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This week, both Donald Trump and his Secretary of Housing and Urban Development told us that 50-year home mortgages may soon be a thing. While seemingly insane (you could end up paying more than three times the cost of the house and never escape the burden of debt before you die), this is just the latest iteration of one of American businesses’ most profitable scams: the rental economy.

It’s a growing threat to the American middle class that rarely gets named, even as it reshapes our lives every day. Over the past two decades, it’s snuck in quietly, disguised as convenience, efficiency, and “innovation.”

As a result, nothing is “ours” any more. Instead, we’re renting our lives away.

There was a time when you bought things.

You bought a house, a book, a record, a car, a word processing program. You paid once, took it home or lived in it, and it was yours. If the company went out of business, your stereo still worked. If the manufacturer didn’t get their annual payment, your computer didn’t lock you out of your own words. You could read books on your phone or pad without an internet connection to “confirm your purchase.”

That America is disappearing.

Today, almost everything that used to be a purchase has become a rental.

Take Microsoft Word. Decades ago, you bought it once and used it for years. Now it’s a monthly fee. Stop paying, and you may not even be able to open documents you wrote yourself. Adobe did the same thing. So did music, movies, and television. At first, it felt like convenience; a few dollars a month didn’t seem like a big deal.

Even the latest versions of the two major computer operating systems are essentially spyware, constantly tracking everything you do while demanding that you put all your personal information on their “cloud” servers.

Instead of buying homes, people are renting because, in part, massive New York hedge funds and foreign investors are purchasing as many as half of all the homes that come available for sale in some communities, and then flipping them into rentals. Renters can end up on the hook for their entire lives.

Even the means to get a good job — a college education — has become something you must pay for over a period of decades or even a lifetime instead of the pay-as-you-go model my generation had before Reagan gutted federal aid to higher ed. We now have almost $2 trillion in student debt — the only developed nation in the world that does this to its students — and I regularly get calls into my radio program from people in their 70s still paying off their student debt.

But this change was never really just about money. It has morphed over the past decades into a new form of corporate control over our lives and our wealth. It’s become a never-ending extraction of money and personal data from each of us, every month, every year, time after time, over and over again until we’re financially exhausted.

When you own something, you decide how it’s used. When you rent, someone else makes that choice. They can raise prices, change terms, remove features, track everything you do with it, or shut it off entirely. Your “choice” becomes compliance.

That same model has spread everywhere.

Cars used to be machines you owned. Now they’re rolling computers with features like heated seats, remote start, or performance upgrades locked behind monthly fees. Similarly, cars are increasingly leased instead of purchased. Miss your payment this month and the lender will remotely disable “your” vehicle. Your car doesn’t just take you places anymore: it reports on you.

Phones are even worse. They’re not just devices; they’re gatekeepers. Apps can be removed. Accounts can be banned. Services can disappear overnight. And because so much of modern life runs through that phone — banking, work, navigation, healthcare — being cut off isn’t an inconvenience. It’s a functional exclusion from society.

This extends from major things like our cars and homes to simple things like apps. Louise loves to play Scrabble on her phone, and would gladly pay a one-time fee for an app that doesn’t throw ads at her, track and sell her information, or demand constant interaction. Instead, since the old Scrabble app she’s used for years went to a rental model, she’s gone through a half-dozen apps, each worse than the last at demanding her interactions or throwing ads.

And to add insult to injury, layered on top of this rental business model is a vast, multi-billion-dollar industry harvesting our personal information.

Every website you visit. Every app you download. Every product you register just to make it work. Your location, habits, preferences, relationships, and even emotional responses are tracked, analyzed, packaged, and sold. Most often without meaningful consent, and almost always without real alternatives.

This is not how American capitalism worked for over 250 years.

The question business leaders used to ask was simple: “What unmet needs do people have that our company can satisfy with a new product or service?” You built something useful, people bought it, and that was the deal.
Today, the question has changed: “How do we make our product so essential that people can’t function without it, then crush or buy out our competitors so there’s no real consumer choice, then charge a monthly fee forever, all while extracting user data we can sell for even more profit?”

That’s not innovation. It’s parasitism.

In this model, the product is often just bait. The real commodity, the real profit center, the real source of unending corporate cash flow is you.

And because the billionaire “Tech Bros” and Wall Street oligarchs control the products, the data, and increasingly our nation’s news and social media, they also control the content and algorithms that shape public opinion.

As a result, social media and even our news (think CBS, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Fox “News”) increasingly doesn’t just reflect reality, they engineer it to get us to think of this new rental economy as normal, as innovative, as The Way Things Should Be.

In addition to profitably amplifying outrage, profitably distorting truth, and polishing the public image of this new rental economy — all to create billions in ongoing month-after-month profits — America’s billionaire tech lords and the right-wing politicians they bankroll (thanks to five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court) are manufacturing our consent (to apply Noam Chomsky’s phrase).

Thomas Jefferson warned that people are inclined to suffer evils while they are sufferable rather than abolish the forms to which they’ve grown accustomed. The billionaire Tech Bros and Wall Street are hoping we’ll all just roll over, sign up, and let them ding our credit cards until our dying day.

It’s gotten so bad that apps — which also acquire and then sell our data — have emerged that track our “subscriptions” so we can try to get it all under control. They’re advertising them on TV every day: get this app to find out what apps are secretly extracting your cash because you long ago forgot you clicked on that link.

None of this was inevitable.

The solution is not to smash technology or retreat into the past. It’s for government to once again work for the 99 percent instead of the 1 percent. That means once again regulating money in politics, private equity, social media, data harvesting, and the out-of-control rental economy that has replaced ownership.

It means breaking monopolies, restoring regulatory independence, making education affordable, supporting home and car ownership, and reaffirming that democracy — not billionaires — sets the rules of the road.

Technology should serve human freedom, not manage it. Markets should reward service and quality of content, not extraction. People should be able to choose to pay or not to pay for things from apps to the functionality of your car or home’s HVAC system.

Nothing is ours any more. Not the road, not the floor. If everything we touch is leased, freedom is just another fee.

If we don’t act to regulate this out-of-control rental economy, we may one day realize we didn’t lose our wealth and even our democracy all at once: we simply rented our way out of it.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is a mass-murderer and an enemy of the United States of America.

United States President Donald J. Trump has repeatedly appeased Putin, and is an enemy of the United States of America.

That’s today’s column, and thank you for reading ...

Honestly, folks, I hoped to treat myself to a quiet holiday week, but simply must address the latest diabolical Putin-Trump phony attempt at a “peace deal” in Ukraine with some considerable urgency.

I also cannot look away from how this alleged “peace deal” is being reported by what’s left of our stinking garbage can of a legacy media, which is either complicit with Trump and Putin, or incredibly inept at journalism — but most likely both.

Once again, we are all being played for fools by these two dangerous skunks, whose lies echo freely in the vast, empty spaces of these major, bought-off media empires without challenge or context.

I have had more than enough of all of them.

So let’s get right down to it: Aided by a comatose American electorate in which only 59 percent of its voters bothered to show at the polls, Russia worked feverishly to install Trump as president in 2016.

Trump’s Campaign Chairman Paul Manafort was actually passing internal campaign information to Russian intelligence officers during the election.

Go ahead: Read that again.

Trump himself asked for Russia’s help to hack Hillary Clinton’s email on the campaign trail, saying: “Russia, if you’re listening … I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”

Prescient, eh?

For what it’s worth Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan’s office condemned this public treason by saying in part, “Russia is a global menace led by a devious thug. Putin should stay out of this election.”

I add this because there actually was a time when some Republicans frowned on murdering fascists taking power, instead of courting them.

Look, Trump never even sniffs power without Putin’s help.

And hey, if you think I am typing just a little too fast and loose here to get back to my vacation, then I urge you to have a look at the infamous Mueller Report, which concluded among other damning things, that Russian interference in the 2016 election was “sweeping and systemic.” The report “identified numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump Campaign.”

Read that way, it’s a wonder Trump wasn’t removed from office and jailed on the spot, except Trump’s slimy personal lawyer, er, attorney general, Bill Barr, came to his own conclusions, which most of the media at the time were only too happy to lap up, spit out, and call good.

The Mueller Report was a complete mindblower, and after reading it, if anybody still willingly believes that Trump wasn’t aware of Moscow’s illegal interventions on his behalf, shouldn’t be trusted to dress themselves in the morning.

Then there’s the Republican-led Senate intelligence committee report in 2020 which concluded “the Trump campaign's interactions with Russian intelligence services during the 2016 presidential election posed a grave counterintelligence threat.”

Oh, and that committee’s chair? Well, that would be a guy named Marco Rubio, who lately has lowered himself to a level equal to the proximity of Trump’s ample ass.

You can’t make this up, because it’s all true, but has all but been conveniently forgotten by our ridiculous legacy media, whose reporting on Trump consistently includes little to no context for his myriad past offenses.

Here we go again, only this time it appears to be the Working Families Party that’s fixing to help elect Republicans. They’re proudly proclaiming that by the 2028 presidential election they hope to have candidates on the ballot in 18 states. The party’s national director, rapper/musician Maurice “Moe” Mitchell, told the Guardian:

“Less and less (sic) people are identifying as being a Democrat or Republican. The brand of the Democratic and the Republican parties are underwater consistently. I don’t think there’s been a better and more right time for a third party to emerge in this country that speaks to the interest of everyday working people. I believe that our time has come.”

You’d think by now we would have learned that having progressives seize control of the Democratic Party is a hell of a lot more successful strategy for rebuilding our democracy and our middle class than running against it. In Florida in 2000, for example, Ralph Nader on the Green Party’s ticket got 97,488 votes, while George W. Bush “won” Florida — and thus the White House — by 537 votes.

It strains credulity to assert that the majority of Nader’s voters would have either voted for Bush or not voted at all, which is why when David Cobb ran for president on the Green Party ticket in 2004, he explicitly told people in swing states like Florida not to vote for him but to cast their ballots for the Democratic candidate John Kerry instead.

Vanity candidate Jill Stein had no such moral compunction with her Green Party candidacy in 2016. Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin provided Trump’s margin of victory in the Electoral College over Hillary Clinton that year, and, in each of those states, Stein pulled more votes than Trump’s margin.

(In Michigan she got 51,463 votes and Trump won by 10,704; in Pennsylvania she won 49,678 versus Trump’s margin of 46,765; and in Wisconsin Stein carried 31,006 votes but Trump only won by 22,177.)

In other words, had progressives not voted for Ralph Nader in Florida in 2000, Al Gore would have become president, and we never would have been lied into two illegal wars, given trillions in tax breaks to billionaires, or gotten John Roberts and Sam Alito on the Supreme Court.

Had progressives in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin not voted for Jill Stein in 2016, Hillary Clinton would have become president and America would have been spared the trauma of 500,000 unnecessary Covid deaths; Barrett, Kavanaugh, and Gorsuch on the Court; another $5 trillion in tax breaks for billionaires; and the ongoing DOGE assault to our democracy.

America would be a very, very different country with a progressive Supreme Court and an expansion, rather than the destruction, of New Deal and Great Society programs that built and sustained the middle class. In other words, ironically, we’d be a lot closer to the goals of the Green Party today if they’d never run a presidential candidate in those elections.

This is not to say the Democratic Party is perfect. Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin is now hiding an autopsy of the 2024 election, there are still on-the-take Democrats in the neoliberal Problem Solvers’ Caucus and taking piles of cash from AIPAC and corporate PACs, and in many states genuine progressives in the mold of FDR and LBJ are still viewed by the party’s bosses with a jaundiced eye.

But America — with our 250-year-old operating system — is one of only a handful of democracies worldwide with first-past-the-post (FPTP) winner-take-all election systems, which pretty much force a nation into a two-party system. Under those circumstances, a third party will always pull votes (and, thus, victories) away from the main party it’s most closely aligned with philosophically.

This is why Republican donors have historically been so enthusiastic about supporting the Green Party and Democratic donors occasionally pitch in for the Libertarians.

Reporting from AP, CBS, and others document a broad 2024 GOP-linked network that helped Stein and Cornel West with ballot access and legal support in swing states including Wisconsin, Nevada, New Hampshire, Georgia, North Carolina, Michigan and others, often using Republican-aligned lawyers and consultants who have also worked for Donald Trump or state GOP organizations.

In 2016, so many Republican donors and politicians had helped fund Stein’s effort that the federal election commission forced her to return a fraction of it, almost a quarter-million dollars.

Most likely they’re now courting the Working Families Party, following Zohran Mamdani’s spectacular win running on both the Democratic and Working Families tickets in New York (Mamdani voted for himself on the Working Families ballot.)

But while the synergy of Working Families and Democrats worked in New York, that was only because it’s one of a tiny handful of states (including Oregon, Mississippi, Connecticut, and Vermont) that has fusion voting or its equivalent, allowing a single candidate to appear on the ballot under multiple parties.

Whether New Yorkers voted for Mamdani on the Democratic ticket or the line for the Working Families Party, the result was the same: a vote for Mamdani.

Anywhere else in the country, though, it would have been a vote drawn away from the Democratic Party because when the Founders put our system of voting together our form of democracy was a new thing. Voting was a novel experiment, by and large, after Europe had been ruled for almost two millennia by kings and queens.

It wasn’t until the year the Civil War started, 1861, that British philosopher John Stuart Mill published a how-to manual for multi-party “parliamentary democracies” in his book Considerations On Representative Government.

It was so widely distributed and read that nearly all of the world’s democracies today — every one of them countries that became a democracy after the late 1860s — use variations on Mill’s proportional representation parliamentary system.

In Mill’s system, if a political party gets, say, 12 percent of the vote then they also get 12 percent of the seats in that country’s congress or parliament. A party that pulls 34 percent of the vote gets 34 percent of the seats, and so on.

The result is a plethora of parties representing a broad range of perspectives and priorities, all able to participate in the daily governance of their nation. Nobody gets shut out.

Governing becomes an exercise in coalition building, and nobody is excluded. If you want to get something done politically, you have to pull together a coalition of parties to agree with your policy.

Most European countries, for example, have political parties represented in their parliaments that range from the far left to the extreme right, with many across the spectrum of the middle. There’s even room for single issue parties; for example, several in Europe focus almost exclusively on the environment or immigration.

The result is typically an honest and wide-ranging discussion across society about the topics of the day, rather than a stilted debate among only two parties.

It’s how the Greens became part of today’s governing coalition in Germany, for example, and are able to influence the energy future of that nation. And because of that political diversity in the debates, the decisions made tend to be reasonably progressive: look at the politics and lifestyles in most European nations.

In our system, though, if a party gets 12 percent of the vote — or anything short of 50 percent plus one — they get nothing. Whoever gets 50-percent-plus-one wins everything and everybody else gets nothing, which is why we always end up with two parties battling for the higher end of that 50/50 teeter-totter.

Australia and New Zealand have diminished the damage third parties can do to the main, established parties, by using a voting system called ranked choice voting. In a system like that I could have voted for Nader as my first choice in 2000, with Gore as my second choice. When it becomes apparent that Nader isn’t going to make it, my first choice is discarded by the system and my vote for Gore becomes the one that gets counted.

