but also not optimal."
Whether or not the project include military components, "to build an arch on federal land (that is not in the White House complex), the administration needs to navigate a lot of bureaucracy," The Washington Post noted Thursday. "The administration has argued the arch doesn't need to abide by DC's height laws for buildings and that it doesn't need congressional authorization because Congress authorized something similar a century ago nearby."
However, the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation—whose members are picked by the president—has attempted to abide by Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act and related regulations, and consulted with local officials "to seek ways to avoid, minimize, or mitigate adverse effects to historic properties that would result from this undertaking."
ABC News highlighted that "the law says federal officials don't have to reach an agreement with state officials on mitigation of those harms, but they do have to try. Those consultations can then be unilaterally terminated if there's a failure for parties to meet in the middle."
The council's vice chair, Travis Voyles, on Thursday wrote to Tammy Stidman, associate regional director for lands and planning at the National Park Service, that "we are hereby terminating consultation," but the panel "will develop and transmit its final comments to the secretary of interior," aiming to deliver them by October 7.
According to the Post, "The administration is hoping to start construction by November."
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Marking One Year of NSPM-7, Rights Advocates Call On Congress to Rein In FBI's Spying Capabilities
"The actions of the Trump administration, especially those of Stephen Miller, have made it clear they aim to use the counterterrorism bureaucracy to destroy their domestic political opponents."
Sep 25, 2026
On the first anniversary of President Donald Trump's signing of one critical national security memo, every member of Congress on Friday received a report on how his administration's "blatant use of the counterterrorism framework against left-wing domestic speech" has allowed the FBI to "spy on the First Amendment," attacking one of the bedrock principles of the US Constitution in order to crack down on "speech disfavored by Trump."
The 19-page report, titled "7Can the FBI Spy on the First Amendment?," was sent to every congressional office by the advocacy group Defending Rights and Dissent (DRAD), exactly a year after the president signed National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7) in the wake of the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk.
Trump and other top White House officials immediately blamed the killing of 31-year-old Turning Point USA co-founder on the "radical left," and claimed left-wing extremists were behind "the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today." Days earlier, the US Department of Justice had removed from its website a report showing that political violence perpetrated by far-right extremists in the US far outpaced that of people on the left.
The memo outlined how the Trump administration planned to crack down on left-wing groups by directing law enforcement agencies to treat political speech "as a precursor to terrorism," if it came from organizations that demonstrated particular viewpoints—including those critical of capitalism or the US government. Groups that displayed so-called "extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality" were also named as potential targets.
NSPM-7 called for the FBI's 200 Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTF)—comprised of about 4,000 agents across the country—to investigate groups suspected of left-wing extremism under the memo, with local police officers staffing many of the task forces.
"This extremely broad language leads to individual agents interpreting what these viewpoints mean to them when determining who to target. And thanks to the existence of FBI assessments, designed with the same preventive purpose that NSPM-7 echoes, Task Force officers can investigate groups or individuals without a factual basis to suspect them of criminal wrongdoing or consider them a national security threat," wrote Chip Gibbons, policy director at DRAD. "At the assessment level, the FBI can even have an informant infiltrate their group. Informants often act as agent provocateurs in sting operations, in which the informant proposes and recruits individuals to participate in a fictitious terror plot concocted by the FBI."
Under pressure from Trump, Homeland Security Adviser Stephen Miller, and other officials to deliver prosecutions of suspected left-wing extremists, wrote Gibbons, "the agents' loose guidelines, politicized guidance, and track record of the FBI creates a recipe for disaster."
"Trump and Miller have made clear they plan to exploit the broad counterterrorism authorities of the executive branch to unleash this machinery of repression upon their domestic political opponents. Unless Congress acts now, they will get away with it."
A year after NSPM-7 was signed, the memo has already underpinned a crackdown on groups and individuals who oppose Trump's deeply unpopular deployment of federal immigration agents to carry out his violent mass deportation policy and other aspects of his far-right agenda.
US Attorney Daniel Rosen cited the memo in June when he announced the indictment of 15 organizers who led protests against US Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Minnesota, and those indictments came out of a sprawling investigation into local labor and rights groups that was opened after federal agents fatally shot anti-ICE protester Alex Pretti in Minneapolis in January. Top administration officials also accused Pretti, soon after he had been killed, of being a "domestic terrorist."
In July, Miller said NSPM-7 would allow the administration to "disrupt, identify, defund, de-bank, arrest, prosecute these political terrorists that are operating within our country," as Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that four left-wing groups had been designated as "foreign terrorist organizations."