Over 300 communities in America are now using ranked choice voting (including my hometown of Portland, Oregon) and it works great. Moving from FPTP to proportional representation at the federal level would require amending the Constitution, though, so that’s not going to happen any day soon: ranked choice voting is a nearly-as-good alternative.

At the national level, though, the best way to solve the problem of some Democratic politicians not being as progressive as we’d like is to get active by joining the Democratic Party and becoming a force for positive change within it. To stand up for public office and actually elect more progressives to office, something that can only be done within the Democratic Party.

To not “throw away your vote,” but to help rebuild the party that brought America Social Security, the minimum wage, the right to unionize, Medicare, Medicaid, free college, regulatory agencies that defend and protect the environment and working class people, support for people in poverty, the end of legal apartheid, and that built the world’s first real middle class.

Yes, there are corrupt and bought-off politicians within the Democratic Party. Ever since five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court fully legalized political bribery with their Citizens United decision and its predecessors, there have been more than a few Democrats who have enthusiastically put their hands out. The most obvious and cynical ones call themselves corporate “Problem Solvers” or, to a lesser extent, the neoliberal “New Democrats.”

But voting for a third-party candidate and thus handing elections to Republicans won’t solve that problem: if anything it will make it worse, because the entire GOP has committed itself to being on the take and, as we saw with Nader and Stein, third-party candidacies often simply hand more power to the GOP.

Try to find, for example, even one Republican who isn’t benefiting from the billions in oil dollars that have flowed through the Koch network over the years and is thus willing to do something about climate change. Republican governance and their fealty to the fossil fuel industry is literally destroying our planet.

This is why real progressives like Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Ro Khanna, Mark Pocan, Zohran Mamdani, and Pramila Jayapal stay and work within the Democratic Party. For progressives to take over the country, they know we must first take over the DNC. (Yes, Bernie is an independent and Zohran prefers the Working Families party, but both ran as Democrats.)

In other words, every one of us should be working to get inside the Democratic Party and take it over! It’s what hard-core conservatives did with the GOP over the past 20 years, starting with the Tea Party and the MAGA movements, and it’s what progressives must do today with the Democratic Party.

No third-party candidate has ever won the White House, and none ever will until we have nationwide ranked choice voting. And this is not a small or incidental issue: the stakes for 2028 may well include the continued survival of America as a democratic republic.

So, the next time somebody tells you how they’re going to only vote for “the best candidate,” you may want to give them this little Civics 101 lesson, along with the phone number, website, or email address for their local Democratic Party. And get behind the movement to bring ranked choice voting to national elections.

And, hopefully, the Working Families Party folks will turn down all the Republican money that will be dangled in front of them and choose not to run candidates in places where there isn’t either fusion voting or instant runoff voting.

We can’t afford any more George W. Bush’s or Donald Trump’s, who were both brought to us, in part, by Democratic-leaning voters thinking they were doing the right thing by voting for third party candidates.

Marjorie Taylor Greene has been blessed with a profile in the Times magazine. The headline – “‘I Was Just So Naïve’: Inside Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Break With Trump” – gives the impression that the Georgia congresswoman and maga zealot has seen the error of her ways.

Details from the interview appear to deepen that perception. When Greene threatened to go public with the names of men implicated in “the Epstein files,” the president reportedly told her on speaker phone that she can’t, because, according to Greene, “my friends will get hurt.”

I don’t know why a man who will throw anyone under the bus would protect anyone but himself. But I do know bad faith can take many forms. If anyone is a master of bad faith, it’s Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Greene spread the lie that the 2020 election was stolen. She defended the J6 insurrection. She suggested support for executing Democrats. She once stalked a survivor of a shooting massacre to accuse him of being a fraud. Am I supposed to believe she’s had a change of heart?

Still, her break from Donald Trump is politically significant. It suggests that his hold on the Republican Party has limits. It also suggests that true believers are thinking about and preparing for a future without him. (She is resigning next month but appears to be positioning herself nonetheless.) Maga might die or evolve into something new. Either way is an opportunity for the Democrats and liberal reformers generally.

I don’t think Greene is key to reviving the liberal tradition in America, as The Bulwark’s Jonathan V Last suggested, but I do think, as he does, that she will play some kind of role in getting the Republicans to behave. Greene embodies maga’s id. She appears to feel betrayed. If those feelings are real, and can be turned against the GOP, so be it.

In this second of a two-part interview with me, political historian Claire Potter, publisher of Political Junkie, touches on the meaning and importance of Marjorie Taylor Greene’s “naivete,” the unlikelihood of accountability for Trump, and why the reaction to “the Epstein files” is more likely a reaction to authoritarians who fail to deliver on promises.

“The multiple fumbles and lies about the Epstein files have given some Republicans a valid reason to declare their independence,” Claire told me. “Creating air between themselves and Trump will be critical to any Republican who wants a political career once maga starts to swirl the drain next year. We are seeing tremendous swings in districts Trump won in double digits, and that it is the Republicans’ failure to deliver that will, in the end, lead to their defeat, not just in 2026, but in 2028.”

What do you make of recent news about Greene? Principled pariah or craven opportunist? What's the right reaction from Democrats?

I think Greene is using the word "naive" not in the usual sense of a person being innocent and expecting the best of others, but in the sense that she had no idea about what being a politician required and that her devotion to Trump, which initially served her, turned out to be wildly misplaced. Back in 2020, a New Yorker profile described Greene as a kind of seeker who reincarnated herself periodically: as a wife and mother, as a businesswoman, as a QAnon devotee, as a charismatic Christian, and finally, as a maga true believer.

Remember, she ran for Congress having zero background as a politician, but a quite successful career in the construction industry – not unlike Trump. She inherited a family business, she did well with it, and then pivoted out of her marriage and into the CrossFit community, which she was also very successful at, both as a participant and as an entrepreneur. She had enough money to self-fund her own campaign, and once elected, realized that her media talents were ideally suited to the political world Donald Trump had made.

I think conspiracy theorists are idealists in a way. They see a world they don't like, and they want to know, specifically, who is responsible for it. In maga world, that can be Jews, pedophiles, trans people, the deep state or Nancy Pelosi, but the perpetrators of injustice are real, and they walk the earth.

I think Greene saw going to Washington as a way to be a warrior, to get to the bottom of things in the second Trump administration. What she didn't understand – and this is where the naivete comes in, I think – was that politics is a profession, she didn't know how to do it, and that only Trump can get away with pretending he knows how to do a job.

To the extent that Greene's Republican colleagues were willing to draft on her outrageousness and fundraising ability, which should have been a route to influence in Congress, she understood by the end of her first term that there was a Trumpian front stage and a more conventional backstage where Republicans who said they were maga functioned more or less conventionally. Trump was not only out of office, but disgraced, in 2021. Most elected Republicans did not see a way back for him after January 6, and were eager to move on. Greene acted as though the rudeness and brashness of maga could just continue, and her own party collaborated in putting her on the shelf for her whole first term.

There's an old saw about Trump: take him seriously, but not literally. Greene took Trump's language about loyalty both seriously and literally. She believed that his vows to release the Epstein files and get to the bottom of the conspiracy to protect Epstein were real, and she believed that he cared viscerally about white working people. Neither of these things were true, and combined with the lack of respect from her colleagues, and MIke Johnson stonewalling legislation, I think Greene began to see politics as a pointless and cynical exercise.

Andrew Tate, who has been accused child-sex crimes and is a leading figure in the so-called manosphere, was shamed in the boxing ring recently. An amateur beat and bloodied him. The Trump regime saved him from prosecution. Is public humiliation all the justice we can expect when criminals like Tate have powerful allies?

Let me start by saying that it was a real joy to see someone beat the c--- out of that monster of a man, and as I understand it, Tate and his brother are still facing charges in England. The Tates are also an interesting case, because as I understand it their real friends in the White House are Don Jr and Barron Trump, and that the pardon really jolted Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, whose horrible traits do not happen to include sex crimes and battering women.

And while it is easy to imagine people like Doug Burgham and Marco Rubio simply turning away from this kind of thing while Trump is president, I don’t think they will forever. Here, I think, we will see another rift widening up in the Republican Party, one that intersects with the revulsion many in the maga movement have harbored for Bill Clinton for 35 years, and more recently, for Jeffrey Epstein. You don’t have to be a QAnon adherent to see the rot in the party when it comes to gross male sexual behavior.

But I get your point. It seems almost impossible to imagine accounting for this period in our nation’s history — the crimes against immigrants, women, trans people and the poor, to name a few — without a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Forget that our justice system is not functioning to rein in gross malfeasance, and that it seems designed to permit endless appeals and deferrals even when it does work.

It’s hard to imagine bringing Donald Trump, and the network of people activated by Donald Trump, to justice without bringing the rest of the government to a complete stop. It makes me understand why other countries just put their dictators on a plane to some warm, neutral country and tell them to just keep the money.

Perhaps no one pushed the story of "the Epstein files" as hard as former Trump advisor Steve Bannon. Now that he has been exposed as one of Epstein's pals, will it make a difference to followers?

Well, one of my favorite comments on Epstein was when Dan Bongino was asked why he took completely different positions on Epstein as a podcaster and as a top FBI official, he answered — as if it was perfectly obvious — that these were two different jobs with two different realities. I could practically hear J Edgar Hoover spinning in his grave.

I think on some level, except for the very hardcore conspiracy types, maga people know the whole system is a fraud. Think of all the people who go to Disney World over and over again because it fulfills a fantasy about returning to childhood. They see someone in a Snow White suit who is in reality about to vomit from the heat and treat that person as if she is really Snow White.

Similarly, I suspect that Steve Bannon is not a real person to most maga adherents, and neither is Donald Trump. Bannon and Trump are characters in an entertainment called “politics,” and like reality shows or multiplayer games, the story evolves to accommodate contradictions. I would predict that if you follow the right subreddits, or Gab threads, you will see people promoting theories that Bannon was there spying on Epstein, or that he was sent by Q to rescue the girls, or whatever.

Honestly, I think none of this matters to actual voters in the end, although I do think the multiple fumbles and lies about the Epstein files have given some Republicans a valid reason to declare their independence. Creating air between themselves and Trump will be critical to any Republican who wants a political career once maga starts to swirl the drain next year. We are seeing tremendous swings in districts Trump won in double digits, and that it is the Republicans’ failure to deliver that will, in the end, lead to their defeat, not just in 2026, but in 2028. And Trump’s people — including Bannon — will have gotten what they wanted all along: to fleece the American public.

On Dec. 22, 1944, on a brutally cold and snowy battlefield in Bastogne, Belgium, Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe's rough-and-ready 101st Airborne Division was surrounded and outnumbered by German armor units, which had literally come out of nowhere.

The fighting had been bloody and intense, and the Germans, sensing victory, made a final push to prevail in World War II. Before hitting the Americans with everything they had, the German command sent a message to McAuliffe, demanding he surrender his army.

McAuliffe snatched the missive, and then typed one of his own: “NUTS!”

When the Germans asked what “NUTS!” meant, an American officer clarified, “In plain English,” he snarled, “It means, ‘Go to hell!’”

Buoyed by the defiant McAuliffe the Americans went on to prevail in what would be known as the Battle of the Bulge and turned the momentum of the war in the European theater in the allies’ favor …

For the past 340-plus days, the sick and depraved Donald Trump’s fascist, bigoted, lawless regime has thrown everything they’ve got at a country and people they provably hate, by dint of their consistently repulsive actions that hit a boiling point on January 6, 2021, and have been on full simmer since.

• They have moved to poison our air and water, and battered our government and our White House.
• They have stained our armed forces by pitting them against American citizens, and demanded they follow illegal orders by carrying out murder on the high seas.
• They have banned books and tried to bastardize our checkered history and those hard truths they hate most of all.
• They have wrecked our healthcare system, attacked clean energy, and degraded science and vaccines that have saved millions and millions of lives.
• They have coddled fascists, and taken a hammer to allies that have stood with us and people like General McAuliffe for eight decades.
• They have propped up soulless, greedy billionaires, and covered for pedophiles.
• They have pardoned thousands of crooks for cash, and gone after judges.
• And those prices they promised to bring down? Well, they’ve only gone up thanks to Trump’s idiotic tariffs.

The past 340-plus days have been a bombardment of the senses, and an attack on human rights and just plain decency.

And it has all been by evil design.

Because Donald Trump, and Stephen Miller, and JD Vance, and Elon Musk, and the rest of the grotesque Republicans that spin out of control in their evil orbit want you to feel like America’s defeat is inevitable.

The repulsive and sickly Trump is doing everything he can to step on our necks with those fat little feet which are swallowed up by inner tubes for ankles. He’s a garbage-mouthed, lying lout, who can only find true pleasure in administering the pain that has lived inside him his entire stinking, miserable life.

Well, here’s what I say to that:

NUTS!

We’re still here, and by God we’ve more than proven we can give as good as we get.

Because buried in the rubble and amid all that the smoke, Democrats have been winning elections at an astonishing clip, and if 2026 looks anything like 2025, Republicans are heading for a bloodbath in the coming months.

And they damn well know it.

The failing Trump is in deep trouble, and as we swing hard toward the midterms, his subservient cowards in Congress will have a choice to make: Stay with the man who is trying to end us and them, or run to the Left toward freedom and programs and initiatives that lift all of us up.

Or … there’s a third option: They can just flat surrender.

Already, there have been a record amount of retirements in the House and Senate and as Republicans made the choice to cut and run away from their deeply, deeply unpopular president and toward the safety of their homes.

Here’s a fact: If the midterms were held this Tuesday, Republicans would lose the House by 40 to 60 seats, as well as the Senate. Big races, small races, and medium races would swing toward the left, because that is exactly what has been quietly happening among the carnage of Trump’s continued attack on America.

Major races that were supposed to be nail-biters in places like New Jersey and Wisconsin went to the Democrats by double-digits. Democrat Abigail Spanberger absolutely demolished her opponent in Virginia’s governor race.

In fact, the last time the Central Virginia town of Waynesboro voted for a Democratic presidential nominee, Lyndon Johnson led the ticket in 1964.

This makes it a Republican stronghold.

Well, last month, Democrats swept to victory in every race on that town’s ballot, including the governor’s race, when Spanberger became the first Democrat to ever win the majority in Waynesboro.

That’s change we can believe in, good people.

And there are hundreds of examples like Waynesboro all over the map.

Republicans can’t point to ONE election that they over-performed in this year — NOT ONE — while that is all Democrats have been doing.

Republicans are scared, folks, and it’s about damn time we shook off our doubts and started carrying ourselves as winners. Winning begets winning. It’s OK to walk with a swagger just as long as you are prepared to keep going hard on your way to the finish line.

Who here isn’t prepared to do that????

And let me get this out of the way because my ears are already burning: You are saying what happens if Trump somehow rigs the elections, and calls a national emergency or some damn thing to throttle our vote? Then what, Earl?

If these things were to come to pass, and I don’t believe they will, what does that change exactly?

Are you just going to take your toys and go home and cry? Are you just going let him do it, and whine about things not being fair?

Or are you going to show some damn resolve and keep doing whatever is necessary to protect your country and her people?

Here’s something I hope you consider most of all today:

Trump isn’t even close to as powerful as he wants you to think he is, and you are far, far more powerful than you think you are.

Please read that again, dammit.

I am no Pollyanna, and demand as much from our leaders as I do myself. In fact, I’ve caught a lot of guff for going after Democrats like Chuck Schumer from time to time for their half-a----- efforts in the face of fascism.

After last year’s terrible election I thought too damn many Democrats were taking that beating lying down, and man, it made me furious. Turns out there were a lot of people like me …

I saw them by the thousands at all those rallies. I see them by the thousands in this space every day. We aren’t standing up for Democrats as much as we are standing up for America, and against the fascist Trump.

We want fighters.

Dammit you know me, and I know you, and NONE of us are quitting. That’s tens of thousands of us right here alone standing up for what’s good and right. And if everyone of us plants the seeds of democracy and does the necessary work in the field, thousands and thousands more will rise up and join us in this epic battle.

WE are leading the change and the charge.

And we will win.

I swear to God we will.

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.

As long as there was a Democrat in the White House, the rightwing media complex, which is global in scale, had something solid to push up against, allowing internal divisions to fade into the background.

Now that Joe Biden is gone, however, and now that his successor is slipping further into incompetence and incoherence, the maga media unity that vaulted Donald Trump to power seems to be coming apart.

The cracks looked especially apparent during the last gathering of Turning Point USA, the hate group co-founded by the late Charlie Kirk.

Ben Shapiro accused Tucker Carlson of befriending antisemites, like Nick Fuentes. Candace Owens had implied that Israel assassinated Kirk. JD Vance called for unity, saying that “in the United States of America, you don't have to apologize for being white anymore." (To be clear, not one American has been forced to apologize for being white.)

Such fractures, however, were always evident, according to political historian Claire Potter, publisher of Political Junkie. “There has always been a broad streak of antisemitism in the maga movement and, at the same time, strong support for Israel among rightwing Christians like Mike Huckabee and Jewish media figures like Ben Shapiro,” she said.

Claire told me that this combination has meant the maga coalition was inherently unstable from the start. Kirk’s murder didn’t reveal cracks so much as “create a new focus for antisemitic conspiracy theories.”

If it’s true that rightwing media personalities are cannibalizing themselves, what does that say about the future of maga? Can it outlive Trump? Is JD Vance the heir apparent? Will the GOP quit pretending to believe in equality and openly embrace fascism?

In this first of a two-part interview, Claire explains that the GOP will probably evolve into something that echoes maga without actually being maga. As for the vice president, however, there is no future.

“He has real deficits, in the sense that he is interracially married, he has no charisma or stage presence, and he projects very little authority,” Claire said. “Also, frankly, he just isn’t mean enough.”

The murder of demagogue Charlie Kirk appears to have divided maga media personalities. Do you think it's an opportunity for Donald Trump's opponents or is it just squabbling among siblings?

I would start by pointing out that these siblings were always an uneasy coalition. There has always been a broad streak of antisemitism in the maga movement and, at the same time, strong support for Israel among rightwing Christians like Mike Huckabee and Jewish media figures like Ben Shapiro. Recall, for example, that Candace Owens has always trafficked in antisemitic conspiracies, and that hostilities came to a head in 2024, as she and Shapiro clashed over the October 7 attacks on Israel launched from Gaza.

That resulted in Owens being fired by Shapiro’s Daily Wire, but it long predated Trump’s return to the White House or Charlie Kirk’s death. What Kirk’s murder did was create a new focus for antisemitic conspiracy theories: Owens, Milo Yiannopoulos, and others have floated false theories about Israel’s involvement with Kirk’s death, for example, while Tucker Carlson and groyper Nick Fuentes (who any number of people thought might really have been involved with the assassination) jumped into that space for their own clicks.

And now, the president of the Heritage Foundation’s support for Carlson – and refusal to condemn Fuentes – has sent prominent conservatives running off to Mike Pence’s project. So, while Kirk’s murder may have been the tipping point, these fractures were there already.

I also think that Charlie Kirk was probably more broadly liked in retrospect than he was during his lifetime. I knew several maga influencers who saw him as an opportunist, someone who was suddenly sucking down millions in donations that had previously gone elsewhere. Once the narrative of Saint Charlie was established however, you didn’t hear those criticisms.

What will be interesting to see is whether Erika Kirk’s power play in expanding the organization’s presence, particularly in Texas and Florida high schools, creates a possibility for a maga future without Trump, QAnon, and the fringier elements of the coalition — something more corporate, along the lines of the Campus Crusade for Christ or Young Americans for Freedom.

Vice President JD Vance seems to be positioning himself for a post-Trump future as heir to the maga movement. Is there a maga movement without Trump and if so, does Vance have the juice?

No, JD Vance will not be the next president. He has real deficits, in the sense that he is interracially married, he has no charisma or stage presence, and he projects very little authority. Also, frankly, he just isn’t mean enough. He tries to be mean on X, but just ends up sounding like a cluck, whereas Trump’s cruel and incoherent ravings have a kind of weird charm for the maga faithful.

I also think Vance is a terrible campaigner and a mediocre fundraiser, and working for Trump will not have made him more than marginally better at these things. He barely won the primary for his Senate seat, and only because Trump jumped in and pushed him over the top and Peter Thiel gave him millions of dollars.

But I don’t think there is a maga movement without Trump. It will be something else, something that bears a relationship to it, much as many of the rightwing or explicitly fascist parties in Europe have evolved out of the fascisms of the interwar period, coyly gesture to that history but also disown it. AfP, for example, bears a strong resemblance to Nazism, but of course, since Nazism is illegal in Germany, it has to gesture at it rather than be explicit about its genealogy. Georgia Meloni, the prime minister of Italy, was steeped in Italian postwar fascism. She is a fascist and she governs as a fascist, even though her party is euphemistically called the Brothers of Italy.

There’s another problem. Like all fascisms, maga is a nostalgic movement, imagining a nation that strayed from an “original” America that was white, virtuous and Christian. This produces two problems. One is the profound unease many magas have with the fact that JD Vance is married to a brown daughter of immigrants and that he has mixed-race children. The many photos of Vance embracing Erika Kirk, who I think is going to have real problems hanging on to the very male-centered TPUSA, have anointed her as a potential “office wife.”

But the second problem is that Trump’s nostalgia, when translated into economic policies, is driving the nation into debt at an accelerated pace, at the same time as he is cutting as many Americans loose from the social safety net as he can. This is going to drive the United States into a social crisis that the Republican Party will not survive in its current form. It’s why we see so many GOP office holders streaming for the exits. It’s not just the 2026 midterms: it’s that they understand that there is no Vance presidency in 2028 — nor a Rubio, DeSantis or Abbott presidency.

The rightwing media complex is vast and powerful. And it's getting bigger. Can you imagine a future in which Republicans shed all pretense to equality and outwardly embrace bigotry?

I think those tendencies were there from the beginning. Part of what is so startling about the maga movement is the reemergence of a variety of bigoted, authoritarian tendencies in American politics that for the first half of the 20th century expressed themselves in the Democratic Party as the Klan, the Anti-Immigration League and White Citizens Councils, and in the Republican Party as America First, McCarthyism, and conservative Catholicism. All of these tendencies had fused in the New Right by the 1970s — a movement that looks shockingly tolerant from our perspective, but it really wasn’t. It was just more polite. And those tendencies survived, not just in politics, but among ordinary Americans. People don’t start hanging Confederate flags in their 60s.

But it wasn’t until rightwing media — whether Fox or YouTube or major publishing houses marketing rightwing books — that these views go mainstream. Remember that the Tea Party was born, not just as a racist reaction to Obama that was willing to express itself in explicitly racist language, but as a movement designed to take over the GOP. Tea Partiers weren’t fringe — they understood themselves as “real” Americans, as opposed to the guy with the funny name born in Hawaii.

And that’s where the idea that America has been usurped really goes mainstream on the right. If you look at Ann Coulter’s 2015 book, ¡Adios, America! The Left's Plan to Turn Our Country Into a Third World Hellhole, it’s all there. And remember that she breaks with Trump because he didn’t carry out the deportation agenda he promised, didn’t build the wall, didn’t eliminate birthright citizenship. If you listen to Coulter today, she says: “This is the President I voted for.”

The Washington Post published an article this week titled A Middle-Class Family’s Only Option: A $43,000 Health Insurance Premium about how the GOP’s refusal to extend ACA/Obamacare subsidies means that Stacy Newton’s family in Jackson Hole, Wyoming will have to pay $43,000 a year for health insurance if they want to stay covered.

If, however, the United States had an extra trillion dollars a year — the amount we’re now spending every year on interest payments against the GOP’s $38 trillion national debt — the Newtons would only pay a few hundred dollars a month and we could also have Universal Childcare & Pre-K, Paid Family & Medical Leave, Tuition-Free College, Affordable Housing & No More Homelessness, End Child Poverty & Hunger, and, as mentioned, Affordable Healthcare for all Americans.

Which raises the question: where did our $38 trillion dollar national debt — that’s costing us $1 trillion a year in interest — come from? After all, when Ronald Reagan came into office in 1981 we’d been paying down the debt from WWI and WWII to the point where the entire national debt was only $800 billion (less than $1 trillion).

So, where the hell did all this debt come from? Turns out, you could call it a conspiracy: there’s an amazing backstory to our national debt with the unique name “Two Santas.”

This conspiracy/strategy was developed by a Republican strategist named Jude Wanniski back in the 1970s, and he quite literally transformed America and the GOP with it.

Here’s how it works, laid it out in simple summary:

The Two Santas strategy dictates that when Republicans control the White House they must spend money like a drunken Santa and massively cut taxes on the rich, all to intentionally run up the US debt as far and as fast as possible.

They started this during the Reagan presidency when he dropped the top income tax rate on the morbidly rich from 74 percent down to 28 percent, and the GOP tripled down on it with four subsequent massive tax cuts for the rich during the presidencies of Bush, Trump I, and Trump II.

Massive tax cuts for the rich and uncontrolled spending during those four Republican presidencies produced three results:

1. They stimulated the economy with a sort of sugar high, making people think that the GOP can produce a good economy;
2. They raised the national debt dramatically (it’s at $38 trillion today, 100 percent of which tracks back to Reagan’s, Bush Jr.’s, and Trump’s massive tax cuts and Bush’s two illegal $5 trillion off-the-books wars);
3. They produced trillions in additional wealth for the richest families in America, who returned the favor by recycling billions into the campaign coffers of Republican candidates;
4. And they made people think that Republicans are the “tax-cut Santa Clauses.”

Then comes part two of the one-two punch: when a Democrat gains the White House, Republicans and GOP-friendly media must scream about the national debt as loudly and frantically as possible, freaking out about how “our children will have to pay for it!” and “we have to cut spending to solve this crisis!”

The “debt crisis,” that is, that they themselves created with their massive tax cuts and wild spending.

Do whatever it takes to force Democrats to kill their own social programs: shut down the government, crash the stock market, and even damage US credibility around the world if necessary.

This, Wanniski argued back in the day, would force the Democrats in power to cut their own social safety net programs and even dial back the crown jewel of the New Deal, Social Security, thus shooting their welfare-of-the-American-people Santa Claus right in the face.

And, sure enough, here we are with Trump again in the White House having already added $1 trillion to the national debt just this year, with another $5 trillion to come from this year’s tax cuts for the rich, the only significant legislation passed by the GOP Congress all year.

It’s a cynical political and media effort devised by Republicans in the 1970s, fine-tuned in the ’80s and ’90s, and since then meticulously followed by every GOP presidency since.

And, politically, it’s been a brilliantly effective strategy that was hatched by a man most Americans have never heard of: economist and GOP partisan Jude Wanniski.

Wanniski first proposed his Two Santa Clauses strategy in the Wall Street Journal in 1974, after Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace and the future of the Republican Party was so dim that books and articles were widely suggesting the GOP was about to go the way of the Whigs.

There was genuine despair across the GOP back then, particularly when incumbent President Jerry Ford couldn’t even beat an unknown peanut farmer from rural Georgia for the presidency.

Wanniski argued back then that Republicans weren’t losing so many elections just because of Nixon’s corruption, but mostly because the Democrats had been viewed since the New Deal of the 1930s as the “Santa Claus party.”

On the other hand, the GOP, he said, was widely seen as the “party of Scrooge” because they publicly opposed everything from Social Security and Medicare to unemployment insurance and food stamps.

The Democrats, he noted, had gotten to play Santa Claus for decades when they passed out Social Security and unemployment checks — both programs of FDR’s Democratic Socialist New Deal — as well as their “big government” socialist projects like roads, bridges, public schools, public hospitals, and highways that gave a healthy union paycheck to workers and made our country shine.

Even worse, back in that day, Democrats kept raising taxes on businesses and rich people to pay for all that “free stuff” and Democrats’ 91 percent top tax rates on the morbidly rich — from the 1930s up to Reagan’s era — didn’t have any negative effect at all on working people (wages were steadily going up until the Reagan Revolution, in fact).

It all added, Wanniski theorized, to the public perception that the Democrats were the true party of Santa Claus, using taxes on the rich to fund programs for the poor and the working class.

Americans loved the Democrats back then. And every time Republicans railed against these “socialist” programs, they lost elections.

Therefore, Wanniski concluded, the GOP had to become a Santa Claus party, too. But, because Republicans hated the idea of helping out working people, they had to come up with a new way to convince average voters that the GOP, too, had the Santa spirit. But what?

“Tax cuts!” said Wanniski.

To make this work, the Republicans would first have to turn the classical world of economics — which had operated on a simple demand-driven equation for seven thousand years — on its head.

(Everybody then understood that “demand” — aka “working-class wages” — drove economies because working people spent most of the money they earned in the marketplace, producing “demand” for factory-output goods and services. Consumer spending, in fact, accounts for roughly 70 percent of the entire US economy.)

To lay the groundwork to roll out Two Santa Clauses, in 1974 Wanniski invented a new phrase — “Supply-Side Economics” — and said the reason economies grew and became robust wasn’t because people had good union jobs and thus enough money to buy things but, instead, because businesses made extra/new things available for sale, thus tantalizing people to part with their money.

The more products (supply) there were in the stores, he argued, the faster the economy would grow. And the more money we gave rich people and their corporations (via tax cuts) the more stuff (supply) they’d generously produce for us to think about buying.

At a glance, this 1981 adoption of Wanniski’s Two Santas strategy by the Reagan Republicans to “cut taxes while increasing spending” seems irrational, cynical and counterproductive. It certainly defies classic understandings of economics. But when you consider Jude Wanniski’s playbook, it makes complete sense.

To help, economist Arthur Laffer took that equation a step farther with the famous “Laffer Curve” napkin scribble he shared with Reagan over lunch. Not only was supply-side a rational concept, Laffer suggested, but as taxes went down, revenue to the government would magically go up!