And in March, the memo underpinned the conviction of eight people accused of domestic terrorism for wearing all black to a protest at Prairieland Detention Facility in Alvarado, Texas, where one demonstrator shot and wounded a police officer. The protesters were later sentenced to 30-100 years in prison.
“This wouldn’t be a terrorism case if it weren’t for that memo,” a defense lawyer told one news outlet after the conviction.
Gibbons emphasized on Friday that carrying out NSPM-7's directives "requires no new laws, no new agencies, because well before Trump ever returned to power, the FBI and its enablers have amassed for itself the power to spy on pure political speech."
As hundreds of thousands of Americans expressed opposition to President George W. Bush's impending invasion of Iraq in 2003, notes the report, "the FBI issued two controversial intelligence bulletins, one on 'Tactics Used During Protests and Demonstrations,' and one on 'Potential for Criminal Activity at Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) Annual Meeting.'"
"The latter bulletin was prepared in advance of mass protests against the Iraq War," reads the report. "It went so far as to list 'tactics by which protestors draw attention,' which included 'marches, banners, and forms of passive resistance such as sit-in.' It urged law enforcement to 'be alert to these possible indicators of protest activity and report any potentially illegal acts to the nearest FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force.'"
The inspector general of the Department of Justice at the time raised alarm about the bulletins' potential violation of the First Amendment, but the head of the DOJ's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), Jack Goldsmith, dismissed the concern.
"The OLC opinion made clear that the executive branch believes it is not unconstitutional for the FBI to monitor protected speech so long as it claimed it was looking for potential unlawful activity, such as terrorist threats or 'civil disorder,'" writes Gibbons.
The FBI's international terrorism program has also pursued "homegrown violent terrorists," and the agency sought to prove in the 1960s and '70s that anti-war protests were "the product of Soviet foreign"—providing the National Security Agency with the names of US citizens to be added to a watchlist.
"While the stakes were high before, the actions of the Trump administration, especially those of Stephen Miller, have made it clear they aim to use the counterterrorism bureaucracy to destroy their domestic political opponents," reads the DRAD report.
Gibbons called on Congress to take several key actions to rein in the FBI as it seeks to carry out the directive outlined in NSPM-7, including:
- Creating a statutory charter for the FBI that outlines what it can investigate and why;
- Imposing on the FBI a definition of "terrorism" that puts the focus on criminal violence against people instead of political ideology;
- Eliminating the FBI's assessments of individuals based on their political speech and putting the agency "out of the business of suspicionless investigations"; and
- Requiring a warrant for foreign intelligence searches and queries under §702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
"With NSPM-7, Trump and Miller have made clear they plan to exploit the broad counterterrorism authorities of the executive branch to unleash this machinery of repression upon their domestic political opponents," said Gibbons. "Unless Congress acts now, they will get away with it."
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Lula Teams With Bad Bunny to Highlight Dangers of Trump’s Colonial Ambitions Across Latin America
"Brazil has only one owner: The Brazilian people," said Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
Sep 25, 2026
The campaign of Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva released new advertisements this week that sounded alarms about the threat posed by US President Donald Trump to the country's sovereignty and resources.
One ad, released on Tuesday, features a Portuguese version of Puerto Rican music star Bad Bunny's song "Lo Que Le Pasó a Hawaii," the lyrics of which decry the damage done by US imperialism throughout the Western Hemisphere.
The ad consists of a video montage highlighting Brazil's rich cultural, ethnic, and ecological diversity, and ends with Lula saying, "Brazil has only one owner: The Brazilian people."
Do Latim, Silva é a própria selva: a raiz que brota do solo, o verde que resiste e a força viva da terra.
Durante séculos quiseram diminuir a nossa gente, mas foi na garra, no suor e na dignidade que cada Silva construiu este país.
A nossa força não se curva, a nossa bandeira… pic.twitter.com/iwujl0ojq0
— Lula (@LulaOficial) September 23, 2026
"Lo Que Le Pasó a Hawaii" was one of the songs that Bad Bunny performed during his acclaimed Super Bowl halftime show in February, which some critics saw as a joyful rebuke to the colonialist vision for Latin America that Trump has embraced throughout his second term.
According to a report published Thursday in Correio Braziliense, Bad Bunny gave Lula's team permission to use his music in the campaign video.
Another ad, released on Thursday, is more explicit in its warnings about Trump's ambitions for Latin America.
Unlike the video released Tuesday, the later ad directly links the unpopular US president to far-right politician Flávio Bolsonaro, who has emerged as Lula’s top rival for the presidency in upcoming elections and is the son of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, still serving a criminal sentence for efforts to overthrow Lula's government.
"Flávio Bolsonaro is Trump's candidate," says that ad's narrator. "And what Trump wants is to colonize Brazil, take our wealth, steal our future, and leave us behind."