Neither concept made any sense — and time has proven both to be colossal idiocies — but, Wanniski argued, if think tanks, rightwing media, and Republican politicians could convince Americans to buy into it, they offered the GOP a way out of the wilderness.

Ronald Reagan was the first national Republican politician to fully embrace the Two Santa Clauses strategy, although it’s been followed by every Republican in federal office ever since and still is today.

Jumping in with both feet, Reagan told the American people straight-out that if he could cut taxes on rich people and businesses, those “job creators” (also a then-newly-invented Republican phrase) would use their extra money to “build new factories” and “increase wages” so all that new stuff “supplying” the economy would produce faster economic growth.

George HW Bush — like most Republicans in 1980 who hadn’t read Wanniski’s piece in the Wall Street Journal — was initially horrified. Reagan was proposing “Voodoo Economics,” said Bush in the primary campaign, and Wanniski's supply-side and Laffer’s tax-cut theories would throw the nation into debt while producing, Bush said, nothing to benefit average American voters.

But Wanniski had done his homework, selling “Voodoo” supply-side economics to the wealthy elders and influencers of the Republican Party, so when Reagan took Bush on as his VP suddenly even Bush “saw the light.”

Democrats, Wanniski told Bush, had been “Santa Clauses” since 1933 by giving people things. From union jobs to food stamps, new schools to Social Security, the American people loved the “toys” and “free stuff” the Democratic Santas brought them every year, as well as the growing economy the increasing union wages and social programs produced in middle class hands.

But Republicans could stimulate the economy by throwing trillions at defense contractors and other fat-cat donor industries, Jude’s pitch to Bush went: spending could actually increase without negative repercussions and that money would trickle down to workers from billionaires and corporate CEOs buying new yachts and building new factories and mansions with middle-class labor.

Plus, Republicans could be double Santa Clauses by cutting everybody’s taxes!

For working people the tax cuts would, of course, only be a small token — a few hundred dollars a year at the most — but Republicans would heavily market them to the media and in political advertising. And the tax cuts for the rich, which weren’t to be discussed in public, would amount to trillions of dollars, parts of which would be recycled back to the GOP as campaign contributions from the morbidly rich beneficiaries of those very tax cuts.

There was no way, Wanniski said, if Republicans stuck to his strategy for a generation or more, that the Democrats could ever win again.

Democrats would be forced into the role of Santa-killers if they acted responsibly by raising taxes, or, even better, they’d be machine-gunning Santa by cutting spending on their own social programs.

Either choice would cause Democrats to lose elections, and, if Republicans executed the strategy right, they could force Democrats to do both!

Reagan took the federal budget deficit from under a trillion dollars when he and Bush were elected in 1980 to almost three trillion by 1988, and back then a dollar could buy far more than it buys today.

They embraced Wanniski’s theory with such gusto that Presidents Reagan and George HW Bush ran up more debt in their twelve years than every president in history up until that time, from George Washington to Jimmy Carter, combined.

Surely this would both “starve the beast” (another phrase invented by Wanniski in 1976) of the American government and force the Democrats to make the politically suicidal move of becoming deficit hawks.

And that’s just how it turned out.

Bill Clinton, the first Democrat they blindsided with Two Santas, had run in 1992 on an FDR-like platform of a “New Covenant” with the American people that would strengthen the democratic socialist institutions of the New Deal and Great Society, re-empower labor, and institute a national single-payer health care system.

A few weeks before his inauguration, however, Wanniski-insiders Alan Greenspan, Larry Sommers, and Goldman Sachs co-chairman Robert Rubin famously sat Clinton down and told him the facts of life: Reagan and Bush had run up such a huge deficit that he was going to have to both raise taxes and cut the size of government programs for the working class and poor.

Clinton took their advice to heart, raised taxes, balanced the budget, and cut numerous social programs. He declared an “end to welfare as we know it” and, in his second inaugural address, an “end to the era of big government.”

Clinton shot Santa Claus, and the result was an explosion of Republican wins across the country as GOP politicians campaigned on a “Republican Santa” platform of supply-side tax cuts and pork-rich spending increases.

Democrats had controlled the House of Representatives in almost every single year since the Republican Great Depression of the 1930s, but with Speaker Newt Gingrich rigorously enforcing Wanniski’s Two Santa Clauses strategy, they finally took it over and held it in the middle of Clinton’s 1990s presidency.

State after state turned red, and the Republican Party rose to take over, in less than a decade, every single lever of power in the federal government, from the Supreme Court to the White House.

Looking at the wreckage of the Democratic Party all around Clinton in 1999, Wanniski wrote a gloating memo that said, in part:

“We of course should be indebted to Art Laffer for all time for his Curve... But as the primary political theoretician of the supply-side camp, I began arguing for the ‘Two Santa Claus Theory’ in 1974. If the Democrats are going to play Santa Claus by promoting more spending, the Republicans can never beat them by promoting less spending. They have to promise tax cuts...”

Ed Crane, then-president of the Koch-funded Libertarian CATO Institute, noted in a memo that year:

“When Jack Kemp, Newt Gingrich, Vin Weber, Connie Mack and the rest discovered Jude Wanniski and Art Laffer, they thought they’d died and gone to heaven. In supply-side economics they found a philosophy that gave them a free pass out of the debate over the proper role of government. ... That’s why you rarely, if ever, heard Kemp or Gingrich call for spending cuts, much less the elimination of programs and departments.”

Two Santa Clauses had fully seized the GOP mainstream, and hasn’t let go to this day.

Never again would Republicans worry about the debt or deficit when in office; and they knew well how to scream hysterically about the debt to the economically naïve national media as soon as Democrats again took power.

When Jude Wanniski died, George Gilder celebrated the Reagan/Bush adoption of his Two Santas “Voodoo Economics” scheme — then still considered irrational by mainstream economists — in a Wall Street Journal eulogy:

“Unbound by zero-sum economics, Jude forged the golden gift of a profound and passionate argument that the establishments of the mold must finally give way to the powers of the mind. ... He audaciously defied all the Buffetteers of the trade gap, the moldy figs of the Phillips Curve, the chic traders in money and principle, even the stultifying pillows of the Nobel Prize.”

Republicans got what they wanted from Wanniski’s work.

They held power for forty years, transferred over $50 trillion from working class families into the money bins of the top one percent, and cut organized labor's representation in the workplace from around a third of workers when Reagan came into office to around 6 percent of the non-governmental workforce today.

Think back to Reagan, who more than tripled the US debt from a mere $800 billion to $2.4 trillion in his eight years. That spending produced a massive stimulus to the economy, and the biggest non-wartime increase in America’s national debt in all of our history.

There was nary a peep from Republicans about that 218 percent increase in our debt in eight short years; they were just fine with it and to this day claim Reagan presided over a “great” economy.

When five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court gave the White House to George W. Bush in 2000, he instantly reverted to Wanniski’s “Two Santa” strategy and again nearly doubled the national debt, adding over two trillion in borrowed money to pay for his tax cut for billionaires, and tossing in two unfunded wars for good measure, which also added at least (long term) another $5 trillion.

Again, there was nary a peep about that debt from any high-profile in-the-know Republicans; in fact, Dick Cheney famously said, amplifying Wanniski’s strategy:

“Reagan proved deficits don't matter. We won the midterms. This is our due.”

Bush and Cheney’s tax cuts for the rich raised the debt by 86 percent to over $10 trillion (and additional trillions in war debt that wasn’t put on the books until Obama entered office, so it looked like it was his).

Then came Democratic President Barack Obama, and suddenly the GOP was hysterical about the debt again.

They — and the national media that amplified their message — were so good at it that they convinced a sitting Democratic president to propose a cut to Social Security (the “chained CPI”). Obama nearly shot the Democrats’ biggest Santa Claus, just like Wanniski predicted, until outrage from the Democratic base stopped him.

Next, Donald Trump raised our national debt by almost $7 trillion, but the GOP raised the debt ceiling without a peep every year for the first three years of his administration, and then suspended it altogether for 2020 (so, when Biden won, he had to justify raising the debt ceiling for two years’ worth of deficits, making it even more politically painful).

And now Republicans are once again spending like drunken sailors while doubling down on a fifth major round of tax cuts for billionaires since Reagan’s initial 1981 effort. After all, it worked against Clinton, Obama, and Biden and the media never caught on. Why wouldn’t they use it again?

In the meantime, though, interest has to be paid on the $38 trillion national debt Reagan, Bush, Bush, and Trump ran up, and the bill is now around a trillion a year, about the same as our entire Defense budget.

If Reagan had never adopted Wanniski’s Two Santas strategy, we could have a standard of living today much like the Scandinavian nations with just the trillion dollars a year we’re instead spending on interest payments.

Not to mention the trillions in surplus we’d have now if none of those tax cuts had happened, which could easily fully fund a national single-payer healthcare system.

Americans deserve to know how we’ve been manipulated and ripped off — and by whom — for the past 45 years.

Hopefully Democratic politicians and our media will, finally, call the GOP out on Wanniski’s Two Santas scam that’s been so enthusiastically adopted by Reagan, both Bush’s, and Trump.

On Christmas of all days, Donald Trump chose to call Democrats “scum.” Not criminals. Not misguided. Not wrong. Scum. A word we usually reserve for things we scrape off the bottom of a shoe or skim off polluted water. A word whose entire purpose is to dehumanize.

That moment matters far beyond the day’s news cycle, and far beyond partisan politics. It matters because leaders don’t just govern; they model.

Psychologists and social and political scientists have long pointed out that national leaders function, at a deep emotional level, as parental figures for their nations. They set the boundaries of what is acceptable. They establish norms. They shape the emotional climate children grow up breathing.

America has lived through this before, both for good and, now, for ill.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt understood this instinctively. In the depths of the Great Depression and the terror of World War II, he spoke to the country as a calm, steady parent. His fireside chats didn’t just convey policy; they conveyed reassurance, dignity, and solidarity.

He treated Americans as adults capable of courage and sacrifice. He named fear without exploiting it. The result was not weakness, but national resilience.

A generation raised under that moral tone went on to build the modern middle class, defeat fascism, and help construct a postwar world that valued democracy, human rights, and shared prosperity.

Contrast that with the bigoted, hateful, revenge-filled claptrap children have heard for the past decade from the emotionally stunted psychopath currently occupying the White House. Hours after calling you and me “scum,” he put up another post calling us “sleazebags.”

How presidential.

Presidents like Dwight D. Eisenhower warned Americans about the dangers of concentrated power and the military-industrial complex, modeling restraint and foresight.

John F. Kennedy appealed to service, famously asking what we could do for our country. Lyndon Johnson, for all his flaws, used the moral authority of the presidency to push civil rights forward, telling America that discrimination was not just illegal but wrong.

Even Ronald Reagan, whose policies I fiercely opposed, spoke a language of civic belonging and optimism rather than open dehumanization.

Go back further, to the Founders themselves, and George Washington warned against factional hatred and the corrosive effects of treating political opponents as enemies rather than fellow citizens.

John Adams argued that a republic could only survive if it was grounded in virtue and moral responsibility. Thomas Jefferson wrote that every generation must renew its commitment to liberty, not surrender it to demagogues who feed on division.

They all understood something Trump doesn’t, or is so obsessively wrapped up in himself and his own infantile grievances that he doesn’t care about: the psychological power of example.

Donald Trump has spent ten years modeling for America the exact opposite of leadership.

Ten years of cruelty framed as strength.

Ten years of mockery, insults, and grievance elevated to the highest office in the land.

Ten years of praising strongmen, including Putin, Xi, and Orbán, while attacking democratic institutions.

Ten years of targeting Hispanics, Black Somali immigrants, demonizing refugees, and encouraging suspicion and hatred toward entire communities.

And now he’s giving us the example of using ICE not simply as a law enforcement agency, but as a masked, armed, unaccountable weapon of state terror aimed not only at brown-skinned families, but at journalists, clergy, lawyers, and anyone else who dares to document their abuse.

Kids graduating from high school this year have never known anything else. That fact should alarm every parent.

Children learn what leadership looks like long before they understand policy debates. They absorb emotional cues, and notice who gets rewarded and who gets punished.

When a president calls fellow Americans “scum” and suffers no consequences, the lesson is clear: cruelty is permissible if you have power. Empathy is expendable. Democracy is a nuisance. Accountability is optional.

This is how normalization works. What once would have been unthinkable becomes routine. The outrage dulls. The abnormal becomes background noise. And a generation grows up believing this is simply how adults in authority behave.

History tells us where that road leads: dehumanizing language precedes dehumanizing actions.

Every authoritarian movement begins by teaching people to see their neighbors as less than fully human. Once empathy vanishes, abuses become easier to justify, and violence becomes easier to excuse.

That’s why we all — parents, grandparents, and citizens — have a special responsibility right now.

We can’t assume our nation’s children will automatically recognize how dangerous and abnormal this moment is; instead, we have to name it for them.

We have to tell them, plainly and repeatedly, that this is not what healthy leadership looks like.

That calling people “scum” and “sleazebags” is not strength. That praising autocrats while undermining democracy is not patriotism. That power without empathy is not leadership; it’s merely a simple pathology known as psychopathy.

And we must model something better ourselves.

Disagree without dehumanizing. Stand up without tearing others down. Teach that democracy, in order to work, depends on mutual recognition of one another’s humanity.

Remind our kids that America has, in its best moments, been led by people who understood their role as moral examples, not just political operators.

And that when CBS, Fox “News,” the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Facebook, X, and other billionaire-owned rightwing media and social media pretend this is normal, they’re spitting on the graves of our Founders and participating in a gross violation of the basic norms of human decency.

Trump’s Christmas message wasn’t just offensive. It was a warning.

The future lays before us now, and if we care about the country our children will inherit, we can’t let this moral vandalism to go unanswered.

While growing up in a working-class town in New Jersey, my family took the morning and evening newspapers, the latter of which I dutifully delivered to the houses in my tangled neighborhood and along the two main thoroughfares that tucked us all in.

When I’d get home from school, there’d be a mountain of bundled papers waiting for me on the curb. I’d sigh, roll ‘em up, wrap ‘em in a rubber band, pile ‘em in a Santa-like sack, hop on my bike, and sling ‘em in the vicinity of people’s porches. I had more than a few “uh-oh” moments when a paper would get away from me and head straight for a window, or a subscriber’s unsuspecting flower pot.

That’s what mass-communicating looked like back in the 1960s and 70s.

After some above-averagely rambunctious teenage years, and too many classrooms I could never settle into, I served in the U.S. Navy, and was honorably discharged to start living my dream: getting a byline in one of those newspapers I used to sling about. I went on to work at five dailies, one weekly, and two magazines during the greatest, luckiest, and most fulfilling career any man has ever had doing anything.

You know, my friends, I reckon the terrible decline in local newspapers has had a direct impact on the increasing ignorance, propaganda and misinformation in today’s America. You can draw a direct line from the end of our daily newspapers’ heyday, to the beginning of the fascism that is pouring over us like orange, contaminated syrup.

Gone are the days when eager journalists were everywhere that you couldn’t be reporting on what was happening in our communities, and calling power into account in our local courts, police stations, schools boards, sports venues, city halls, and state houses.

These days, most of our towns in this faltering country don’t have a daily newspaper, and there is no way they are any better for it. Too many public officials are now free to rob us blind in private.

Today we have the Internet, and I’ve consistently argued we haven’t come close to reckoning with the tidal wave of change it has wrought on society. Some of it has no doubt been good, but I’m confident as hell I could have lived very happily without it.

I am reminded of this every time I see an idiot crossing a busy street looking at God knows what on their stupid phone. Yet here I am typing to you in God knows where because of that Internet I am currently bellyaching about ...

I’ll be honest with you: When I started writing urgently following one of the most tragic days in American history, Nov. 8, 2016, I had no plans for where any of it would end up. It was simply therapy, and a release of the madness crawling around inside my head, as I tried to make sense of a country and a people I all of a sudden didn’t recognize anymore.

Who could vote for such an obviously grotesque man to lead the United States of America?

I guess I had no idea how many people thought so damn little of their country.

For the first time in my life I was not professionally tied to any single publication, and free to write what I wanted. Words are all I have ever known since I was first published in 1983, so I started pouring my heart out on an Internet that I didn’t trust.

After all that writing, I had a book, three basketfuls worth of columns and a need for a respectable place to hang my jacket and my words. So three-plus years ago, I decided to make Substack home, and I am happy as hell I did.

As many of you are aware, Trump and his lying, subservient Republican Orcs are in a war against the truth, and trying to crush anybody who dares report it. On Sunday, CBS News once again fell at the orange fascist’s fat little feet and spiked a story that was set to run on the once-venerable 60 Minutes news program, about the "the brutal and tortuous conditions" of his detention camps .

This was only the latest surrender by our diminishing legacy media to the convicted felon who attacked us on January 6, 2021.

The media I gave my professional life to is under attack and dying right in front of our eyes, so it is surprising and gratifying as hell for an old, broken down journalist to help breathe life into something new.

Places like Substack are the present in a world where the future comes at us too fast, and we should all do our best to support the tremendous work being done by independent journalists to inform and call power into account.

As a reader first, and a writer second, I know that the written word has staying power, and I like it just fine on paper, or one of these screens.

I am a fiercely independent SOB, and a one-man gang. I don’t collaborate with anybody, because I can’t live with letting anybody down but myself. I spent decades living on somebody else’s deadline. Now I set my own clock. It’s incredible how freeing that is.

I don’t do podcasts, and you won’t see my pretty face streaming live, taped, on the cloud, on a mountain, or anyplace there is some camera.

I learned a long time ago I’m just not made for that.

I co-hosted a TV show in the 1990s, and absolutely hated it. The show came first, and any substance second. That’ll read a little haughty, but it was the truth. So I stayed with the written word, which might explain why money never stayed around me for long.

I have my sources, integrity, but mostly … you.

I was taught working at all those newspapers that readers are pure gold, and owed everything you got. You are the reason I am here, folks, and I hope like hell that comes through in my writing.

These are some tough, soul-sucking, lonely and scary times we are living in, and community has never been more important. Thanks to this Internet I don’t trust I am able to connect with people like you I do trust all over the world, and that’s pretty cool.

Your readership and camaraderie helps keep me sane and hopeful. Your paid support means everything, and helps to deal with the never-ending bills that only increase with age, because America has decided older people aren’t worth as much as they are owed.

As I put a holiday bow on this piece, it has occurred to me that I started my life slinging words at people’s doorsteps, and I’m now on my way to ending it by slinging words into a computer and along an invisible information highway.

Such discovery …

Such a wonderful life …

Happy holidays, good people. I have a journalist’s hunch that 2026 is going to be a great damn year. In fact, you have my word.

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.

Given how the Republicans who run Congress let health insurance premiums for over 24 million Americans explode by not acting last week before going on vacation, it appears former Congressman Alan Grayson was right. The GOP Healthcare Plan is simple and straightforward:

“Don’t get sick.“If you do get sick, die quickly.”

And it appears Trump is handily helping us all along with that “die quickly” part, promoting both cancer-causing chemicals in our environment and food supply as well as pushing for more greenhouse gasses to kill more of us with droughts, floods, hurricanes, and wildfires via climate change.

The EPA requires the country’s largest industrial facilities to report their greenhouse gas emissions, which have been a major source of information for those tracking America’s progress toward mitigating climate change. Now, Trump’s proposing to gut that requirement, so we’ll no longer know how badly Big Industry is polluting our skies and wilding our weather.

Additionally, he wants to radically increase the amount of cancer-causing formaldehyde we can be exposed to, has already ended reporting requirements for heavily-polluting factory farms (ammonia and hydrogen sulfide), and is prioritizing polluters over our national parks.

Last year, you’ll recall, Trump told a group of fossil fuel executives that if they’d give him a billion dollars, he’d do whatever they wanted. Apparently he’s now following through, right down to killing off wind farms.

The long and winding story of how we got here is one every American should know.

While many trace the beginning of the modern rightwing fascist-friendly MAGA-type movement to the 1954 Brown v Board decision and the way Fred Koch put the John Birch Society on steroids, another interesting origin story for today’s GOP base is grounded in the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

In the years immediately leading up to the 1970 creation of the EPA, pollution in America had gotten so bad it was impossible to ignore and was quickly becoming a political issue.

Rachel Carson had published Silent Spring in 1962, a book about how DDT was killing birds worldwide, that electrified Americans and launched the nation’s first real environmental movement. The following year, smog killed 400 New Yorkers, and Lake Erie had largely died because it was so polluted.

In 1969, a spark from a passing train lit the Cuyahoga river on fire, and that same year a massive oil spill off the California coast covered over 400 square miles of beach and coastline with oil, killing hundreds of thousands of birds and other wildlife.

Car exhaust, scientists reported in 1969, was so severe it was causing large numbers of birth defects and cancer. Major American cities like St. Louis smelled, as TIME magazine reported at the time, “like an old-fashioned drugstore on fire.”

Richard Nixon, a canny politician who’d always had a pretty good take on the pulse of America, stepped up in 1969, creating the Environmental Quality Council. That was well received but didn’t make a dent in the problem, so Nixon did what was probably the only good deed for America of his presidency and helped create the EPA in 1970.

The wealthy oligarchs of American industry — particularly fossil fuel and chemical industry oligarchs — hated the EPA from the get-go, but this was before five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court had legalized political bribery.

Environmental regulations cut into their profits, and they felt persecuted after generations of their predecessor fatcats had poured their poisons into our air and water without a peep from the government. It was almost as infuriating as having to pay a 74% income tax on everything they earned after their first million (in today’s dollars).

In response to public opinion, the sentiments of the morbidly rich back then went along the lines of, “So what if kids got cancer? We didn’t live in the neighborhoods of our refineries and manufacturing facilities: screw them! They should be happy we keep them employed and shut up about all this hippy-dippy environment stuff!”

Regulating polluting industries and fossil fuel emissions was all the rage in the 1970s, and average working people loved it. But the billionaires hated it. As the EPA historian noted, by the time Russell Train had become the EPA Administrator in 1973, they were starting to get organized and active:

“During Train’s tenure at EPA, clean air issues continued to cause contention between environmentalists and industry representatives.“‘The entire environmental program was under siege by the energy crowd. It was a major accomplishment that we were able to keep environmental programs on track,’ said Train.
“Many efforts to trim EPA’s authority — to kill requirements for tall stacks, to curtail efforts to prevent significant deterioration of air cleaner than national air quality standards, and the like — were beaten back.”

That was also the year that America’s industrialists got serious about taking tobacco lawyer Lewis Powell’s Memo’s advice: the rich needed to step up and start buying off politicians and judges, seize control of the media, and use their endowments to stock universities with rightwing professors while pushing out the old-line liberals.

They got a big boost in 1976 (Buckley) and 1978 (Bellotti) when five Republicans on the Supreme Court ruled that billionaires and corporations buying off politicians was no longer considered criminal bribery: from those years forward it was, instead, “Constitutionally protected First Amendment free speech” and corporations were no longer legal fictions but fully “persons” who could claim protections under the Bill of (Human) Rights.

Lewis Powell himself, in fact, wrote the 1978 Bellotti decision giving corporate “persons” — including foreign corporations — the right to pour unlimited amounts of “dark money” into political campaigns. (Five corrupt Republicans on the Court would double down on this in 2010 with Citizens United.)

The fossil fuel billionaires, however, were still groaning under what they believed was an unending regulatory assault. The EPA was demanding that they clean up refineries that were spewing tons of cancer-causing benzene into the air, stop dumping radioactive and arsenic-containing coal tailings and drilling waste into rivers, and limit the exposure of workers. It was all too much.

So the fossil fuel billionaires and their fellow travelers got organized. They set up and funded policy think-tanks in every state in the union, each one devoted to the two main goals of the billionaires who birthed them: deregulation and tax cuts.

The challenge was convincing Americans that regulations were bad things, and that rich people should have their taxes cut from the 74 percent rate. That top tax bracket, after all, was the main thing preventing billionaires from grabbing all the money that was instead, then, going into the homes and pockets of unionized working-class people.

The think tanks got to work, backstopping the GOP at every opportunity. Money flowed to Republican politicians, both state and federal. A small army of commentators was organized, some of them scientists and economists willing to go on-the-take, to convince Americans that regulations weren’t something that would protect average people but were, instead, instruments of socialism or communism.

Their factotum, Jude Wanniski, even came up with a bizarre new economic theory and a “Two Santas” tax strategy that included techno-sounding phrases like “trickle down” and “supply side” to justify massive tax cuts for the morbidly rich.

The agencies like the EPA that were doing the regulating would, henceforth, be known as the “deep state,” a designation so creepy that few would choose to defend them.

After Reagan stopped enforcing antitrust laws in 1983 and Clinton deregulated the media in 1996, an army of radio and TV hosts were added to the mix, with over 1,500 local rightwing radio stations and Fox “News” rising into prominence. By 2000, Republicans were openly campaigning on platforms promising deregulation along with giant tax cuts for the “job creator” billionaires.

Now sufficiently indoctrinated to believe up is down, Republican voters became the nation’s useful idiots.

The think tanks told them climate change was a hoax, and they believed them. Trump told them the economy during his tenure was “the best in the history of the world” (it was only mediocre before the pandemic hit) and they believed him. He said he needed to cut taxes on the morbidly rich by around $5 trillion, and Republican voters nodded their heads in agreement.

Alexander Hamilton is often quoted as saying, “Those who stand for nothing will fall for anything.” It’s become the motto of the brahmins of the GOP, who only stand for their own greed and that of their wealthy patrons.

The white Republican base has been so lied to and abused over the past forty or so years that they’ve become easy marks for the predators in both big business and the GOP.

They’ve ceased to stand for anything other than blind obedience to Republican politicians, who lie with impunity (The Washington Post has identified over 30,000 lies Trump told while in his first term in office, for example), and as a result they’re “falling for anything” right in front of God and the world:

• Democrats running child sex rings out of a DC pizza parlor? Sure! Let me bring an assault weapon!
• Teachers hate kids and are hell-bent on screwing up their lives. Of course: why else would they study for all those years for a job that pays squat?
• Treating a deadly new virus with horse de-wormer or a drug that kills the malaria parasite? Why not? Better than having to wear one of those terrible masks! How about injecting bleach? Sounds reasonable!
• There’s even been a recent explosion in the antisemitic claim that Jews run the world and are intent on “replacing” white Americans with Black and Brown people, justifying the brutality of ICE.
• Even as never-before-seen violent weather is destroying Red state communities, they continue to vote for Republicans who refuse to do anything to slow down the ferocity of climate change.
• Republicans who claim Christianity bind themselves to a man who committed adultery with all three of his wives, repeatedly ran fraudulent businesses and charities, quotes Hitler, and tore babies from their nursing mothers and then sold them into fake adoption charities that trafficked over 1,000 of them to nobody-knows-where to this day.

The indoctrination of the Republican voter is so complete that when Trump gutted over 100 environmental regulations during his last term — making it more toxic and dangerous to live or work in America and putting our children at risk of childhood cancers and birth defects — there wasn’t a peep. Most Republican voters don’t even know it happened, although the New York Times kept a list of the regulations he killed that you can read here.

And now, instead of gutting the regulations, he’s gutting the entire Environmental Protection Agency.

And it’s not like America’s wealthiest oligarchs are having second thoughts. The Ford Foundation sponsored an investigative report by The Guardian into the political funding policies of our 100 richest billionaires. While most people know about Koch, Soros, and Gates, few have ever heard most of the others’ names.

But the majority of America’s morbidly rich are totally down with the GOP’s poisonous and brutal agenda. As The Guardian reported:

“Our new, systematic study of the 100 wealthiest Americans indicates that Buffett, Gates, Bloomberg et al are not at all typical. Most of the wealthiest US billionaires — who are much less visible and less reported on — more closely resemble Charles Koch.“They are extremely conservative on economic issues. Obsessed with cutting taxes, especially estate taxes — which apply only to the wealthiest Americans. Opposed to government regulation of the environment or big banks. Unenthusiastic about government programs to help with jobs, incomes, healthcare, or retirement pensions — programs supported by large majorities of Americans. Tempted to cut deficits and shrink government by cutting or privatizing guaranteed Social Security benefits.”

So why don’t Americans know who’s manipulating our political system and why? Again, from The Guardian:

“The answer is simple: billionaires who favor unpopular, ultraconservative economic policies, and work actively to advance them (that is, most politically active billionaires) stay almost entirely silent about those issues in public. This is a deliberate choice. Billionaires have plenty of media access, but most of them choose not to say anything at all about the policy issues of the day. They deliberately pursue a strategy of what we call ‘stealth politics.’”

So, here we are.

America’s billionaires got the tax cuts they wanted: instead of paying 74 percent like before Reagan, or even the high 50 percent range like most European billionaires, the average American billionaire pays around 4 percent in income taxes, which is probably a hell of a lot less than the average Republican voter.

The fossil fuel billionaires also got much of the deregulation they wanted and the Supreme Court justices they’ve bought off with million-dollar vacations and parental homes have gutted the Chevron deference and thus ended the EPA’s ability to seriously regulate the fossil fuel industry altogether.

As a result, since Reagan over $50 trillion has been transferred from the paychecks and homes of working class people into the money bins of the top 1 percent while our environment continues to deteriorate. Meanwhile, Republicans in Congress, relying on the largesse of the fossil fuel billionaires and their industry colleagues, fight every attempt by those concerned about our children’s environmental future.

This 50-year-long plot executed by some of the richest men (with few exceptions, they’re almost all men) in America to gut income taxes and environmental regulations has been a stunning success. Without the burden of income taxes, they’re now richer than any humans ever before in the history of the Earth. Richer than the pharaohs, richer than the Caesars, richer than any king in European, African, or Asian history.