"Flávio Bolsonaro," the narrator concludes, "is playing against the Brazilian people."
Flávio Bolsonaro é o candidato do Trump.
Quer entregar o nosso país e as nossas riquezas para os Estados Unidos.
Se depender dele, o Brasil vira colônia de novo.
Mas o Brasil só tem um dono: o povo brasileiro. pic.twitter.com/jOSJ83xcKb
— Lula (@LulaOficial) September 25, 2026
In a Thursday social media post, Lula said Bolsonaro “wants to deliver our country and our wealth to the United States,” adding that, if it were up to Bolsonaro, “Brazil will become a colony again.”
During a speech delivered at the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday, Lula called out efforts to treat Brazil as a colony, although he didn’t mention the US directly.
“Brazil is no one’s backyard,” the Brazilian president said at one point.
“We will not allow the enemies of democracy—internal or external—to attack the will of the people," he said. "Brazilian democracy belongs to the Brazilians.”
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Israel’s US-Backed Assault on Gaza Has Created the ‘World’s Most Severe Economic Crisis on Record’: UN
"We have moved from development blocked to development reversed," said the UN official behind a new report.
Sep 25, 2026
Israel’s US-backed military assault on Gaza has not only caused mass death and destruction; it has also created “the world’s most severe economic crisis on record,” according to Pedro Manuel Moreno, the acting secretary-general of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development.
Moreno presented a recent report at a press conference on Thursday showing that 92% of economic establishments in Gaza—including shops, factories, restaurants, and farms—have been damaged or destroyed since Israel launched its assault on the territory in October 2023 and reduced most of its infrastructure to rubble.
Less than 1.5% of cropland across the strip remained accessible and undamaged, while more than half of its hospitals and primary health clinics have been rendered nonfunctional.
Compared with 2022, Gaza’s main productive sectors have been almost entirely wiped out: Agricultural and industrial output were each down 94%, while construction was down 99% in 2025. With most of its economic capacity destroyed, unemployment in the exclave skyrocketed to 78% in 2025, while tremendous scarcity led prices to soar to 274% above 2022 levels.
Dropping to just 17% of its 2022 level, Gaza’s gross domestic product (GDP) per capita cratered to $212 in 2025, equivalent to about 58 cents per person per day.
"Productive capacity is wiped out while the entire population is displaced and condemned to multidimensional poverty," said UNCTAD's coordinator for assistance to the Palestinians, Mutasim Elagraa, who led work on the report. "By multidimensional poverty I mean not just income poverty; it's also a lack of proper shelter, a lack of access to basic services like health and education and sanitation."
"Before the onset of this crisis in October 2023, two out of three residents were poor," Elagraa continued. "Today, everyone in Gaza is multidimensionally poor."
These conditions have increased the territory's reliance on outside aid, which Israel has often blocked, leading UN experts and human rights organizations to accuse its leaders of using starvation and deprivation as "weapons of war."
The International Criminal Court has found reasonable grounds to believe that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—who gave a defiant speech denying Israel's responsibility for genocide at the UN General Assembly Thursday—bears criminal responsibility for the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare.
The report estimates that $71.5 billion will be needed for recovery and reconstruction, as well as $35.2 billion in physical infrastructure damage and $22.7 billion in economic and social losses.
"Restoring the collapsed health system, rebuilding destroyed education infrastructure and other public infrastructure will need to go together while restoring productive capacity, employment, functioning markets and the ability for businesses to operate," Moreno said. "Peace cannot be built on a collapsed economy."
Though the report emphasizes how Israel's bombardment has brought near-apocalyptic conditions upon the strip, it notes that Gaza's economic deprivation dates back decades before the Hamas-led attack in October 2023, which was the catalyst for the unprecedented assault.
It noted that 59 years of Israeli occupation of Palestine had severely stunted its economic growth, particularly as it tightened its blockade of Gaza in the last two decades.
Previous UNCTAD analyses have shown that between 2006, a year before Israel began its land, air, and sea blockade of Gaza, and 2022, Gaza's real GDP per capita fell by 37% while its productive economy, including agriculture and manufacturing, was hollowed out by Israel's restrictions on movement and imports. Even before 2023, nearly half of Gaza's workforce was unemployed, roughly two-thirds lived in poverty, and 80% depended on international aid.
“The central message of this report we are talking about today is that about six decades of occupation have hollowed out the Palestinian economy and de-developed it,” Elagraa said. “We have moved from development blocked to development reversed, and now decades of human development that has been achieved in Gaza has been wiped out."
"Although the intensity of destruction is far more in Gaza" than in the West Bank, he said, the report showed the "destruction" to be "a dramatic escalation of a pattern that dates back to 1967 with the onset of occupation."