Do they care that they’re leaving the rest of us a dying planet? That their actions have created a toxic brew of paranoia and distrust — along with an obese orange-faced monster — that’s on the verge of ending the American experiment? That Americans are dying every day from the pollution and climate change their products produce?

Apparently not, at least as long as they can keep their tax cuts and deregulation. Oxfam International, for example, “found that 125 billionaires create more emissions through their investments and lifestyle than all of France.”

Mission accomplished, America’s rightwing fossil fuel billionaires. And thanks for nothing.

David Brooks, the conservative columnist who is beloved by liberals, wrote last month that the Democrats make too much of the Epstein story. He said they’re acting as conspiratorially as the Republicans.

Brooks said he was “especially startled” to see leading progressives characterizing all elites as part of “the Epstein class.” If he were a Democrat, he said, he’d be focused on “the truth”: “the elites didn’t betray you, but they did ignore you. They didn’t mean to harm you.”

Brooks went on to say: “If I were a Democratic politician … I’d add that America can’t get itself back on track if the culture is awash in distrust, cynicism, catastrophizing lies and conspiracymongering. No governing majority will ever form if we’re locked in a permanent class war.”

Sounds noble, but he didn’t mean any of it.

Last week, it was discovered that David Brooks had palled around with Jeffrey Epstein. Pictures of him were part of a trove released by the Democrats on the House Oversight Committee. It was deduced that they were taken at a 2011 “billionaires dinner.” A 2019 report by Buzzfeed identified Brooks, among others, along with Epstein, who had pleaded guilty to soliciting a minor for sex just three years prior.

Buzzfeed: “In 2011, after Epstein had been released from a Florida jail, it was an exclusive gathering, dominated by tech industry leadership. A gallery of photos taken at the event by Nathan Myhrvold, formerly Microsoft’s chief technology officer, named 20 guests, including just one media representative: New York Times columnist David Brooks.”

While defending Brooks, the Times inadvertently confirmed Epstein's presence at the dinner. “Mr. Brooks had no contact with [Epstein] before or after his single attendance at a widely-attended dinner.”

Sure, but Brooks knew Epstein was there. If he didn’t know about his crimes, which is doubtful, he still chose to write a column warning the Democrats against waging “permanent class war” without disclosing his non-trivial association with the namesake of “the Epstein class.”

It’s bad faith, up and down.

“I think that's what we get when (very) wealthy people are shaping opinion,” said Denny Carter, publisher of Bad Faith Times, a newsletter. “We can never really know the depths of their conflicts of interest, whether it's covering for a known pedophile ringleader or promoting a cause or politician or company that will benefit them financially.”

In 2023, Denny wrote a piece highlighting the importance of bad faith, which is to say, if you don’t put it at the center of your thinking about rightwing politics, you’re going to be very, very confused. He wrote:

“Republicans today support women’s sports (if it means barring trans folks from participating). They love a member of the Kennedy family. They’re skeptical of Big Pharma. They hate banks. None of it – not a single part of it – makes any sense unless you understand bad faith.”

They never mean what they say.

Denny brought my attention to that two-year-old piece by reposting it. I immediately thought of Brooks. Scolding the Democrats about demonizing “the Epstein class” while fraternizing with “the Epstein class” (it was a “billionaires dinner,” for Christ’s sake) – that’s the kind of behavior you might expect from a man who’s ready to betray you.

“You see these op-eds about supporting the fossil fuel industry and continuing to accelerate climate collapse in the guise of electoral advice for Democrats without having any idea if the writer means what they're saying or has some financial stake in promoting Big Oil and its various subsidiaries,” Denny told me in a brief interview. “You assume good faith among these writers and influencers at your own peril.”

In a 2023 piece you recently reposted, you said the world is upside down. The right loves Russia. The left hates Russia. This is confusing for those of us who remember 20 years ago. What happened?

This one, I think, is pretty straightforward. The right despised the collectivism inherent in Soviet ideology and the left was curious about how it might look in action. The fall of the USSR (eventually) led to a totalitarian fascist Russian state ruled by a vicious dictator who used religion and "traditional values" as a weapon against his many enemies, or anyone who dared promote democracy in Russia.

Listen to Putin and you'll hear a Republican babbling about “woke” this and “woke” that and positioning himself as the last barrier between so-called traditional society and some kind of far-left hellscape.

It's the same script every modern fascist leader uses, and it appeals very much to Republican lawmakers and their voters. You sometimes read stories about Americans fleeing to Russia to escape the “woke” scourge, only to deeply regret it. That's always funny or tragic, depending on how you look at it.

You say bad faith explains the upside-downness, but you also suggest the center has not held -- that social fragmentation brought us here. You even cite David Bowie. How did you come to that insight?

I've been a Bowie superfan for a while now, and like a lot of folks who spend too much time online, I've seen the viral clip of Bowie explaining the world-changing potential of the internet way back in 1999.

He was right on a few levels, but most of all he identified the internet's potential for destroying any sense of commonly held reality. Here we are today, a quarter century later, trying to operate in a political world in which there are a handful of different realities at any one time.

A traitorous right-wing mob tried to overthrow the US government in 2021. We all saw the footage. We all know what happened. Yet there are tens of millions of Americans who believe January 6 did not happen or was in fact a walking tour of the US Capitol.

We can't even agree that there was a coup attempt orchestrated by the outgoing president because social media took that event, broke it into a million pieces, and allowed bad actors to piece it back together to fit a politically convenient narrative. I wrote about it here.

You suggest that simply telling the truth won't fix things. Why?

I don't mean to sound cynical but if we've learned anything over the past decade of small-d democratic backsliding, it's that the truth doesn't mean anything anymore because of the societal fragmentation created by social media. There is no truth. We can choose our own adventure now because our phones will confirm our priors about what happened and why.

Pro-democracy folks in the US can't rely on facts and figures to win the day. They won't. The Harris campaign reached a highwater mark in August 2024 when they were ignoring facts and figures and coasting on vibes. It was a heady time because it seemed like Democrats had finally learned their lesson: good-faith “Leslie Knope” politics [facts will win the day] has no place in the modern world, if it ever did.

The right has a gigantic media complex and it's getting bigger. Twitter, CBS News and soon perhaps CNN -- all are right-coded or soon could be. Are you seeing recognition among liberals and leftists that this imbalance is unsustainable? If so, what's the plan?

Look, there are plenty of pro-democracy folks in the world with more money than they could spend in 50 lifetimes. A little bit of that money could go a long way in establishing pro-democracy media outlets that operate as propaganda outlets for the kind of liberalism that has been washed away by the right's capture of the media. Democracy needs to be sold to Americans just as fascism was sold to them, first in the seedy corners of the internet, then on Elon Musk's hub for international fascism, then in mainstream outlets run by people cooking their brains daily on Musk's site.

I'm not sure of a specific plan. I'm just a blogger. But people are awash in fascist propaganda 24 hours a day on every major social media site. It has ruined a lot of relationships and radicalized Americans who spent most of their lives ignoring politics as the domain of nerds.

There has to be a flood of pro-democracy messaging in the media and that can't happen without billions being invested in a massive network of outlets that can effectively push back on the right's unreality.

I wrote about the selling of democracy here.

The meaning of "elites" is central to the fascist project. As defined by David Brooks, they are educated liberal-ish people who drive Teslas, or used to. With an affordability crisis underway, liberals and leftists have a chance to redefine "elites" for the long haul. Thoughts?

I think engaging the right on the meaning of "elites" is probably a road to nowhere. They will label as "elite" anyone who has ever read a book or graduated from college. I would say the left can and should point out the vast gulf between real populism and fake right-wing populism. Media outlets, of course, have conflated these two because the media assumes everyone in politics is operating in pristine good faith.

But pointing out that Zohran Mamdani and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are real populists while Trump and his lackeys talk a big populist game while selling the country for parts to their golf buddies and business associates could offer people real insight into what it means to be on the side of the working person. Barack Obama has toyed with the idea of rejecting Trump as a populist; I think every pro-democracy American needs to push back harder on that label because it's disingenuous and a powerful tool for fascist politicians who have nothing if they don't have at least some working-class support.

The media is freaking out over a new Rasmussen poll that found:

“A majority of voters under 40 want a democratic socialist to win the White House in the next presidential election.“… 51 percent of Likely U.S. Voters ages 18 to 39 would like to see a democratic socialist candidate win the 2028 presidential election. Thirty-six percent (36 percent) don’t want a democratic socialist to win in 2028, while 17 percent are not sure…
“Among the youngest cohort (ages 18-24) of voters, 57 percent want a democratic socialist to win the next presidential election…
“Among those who voted for Kamala Harris in last year’s presidential election, 78 percent would like to see a democratic socialist candidate win the 2028 presidential election…” (emphasis added).

I was on Ali Velshi’s MSNOW show discussing this, along with Michael Green who recently wrote a thought-provoking article about how the official poverty line in America is completely out-of-date and out of touch with the needs of most Americans. I shared a few statistics from my recent book The Hidden History of the American Dream: the Demise of the Middle Class and How to Rescue Our Future:

• When, in 1957, my dad bought the house I grew up in, the average cost of a single-family home in America was about 2.2 times the average annual wage. Today it’s more than ten times the average wage.
• When my Boomer generation was the same age as today’s Millennials, we owned a bit over 22 percent of the nation’s wealth; Millennials today control only about 4 percent of the country’s wealth (and it’s the same for Zoomers).
• From the 1930s right up until the Reagan Revolution, it was possible for seniors to live comfortably on Social Security alone; Reagan undid that with his “reforms” so today that’s nearly impossible.
• When I ran my first seriously successful business in the early 1970s, it cost me around $35/month for comprehensive health insurance for each of my 18 employees; at that time hospitals and health insurance companies were required by Michigan law (where I lived; most other states were identical) to be run as non-profits. Today, health insurance can be as much as one-fifth of a company’s payroll expense.
• When Reagan came into office in 1981, a single wage earner could support a family with a middle-class lifestyle, and fully 65 percent of us were in the middle class (up from around 20 percent in the 1930s). Today, after 44 years of Reaganomics, it takes two full-time people to achieve the same status, which triggers huge childcare expenses, which is part of why only 43 percent of us are middle class .

FDR’s great — and successful — Democratic Socialist experiment following the Republican Great Depression was to drive the economy from the bottom up, reversing the “Horse and Sparrow” trickle-down economics and deregulation of the Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover administrations that provoked the Great Crash.

He did that by:

• Expanding the notion of the commons — the stuff we all collectively own and is administered or funded and regulated by government — to include free public education nationwide (and cheap college), old-age retirement (Social Security), and public power and transportation systems (Tennessee Valley Authority, federal support for local transit, roads and highways).
• Legalizing unions, an effort that was so successful that when Reagan came into office fully a third of us had good union jobs and, because they set the local wage floors, two-thirds of Americans had the equivalent of a union wage and benefit package.
• Establishing a minimum wage on which a single worker could raise a family of three and still stay above the federal poverty level (today’s federal minimum wage is $7.25: adjusted with the Consumer Price Index, that $1.60 minimum wage in 1968 is equivalent to about $14.90 an hour in 2025 dollars).

In the years since, we’ve continued to expand the commons by establishing national single-payer healthcare systems for low-income people (Medicaid) and retired people (Medicare), both of which came out of LBJ’s Democratic Socialist program that he called The Great Society.

Meanwhile, Republicans and a few neoliberal Democrats have pushed back against these Democratic Socialist programs that made the American middle class the first in the history of the world to exceed more than half the population.

• Reagan’s war on unions has cut our union membership down to well under 10 percent in the private sector.
• His gutting federal funding for education has exploded college costs to the point where three generations are saddled with over $2 trillion in debt that can’t be discharged by bankruptcy.
• Reagan’s tax cuts for the rich (from 74 percent down to 27 percent) and corporations tripled the national debt (from $800 billion to $2.4 trillion) just in his eight years; since then the four GW Bush and Trump tax cuts have, when combined with Reagan’s, produced a $38 trillion national debt so big that we now spend more on servicing their debt than we do on our defense budget or would on administering a national healthcare system.

Back in the 1940s, after the incredible success of the New Deal, President Roosevelt wanted to further expand the commons by expanding the scope of his Democratic Socialist programs. Just before he died, he proposed a “Second Bill of Rights” that included:

• “The right to a useful and remunerative job in the nation’s industries, shops, farms, or mines. (Unionization and an above-poverty-level minimum wage.)
• “The right to earn enough to provide adequate food, clothing, and recreation. (Ditto and government as the employer of last resort.)
• “The right of every farmer to raise and sell products at a return that gives his family a decent living. (Don’t manipulate farm prices with stupid tariff wars, etc., and make the government the purchaser of last resort.)
• “The right of every businessperson, large and small, to trade free from unfair competition and domination by monopolies. (Break up the giant corporations and encourage average people to start small businesses, including with loan supports.)
• “The right of every family to a decent home. (Today this would mean no more corporations, hedge funds, and foreign billionaires owning single-family homes to squeeze us dry by jacking up rents.)
• “The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to enjoy good health. (FDR favored a single-payer healthcare system like Medicare for All.)
• “The right to protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment (i.e., robust Social Security, Medicare, and unemployment insurance).
• “The right to a good education.” (Free or inexpensive college, quality public schools in every community.)

Much to the chagrin of my Republican-activist father, my grandfather (a 1917 Norwegian immigrant) frequently and proudly described himself as a socialist. When I asked him what he meant, he always pointed me to FDR, the New Deal, and his proposed Second Bill of Rights.

And here we are again.

My grandfather’s generation saw up-close and firsthand the tax-cutting and deregulation binge of the Roaring 20s (which were only “roaring” for the morbidly rich), and then had the lived experience of watching FDR put the country back together and create the world’s first widespread middle class.

Millennials and Zoomers today are seeing the same thing, between the Bush Housing Crash of 2008, the botched Covid Crash of 2020, and the GOP’s relentless program to drive the wealth of the nation into the money bins of the billionaires who own that party.

They see the example of most European countries, where the commons includes college (many will actually pay you a stipend to attend), healthcare, and daycare/preschool, and union density is often well above 80%. Housing is subsidized or heavily regulated, leading several to have essentially ended homelessness. Giant corporate monopolies are prohibited and local small businesses are encouraged.

Europeans call these programs Democratic Socialism or social democracy, and young Americans clearly are enthusiastic about bringing the “European Dream” to this country.

My sense is that — much like in the 1930s — a significant majority of Americans are sick of the neoliberal “let the rich run things because they know best” b------- that Republicans, “Tech Bros,” and a shrinking minority of on-the-take Democratic politicians embrace.

Meanwhile, nobody’s sure why the Democratic National Committee (DNC) is refusing to release the autopsy they did of the 2024 election, producing speculation it may have uncovered examples of Russian and Republican manipulation of both voters and the vote, but I’m guessing the real reason is that the neoliberals who largely run the DNC saw feedback that reflected the Rasmussen poll I opened this article with.

The exploding popularity of progressive politicians from Zohran Mamdani to Bernie Sanders, Jasmine Crockett, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez aren’t an anomaly; they’re a signpost to both electoral and governing success for the next generation of genuinely progressive Democratic politicians.

The White House has always mattered because of what it represents. It was never supposed to be a palace; it was meant to be the people’s house, a physical reminder that power in America is borrowed, temporary, and accountable.

That’s why the news that Donald Trump is turning it into a $400 million monument to himself should stop every American cold.

This isn’t a routine renovation. What Trump first floated as a ballroom has ballooned into a massive two-story complex with sweeping staircases, private residential quarters, and a secure bridge connecting it directly to the presidential residence.

Streets around the White House will be shut down for years. Historic gardens are being ripped out. A magnolia planted by Franklin Roosevelt in 1942 is gone. Jackie Kennedy’s legacy is treated like landscaping debris.

And this thing won’t just sit on the White House grounds: according to the National Park Service, it will dominate them. It visually overwhelms the West Wing and the Executive Mansion.

That detail matters. Symbols matter. And this symbol screams something Trump has been telling us for years. In his mind, this country isn’t about shared sacrifice or common good, it’s about power, spectacle, and who gets to live above the law and above the rest of us.

While Trump is building himself a palace, millions of Americans are deciding whether they can afford to see a doctor. Parents are cutting pills in half. Seniors are rationing insulin.

Working people are drowning under rent, groceries, student loans, and insurance premiums that climb every year. We’re told health care just wasn’t meant to be, that there’s no money for universal care, no money to make life affordable, no money to help people survive.

Funny how there’s always money for marble, steel, and ego when Trump (or any other dictator, anywhere in the world) is running the show. This is how authoritarianism announces itself, and he’s not even trying to be subtle about it.

Strongmen don’t just seize power, they remake the landscape to reflect it. They build grand halls and private corridors, while separating themselves physically and psychologically from the public. They hang huge banners with their faces on them from public buildings.

And now he’s even slapping his name on the Kennedy Center. It’s obscene.

Look around the world and you’ll see the pattern repeated again and again of civic spaces turn into monuments and humble government buildings becoming fortresses. Leaders of this type — if you could call them “leaders” instead of “tinpot dictators” — stop walking among the people and start hovering above them.

Trump isn’t inventing anything new. He’s following a playbook as old as the Egyptian pharaohs and the Roman emperors.

The “secure bridge” to gain access to the building from the White House residence alone tells you everything you need to know. This is about insulation, about never having to mix with the public, about power flowing smoothly behind locked doors and away from protest, dissent, and accountability.

A president who believes in democracy doesn’t need that, but a president who fears or even hates the people — but craves the wealth and power a corrupt Supreme Court has said he can grab at will — does.

The White House was intentionally modest by design: it was a rebuke to kings and emperors. The White House’s first residents — John Adams and Thomas Jefferson — refused to live like royalty because they understood that democracy depends on restraint. Jefferson used to answer the front door in his pajamas.

Trump understands the opposite. He believes any symbol of his own personal power should look expensive, imposing, and permanent, like Trump Tower and his gaudy golf motels. That’s why this project matters far beyond architecture: it’s a declaration of values.

And notice what had to be erased to make room for it. Historic gardens. Living symbols of past presidents who believed in stewardship rather than self-glorification.

Authoritarian types like Trump and Putin don’t preserve history, they overwrite it. They don’t see themselves as part of a long democratic story, but instead put themselves at the center of it.

There’s a lawsuit now from the National Trust for Historic Preservation, pointing out the obvious, that no president gets to tear apart the White House without review. Not Trump. Not anyone.

Yet a federal judge appears ready to let it move forward, asking only that designs be submitted after the fact. That’s how democratic guardrails weaken. Excess becomes normalized, deference replaces oversight, and power gets a pass because Trump insists he’s a special boy.

This is what Americans are reacting to, even if they don’t always have the language for it. People feel the imbalance in their bones.

They hear Republicans telling them to tighten their belts while loosening their own and those of the morbidly rich who own them. They see suffering framed as unavoidable while luxury is treated as destiny. They understand, instinctively, that something is deeply wrong when a president builds himself a palace while calling unrealistic things like feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, and providing healthcare to the people.

This moment matters because of what it reveals about the direction Republicans and the morbidly rich are taking our country. A democracy is supposed to make power feel smaller than the people, as the old quote usually misattributed to Jefferson notes:

“When government fears the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny.”

Trump wants to make power seem untouchable and the people to fear him and his masked goons.

This isn’t about taste or aesthetics. It’s about whether America remains a republic or slides toward something darker. When leaders wall themselves off, elevate themselves physically above the public, and replace shared civic symbols with personal monuments, history warns us where that road leads.

The White House belongs to We, the People.

Every garden, every hallway, every inch of it exists because this country has repeatedly, for over 250 years, rejected kings. Turning it into a private palace while Americans are told to accept illness, debt, and precarity as fate isn’t just obscene, it’s a warning.

Democracies don’t collapse in a single moment. They erode as excess is excused and power forgets who it serves. This project is Trump saying the quiet part out loud: He’s not here to govern with us, he’s here to rule above us.

And Americans are right to reject that.

As the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) looks to shed as many as 35,000 mostly vacant health-care jobs this month — having already cut nearly 30,000 since President Donald Trump returned to office — a disabled Vietnam veteran has gone public, railing against the administration.

Ronn Easton, 76, is the face of a new video calling out the Trump administration for its attacks on veterans and produced by Home of the Brave, a nonprofit focused on portraying what it calls “catastrophic harm” under Trump.

“This is not what I intended my retirement years to be like,” Easton told Raw Story.

“I've only taken one oath in my life, and there is no expiration date on that oath, and that oath says that I am to defend this country against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and right now, as I have said many, many times, Donald John Trump is the biggest threat to democracy that this country will ever see.

“I'm duty-bound to do whatever I can to fight against it, and I will do that until the day I die.”

‘Veterans' lives at risk’

Last week, Trump announced a $1,776 “veterans dividend” — its value symbolizing the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and the Revolutionary War against Great Britain.

Analysts pointed out that Trump misrepresented the source of the cash, implying it was raised by tariffs when in fact it was money already approved by Congress for a one-time housing allowance.

In his new video, Easton said Trump’s latest VA moves are “killing soldiers,” particularly as veterans need access to VA health care and suicide hotline resources.

Easton served as an armorer in the Vietnam War, enlisting after two childhood friends were killed in action. He said he has used the Veterans Crisis Line himself.

Following his service, Easton became 100 percent disabled, diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), tinnitus, neuropathy and Type 2 diabetes due to exposure to Agent Orange, the cancer- and neurological disease-causing herbicide used in Vietnam to clear enemy hiding spots.

“There have been times where I have had a gun in my mouth, but I made a promise to my daughter, to my bride, that I would never do something like that,” Easton said.

“That's not an option for me anymore, so that's why I do what I do now. I fight.”

With the Trump administration cutting billions of dollars in medical research funding, including cancer research, veterans end up suffering as many have cancer due to exposure to chemical agents like Agent Orange, Easton said.

“All they're doing is putting veterans’ lives at risk again,” Easton said.

Easton puts a lot of the responsibility on Elon Musk, who led the now-sunset Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which took a sledgehammer approach to cutting government funding and employees in the first months of Trump’s second term.

“People like that, who come in and make little of veterans, and they do all of these cuts to the VA, where they fired thousands of people, and all that does is affect the health care [for] people who have served this country,” Easton said.

‘Pattern of callousness’

Easton first got fired up about speaking out against Trump when he watched the then-2016 presidential candidate imply that veterans with PTSD weren’t strong enough, during an address at the United States Military Academy, at West Point.

Trump, 79, has long attracted skepticism and anger among veterans, given his own record of avoiding service during the Vietnam War.

Trump received five draft deferments — four educational and one medical, over a diagnosis of bone spurs in his heels that has been widely questioned.

He famously said avoiding sexually transmitted diseases in Manhattan nightclubs in the 1970s was his “personal Vietnam.”

On entering politics, Trump also courted controversy with attacks on John McCain, the late Republican presidential candidate and Arizona senator who suffered torture as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.

"He's a war hero because he was captured,” Trump famously said of McCain in 2015. “I like people that weren't captured."

Easton said Trump had continued a pattern of “callousness and the lack of caring” toward veterans over the years, including recent controversy over photo opportunities at Arlington National Cemetery.

Easton, a former epidemiologist with the Minnesota Department of Health, started a new podcast this fall focused on current events, where he frequently hosts veterans.

Called Cover Your Six — a military term for “I’ve got your back” — the podcast is the latest of Easton’s efforts to speak out against racism and injustices, which he said he learned from his grandmother, a civil rights activist with the NAACP who hosted figures including late icons John Lewis and Martin Luther King, Jr. in her Memphis living room.

“I've been a warrior all my life,” Easton said.

In light of the scandal at 60 Minutes, it bears repeating that the primary crisis facing American democracy is about information. There are just too many ways for the rich and powerful to control the truth.

Over the weekend, news broke that the new head of CBS News, Bari Weiss, had spiked a highly revealing 60 Minutes investigation into the torture prison in El Salvador, where the president has sent deportees.

According to lead reporter Sharyn Alfonsi, the investigation had gone through all the levels that investigations go through at 60 Minutes, including lawyers. But at the last minute, Weiss yanked it, saying it couldn’t run without a reaction from the Trump administration.

For non-journalists, understand that this is not a valid reason. Alfonsi asked for a reaction. That’s what reporters do after they discover facts that those in power do not want to be made public. That she didn’t get one is a part of the story. In saying the story couldn’t air without one, Bari Weiss in effect gave Donald Trump control of editorial choices.

And hence control of the truth.

Non-journalists should also understand that this is what Weiss is being paid to do. Trump-aligned billionaires Larry and David Ellison, father and son, respectively, installed her after taking ownership of CBS. She’s best known as an “anti-woke” pundit. She has no experience in reporting or broadcasting. But what Weiss does have is the “only qualification that matters,” said Jennifer Schulze, a Chicago journalist and publisher of Indistinct Chatter, a newsletter about the news.

“She embraces Trump/MAGA friendly content,” Jennifer told me.

“I thought the Erika Kirk townhall was a questionable move, but even that ratings/advertising disaster can’t compare with what she’s just done to 60 Minutes,” Jennifer went on to say. “To suggest that the piece on the El Salvador torture prison was somehow unfinished and need more work is a cover for 'Trump won’t like it so it can’t run.’”

The 60 Minutes scandal is one example of the larger moral and professional corruption of the news by the rich and powerful. In this wide-ranging interview with me, Jennifer discusses courageous local coverage of ICE raids, the sacrilege of Olivia Nuzzi, the threat of media consolidation, Trump’s health and the apparent end of PBS in Arkansas.

“It's such a shame that Republicans turned PBS into a political issue,” Jennifer said. “It's been a valuable, free source of news and information for the entire country, but the future of PBS looks grim, especially in red states where there is little or no political will to keep it alive.”

Let's start locally. Chicago news media has been covering ICE raids better than the national media. Is that a fair statement?

Local Chicago media is on the story every single day 24/7. The coverage has been and continues to be really impressive, even inspiring. It's exactly what everyone should want from local, fact-based reporters and news outlets: timely, sustained, in-depth.

It's also deeply personal. These reporters and photographers live here. This is happening to their city and they are out there every day making sure the stories get told. With the help of vigilant residents and rapid response groups, Chicago journalists are holding ICE/CPB to account.

The videos of immigration incidents along with eyewitness on-the-ground accounts of how ICE rammed a car, not the other way around, or how ICE threw tear gas canisters at a peaceful crowd, are providing some powerful truth-telling. Many of these accounts gathered by our local press have also been used in federal court cases to show how and when Border Patrol head Greg Bovino, Kristi Noem and their federal agents are lying and behaving unlawfully. The national press dips in from time to time, then leaves. It is not lead story news for national newspapers or TV networks, but it should be!

Olivia Nuzzi's book, American Canto, is a sales dud. Yet here I am asking you about her. Why is she important, or a liability, to journalism? Why is that important to non-media folk?

The Nuzzi story is very much insider baseball for media types. It is at its heart a story about massive, ongoing failures by all involved, and that includes the magazines she worked for and the other journalists who continue to prop her up. I would want non-media people to be reminded that most journalists operate by a strict code of ethics that prohibit reporters from being romantically involved with a source and doing political work for a source. Nuzzi is apparently guilty of both.

The story of 21st-century news media is the story of 21st-century corporate consolidation? I'm thinking about the Ellisons controlling CBS and bidding for Warner. Why is that bad for democracy?

The last thing the country needs is Donald Trump running CNN. That's essentially what will happen if billionaire David Ellison succeeds in taking over the news network's parent company, WBD.

Ellison has apparently already promised Trump sweeping changes at CNN, including firing news anchors that Trump dislikes. We've already seen how Ellison is accommodating Trump at CBS with the hiring of rightwing pundit Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief of the news division, naming a Trump ally as the network's “ombudsman,” and promises to shift news content to a more “fair, balanced” coverage, which in maga-speak means pro-Trump plus no fact-checking. It would be a big blow to fact-based journalism and democracy if the same pro-Trump sensibilities take hold at yet another news organization like CNN.

There was endless news about President Joe Biden's health. There was almost nothing but news about his cognitive decline after the June debate. Trump is clearly in decline. He falls asleep during televised cabinet meetings. Yet there’s nothing close to the media's treatment of Biden. Why and why is that imbalance important?

Ten-plus years in and the mainstream press still struggles with sticking to any one Trump story. Of course, that's part of Trump's plan – to flood the zone with endless stories so that nothing sticks. I think that's the main reason we don't see ongoing news coverage of Trump's age/cognitive ability/and plain ole bat---- crazy behavior.

Trump falls asleep in a cabinet meeting and it's a one- maybe two-day story, because here's another weird thing or another international crisis to cover. Sometimes I wonder if it's the press version of FOMO. We can't really dig into this topic because we'll miss that one over there. I also think we have to acknowledge that the White House press corps has changed dramatically since Trump came into office. This is not the same press corps that was chasing all those Biden age stories. Now there are dozens of rightwing media personalities taking up oxygen in every briefing, especially the Oval Office gaggles.

That has changed the number of questions and the nature of the questions being asked, so it has an impact on the coverage itself. I still contend that fact-based news outlets should send cameras to the White House and set their reporters loose to report. Look at the big stories that have come out about Pete Hegseth and the Pentagon ever since the Pentagon press corps left the building.

Finally, Arkansas appears to be the first state to sever ties with PBS. PBS came into existence amid the Great Society reforms of the early 1960s. Is this the end of an era or the beginning of something new?

Millions of people in Arkansas rely on the PBS programming they see on one of the six PBS stations in that state. There's no way that this new local Arkansas effort can come close to filling the gap, particularly with children's programming. It's such a shame that Republicans turned PBS into a political issue. For years, it's been a valuable, free source of news and information for the entire country, but the future of PBS looks grim, especially in red states where there is little or no political will to keep it alive.