"The report," he said, "maintains that history did not start in October 2023."
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'Never Fails to Disappoint': Fetterman Joins GOP to Keep Trump's Iran War Going
"This reckless war has cost American lives, innocent lives, tens of billions of dollars, and higher prices on nearly everything here at home. John and 49 Republican Senators voted in favor of all of that."
Sep 25, 2026
Democratic Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania was the lone Democrat on Thursday to help Republicans in the US Senate vote down a resolution to end the "illegal" war of choice launched against Iran by President Donald Trump earlier this year.
In the 49-50 vote, the Republican majority blocked the latest resolution calling for an end to the war. While four Republicans—Susan Collins of Maine, Alaska's Lisa Murkowski, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Thom Tillis of North Carolina—joined Democrats by voting in favor, Fetterman became the deciding vote.
Rep. Chris Deluzio (D-Pa.) was among those expressing frustration with Fetterman, a lawmaker who has become a thorn in the side of his party since taking office and taking a hard right with his pro-war positions, accommodations to Trump, and determined support for pro-Israeli policies.
"John Fetterman just cast the deciding vote to keep the Iran War raging," said Deluzio. "This reckless war has cost American lives, innocent lives, tens of billions of dollars, and higher prices on nearly everything here at home. John and 49 Republican Senators voted in favor of all of that."
"Fetterman never fails to disappoint," said Susan Wild, a former Democratic member of the US House from Pennsylvania.
The vote came on the same day that an advocacy group representing American citizens with Iranian heritage sued the Trump administration for usurping the powers of Congress when it launched an "unconstitutional" war against Iran—a military conflict that has lasted nearly 7 months with no end in sight, causing misery across the Middle East and economic pain worldwide, including in the United States.
Filed in the US District Court for the District of Columbia on Thursday, the lawsuit, filed on behalf of the National Iranian American Council Action (NIAC Action), asks the court to declare that President Donald Trump's unprovoked attack on Iran violates the Constitution’s Declare War Clause.
In a statement, NIAC Action said the suit was brought "on behalf of its members whose families have been injured, displaced, economically devastated and are in continuing mortal danger as a result of a war that was never lawfully authorized."
Launched on Feb. 28, the US attack, in coordination with the Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, was launched despite ongoing diplomatic efforts and active talks over US sanctions against Iran and questions about Iran's domestic nuclear program and its conventional missile capabilities. The war was initiated, according to the group,
without a declaration of war or other congressional authorization and that the war has continued, including repeated heavy bombardments and a naval blockade, despite this lack of authorization and the passage by both chambers of Congress of an explicit directive to terminate unauthorized hostilities against Iran.
“No President should have the power to take this country into an indefinite war by himself,” said NIAC Action president Jamal Abdi, in a statement. “Congress never authorized this war. Yet Iranian families are being bombed, American service members have been killed, and communities on both sides are being forced to bear the consequences. This lawsuit asks a fundamental question: can one person decide, on his own, to keep an entire nation at war?”
NIAC Action offered the example of one plaintiff, Nima Dilmaghani, whose cousin in Iran was injured when the company warehouse where she worked was bombed. Dilmaghani's cousin, the group explained, "suffered a broken leg, serious damage to their eardrums, and the loss of their index finger, which surgeons reattached but which has lost motion. Approximately ten of her coworkers were killed, and approximately ten more were injured. In a separate bombing, their apartment was destroyed while they were away at work. They are now working two jobs to survive." Other NIAC Action members have detailed similar stories.
Lawyers behind the lawsuit said that just because President Trump and other officials, including Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, have tried to argue that war against Iran is not a "war," that does not make it so.
“President Trump has spent months waging a war that Congress never authorized, while insisting that changing the terminology somehow changes the constitutional question,” said attorney Bruce Fein. “Calling a war a ‘military operation’ or an ‘excursion’ does not erase the Declare War Clause. The question before the Court is whether the President can continue these hostilities without the authorization the Constitution requires.”
While War Powers resolutions have been passed in the House to cease military operations in Iran, none of those have been binding on President Trump, and overall, Congress has stood aside in the face of what critics have described as criminal aggression and war crimes by Trump.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and other members of the Democratic Caucus in the US Senate, have continued to voice their opposition to Trump's war as poll after poll show that the US voting public—across the political spectrum—want the war, and the economic harm it has wrought—to end.
"The American people, overwhelmingly, want to end this horrific war in Iran," Sanders said after the failed vote. "Pathetically, today, nearly every Republican voted with Trump to keep the war going. When will Republicans represent their constituents and have the courage to oppose their mentally unstable leader?"
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