I will never get over the attack on my country January 6, 2021, by the anti-American lowlife, Donald J. Trump.

I will never move on until the man who spearheaded that attack is brought to justice.

Trump is the most dangerous man in the world, and if this has somehow escaped you until this point, he made the case yet again Wednesday night when he assaulted a podium, a microphone and our senses on primetime TV, telling approximately four lies every minute.

It was an unhinged performance worthy of one of history’s most notorious dictators.

Just six hours earlier, we had learned that former Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith privately testified in front of a closed House Judiciary Committee hearing that his legal team had “developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt” that the convicted felon, Trump, conspired to overturn the 2020 election.

Proof beyond a reasonable doubt.

Can we stop for a minute and consider what another day in America looked like Wednesday?

First, you have Smith telling a closed hearing that his team had “powerful evidence” on the morally dead Trump, who only hours later would claim he had the goods on America, and we better like the beating he is giving her or else.

A closed hearing …

Of course the damn thing was closed, because Republicans know good and damn well that if Smith were to take his testimony public, we all would have been forced to reckon with the worst attack on our Capitol since the War of 1812.

We would have been reminded that the traitor, Trump, did nothing but root for the attack’s success for hours while he sequestered himself in a room and punished ketchup bottles.

We would have been reminded that when the beatings and the threats, and the fires and the damage to our Capitol and worldwide reputation were finally over that gruesome day, the belligerent Trump stumbled in front of a camera and told his anti-American thugs who had attacked us that “he loved them.”

We would have been reminded how little Republicans did to safeguard this country from the worst possible outcome: The return to office of the man who is hellbent on destroying our Democracy and turning America into an authoritarian cesspool ruled by the very worst among us.

Finally, we would have been reminded in the wake of all THAT, how damn little Joe Biden’s Attorney General, the feckless Merrick Garland, did to bring America’s greatest enemy to justice.

Well, I am not moving on from this, dammit.

Ever.

We all watched in horror as America was being murdered in cold blood, hour after hour that day, and nothing was being done to stop it.

WE KNOW HE DID IT.
HIS FAMILY KNOWS HE DID IT.
HE KNOWS HE DID IT.

It was one of the most appalling days in American history, and everything should have been done to make sure it never, ever happened again.

Instead, nothing was done.

NOTHING.

I say again: I am NOT done with this, and I NEVER will be.

As a U.S. Navy veteran who served this country, and a man who cares deeply for her, I am demanding we get to the bottom of just what-in-the-hell happened January 6, 2021.

I will not be shutting up about it until I am dead and gone, because if there really are going to be no consequences for an assault on our country, the idea of America is as hollow as the tiny heart of the lowlife who attacked us.

Jack Smith testified in so many words Wednesday that the man who is currently taking a bulldozer to our White House and our human rights is a traitor.

Just what-in-the-hell is anybody who REALLY cares for his or her country supposed to do with this kind of information?

Let it go?

And what about Garland, this deplorable and gutless loser, who catastrophically failed in his greatest responsibility: PROTECTING AMERICA.

Where is this so-called man? Why wasn’t he on Capitol Hill with Smith on Wednesday?

I remind you: We are paying for his quiet retirement.

So I ask again: Just what in the hell is going on here?

For close to the past five years, I have lived in a constant state of trying to make sense of it all.

Why isn’t Trump rotting in jail right now?

Here is a part of one of the many pieces I wrote about all this following Trump’s attack. I spun this one in March 2023, in the weeks after the man who attacked us announced he was running for president so that he could finish us off.

Re-reading it again this morning, I began to shake with anger:

Just 10 weeks ago, the traitor, Donald J. Trump, announced he was once again running for the most powerful office in the world, the President of the United States of America.

This immediately made the disgusting man the Republicans’ frontrunner in the 2024 presidential election, and elevated the stakes in this contest to a sky-high level. If Trump wins, there’s every reason to believe it will be the last presidential election in American history.

The only person in America who seemed genuinely surprised by Trump’s terrifying and completely predictable announcement was our unflappable Attorney General Merrick Garland, who after nearly two years of doing nothing to punish Trump for his attack on our country, was finally forced out of his malaise and into making a move.

After careful consideration, the three-dimensional grandmaster judicial chess player studied the board, and outdid himself by actually putting himself in check when he pawned off his responsibility to somebody else to take care of this monumental threat to America.

Watching Garland glide to the podium, raise his voice to a thundering whisper, and haul out some unwritten rule to the game that actually tied both his hands behind his back was pretty galling, and plenty pathetic.
Essentially, he took out an empty gun, held himself up, and surrendered.

Grandmaster Crash told us that because Trump was now shockingly a candidate for president, he had been forced to appoint a special counsel to look into the former president’s violent attempt to overturn a free and fair election that he lost by more than seven millions votes.

Brilliant, eh?

Before moving onto Garland’s willing accomplices in our race toward fascism, let’s once and for all dispense with the stupid argument that even had he done his damn job and charged the treasonous Trump with some semblance of alacrity, it wouldn’t have prevented the rotten bastard from running for office while he was on trial.
Technically that’s true. Realistically, it’s laughable.

Had Garland charged Trump in a reasonable timeframe, say, ‘only’ one year after his coup attempt, there’s every reason to believe his gutless party, now provided the necessary political cover by the AG, would have long since abandoned Trump, and moved onto nominating far more qualified and cunning fascists like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis for president.

As bad as that would be, at least Trump would have been finished as a candidate, law and order would have prevailed, and the rotten, orange bastard would be staring at prison where he most certainly belongs.
Most important, there would actually be consequences for disgusting actions like the traitor, Trump’s, which would serve to prevent further attacks like this on our country.

There would be justice.

Except we never did get that justice, and because of that America has never been in this kind of danger.

Trump is every bit as guilty this morning as he was January 6, 2021, and far more dangerous. Predictably, he is failing catastrophically at his job, and lashing out at anybody who dares blame him for it.

He will own none of this, and warm his stubby, bandaged hands on the fires he has kindled.

That unhinged, unfit primetime performance on Wednesday night won’t be the last time he commandeers our TV networks (which one by one are falling at his fat feet and swollen ankles), and relentlessly lies to America, and threatens patriots who stand in his way.

We are in a battle for our survival.

If Jack Smith has “proof beyond a reasonable doubt” that ties Trump to the attack on America then everything must be done to make sure that everybody sees this evidence just as soon as possible.

Because if we are OK with the man who violently attacked our country now leading it, Democracy is dead.

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.

America’s 465th mass shooting in 2025, this one at Brown University in Rhode Island, should remind us all that it’s insane that the GOP passed and George W. Bush signed into law the so-called Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA) in 2006 that largely gives immunity from liability lawsuits to the gun industry (and only the gun industry).

It’s time to end the predator-state coalition in America, of which this is just one glaring example.

Ever since five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court ruled that “money is free speech” protected by the First Amendment and “corporations are persons” protected by the entire Bill of Rights, pretty much every industry in America has poured cash into politicians’ and judges’ pockets to be able to freely rip us off. Or, in the case of the gun industry, kill our children.

Even though a clear majority of Americans want stronger gun laws, our politicians have colluded with the gun industry to give us the exact opposite, as I detail in The Hidden History of Guns and the Second Amendment.

But it’s not just the gun industry.

When greedy banksters crashed our economy in 2008, Bush made sure not a single one went to prison, in stark contrast to the S&L scandal/crash in the 1980s: between 1988 and 1992 the Department of Justice sent 1,706 banksters to prison and obtained 2,603 guilty verdicts for fraud in financial institutions.

In 2008, however, after Bush and his cronies cashed their “contribution” checks, hundreds of banksters walked away with million- and even billion-dollar bonuses. Steve Mnuchin, who allegedly threw over 30,000 people out of their homes with robo-signed documents, was even appointed Treasury Secretary by Donald Trump and later given a billion dollars by the Saudis to invest.

Are you regularly hearing about these horrors on social media? Probably not, because prior to 1996, social media companies (then it was mostly CompuServe and AOL) had to hire people like me and Nigel Peacock to monitor their forums, make sure people followed the rules and told the truth. Nobody was the victim of online predators, and the company didn’t run secret algorithms to push rightwing memes at you and shadow-ban progressive content.

That year, however, after generous contributions to both parties, Congress passed a bill that gave Zuck and his buddies almost complete immunity from liability, which is why social media is now so dangerously toxic that Australia just banned it for kids.

Similarly, every other democracy in the world does your taxes for you and then lets you know their math so you can check it. In several European countries it’s so simple it’s basically a postcard; you only respond if you think they’re in error. The US is the only developed country on Earth where there’s a multi-billion-dollar industry preparing people’s tax returns for them.

For example, in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Finland returns are pre-filled and can be approved via text message or an online portal in minutes. In Germany, the Netherlands, the UK, and France tax forms are similarly filled out in advance by the government; you just sign and mail them back. And in Estonia, widely seen as a digital government pioneer, filing taxes takes minutes and is done with a simple online form that a fifth grader could complete.

Here in the US, Democrats thought this was a fine idea — it would save time and money for both taxpayers and the IRS — and so Biden rolled out a program where people with few deductions could simply file their taxes online for free.

Republicans, however, being on the take from the billion-dollar tax preparation industry, objected; they didn’t want the financial gravy train to stop because that would mean less of the money charged us for tax prep would end up in their campaign coffers, not to mention the fancy vacations, meals, and other lobbying benefits they can get.

So, the Trump administration announced — after tax prep company Intuit “donated” $1 million to Trump’s “inaugural” slush fund — that they’re killing off the free filing option; going forward, pretty much everybody must either learn enough tax law to deal with the IRS themselves or pay a tax preparation company.

And then there’s the health insurance industry, a giant blood-sucking tick attached to our collective backs that made $74 billion in profits (in addition to the billions paid to its most senior executives) last year by denying us payments for doctors’ visits, tests, procedures, surgeries, and even organ transplants.

Most Americans have no idea that the United States is quite literally the only country in the developed world that doesn’t define healthcare as an absolute right for all of its citizens and thus provide it at low or no cost.

That’s it. We’re the only one left. We’re the only country in the entire developed world where somebody getting sick can leave a family bankrupt, destitute, and homeless.

A half-million American families are wiped out every year so completely that they lose everything and must declare bankruptcy just because somebody got sick. The number of health-expense-related bankruptcies in all the other developed countries in the world combined is zero.

Yet the United States spends more on “health care” than any other country in the world: about 17 percent of GDP. Switzerland, Germany, France, Sweden and Japan all average around 11 percent, and Canada, Denmark, Belgium, Austria, Norway, Netherlands, United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Australia all come in between 9.3 percent and 10.5 percent.

Health insurance premiums right now make up about 22 percent of all taxable payroll (and don’t even cover all working people), whereas Medicare For All would run an estimated 10 percent and would cover every man, woman, and child in America. And don’t get me started on the Medicare Advantage scam the Bush administration created that’s routinely ripping off seniors and destroying actual Medicare.

And if disease doesn’t get us, hunger might. One-in-five American children live in “food insecure” households and frequently go to bed hungry at a time Trump and Republicans are cutting SNAP and WIC benefits and grants to food banks.

The amount of money that America’s richest four billionaires (Musk, Bezos, Gates, Zuckerberg) added to their money bins since 2020 because of the Reagan/Bush/Trump tax cuts is over $300 billion: the cost to entirely end child poverty in America is an estimated $25 billion.

And, because of the body and brain damage hunger and malnutrition are doing to one-in-five American children, child hunger in the US is costing our society an estimated $167.5 billion a year in lost opportunity and productivity.

So, why do we avoid spending $25 billion to solve a $167.5 billion problem? Because of the predator-state coalition, which was legalized and enabled by five corrupt on-the-take Republicans on the US Supreme Court.

The predators don’t want you to know this stuff, of course, which is why they’ve bought up or started over 1500 radio stations, hundreds of TV stations, multiple TV networks, multiple major and local newspapers, and thousands of websites to bathe us in a continuous slurry of rightwing b------- and pro-industry talking points.

And then there are the monopolies that Reagan legalized in 1983 and the Bush and Trump administrations have encouraged. Before that, we had competition within industries, and most malls and downtowns were filled with locally-owned businesses and stores.

Grocery stores, airlines, banks, social media, retail stores, gas stations, car manufacturers, insurance companies, internet providers (ISPs), computer companies, phone companies, hospital chains: the list goes on and on.

All — because of their monopoly or oligopoly status — cost the average American family an average of over $5,000 a year that is not paid by the citizens of any other developed country in the world because the rest of the world won’t tolerate this kind of predatory, monopolistic behavior.

Trump has even managed to turn immigration into a predatory scheme, transferring hundreds of billions of dollars from social programs to a masked, secret police force and Republican-aligned private prison contractors, as he gleefully inflicts brutality on dark-skinned immigrants and American citizens alike.

It’s time to roll back the predatory state, and it’d make a hell of a campaign slogan for Democrats running next November and in 2028. End Corporate Personhood and the legal bribery of politicians and judges.

Two Alabama Black Lives Matter activists accused of setting a shopping cart on fire as part of a protest against the fatal police shooting of a young Black man have been charged with conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists, in what one supporter calls a “railroading.”

The federal charge unveiled as part of a superseding indictment against Mercutio Southall, 41, and Lillian Colburn, 26, alleges that the pair committed terrorism through an arson at a Walmart Supercenter in Homewood, a Birmingham suburb, on Aug. 22.

“They’ve been trying to label Black Lives Matter a terrorist movement,” RaShaun Whetstone, a friend of Southall and Colburn, told Raw Story. “This is a railroading.”

The indictments come as President Donald Trump attempts to paint left-wing activism as “domestic terrorism,” through a national security memorandum that accuses activists of undermining “support for law enforcement” in order “to justify and encourage acts of violent revolution.”

This month, Attorney General Pam Bondi issued a memo instructing the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces, which include local law enforcement partners, to prioritize investigations of antifascist groups.

Echoing Trump’s national security memo, Bondi claimed: “These domestic terrorists use violence or the threat of violence to advance political and social agendas, including opposition to law and immigration enforcement; extreme views in favor of mass migration and open borders; adherence to radical gender ideology, anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, or anti-Christianity.”

‘Not even Mercutio’s MO’

Luke Baumgartner, a research fellow at the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, told Raw Story the Alabama case is, as far as he knows, the first time the federal government has applied the material support to terrorists charge to Black Lives Matter protesters.

Southall and Colburn pleaded not guilty.

Whetstone told Raw Story he believes Southall and Colburn to be falsely accused. He said the alleged crime was completely out of character for Southall, who as an early leader of Black Lives Matter became one of the most high-profile racial justice activists in the Birmingham area.

Whetstone added that Colburn doesn’t match the person seen in store surveillance video.

Homewood has seen protests since June, when an 18-year-old Black man, Jabari Peoples, was fatally shot by an unidentified police officer at a city park. Police said the shooting followed a struggle, after which Peoples attempted to retrieve a handgun from his car, according to WVTM 13. Peoples’ family and a young woman who was with him say he was unarmed.

Community members have held several protests resulting in multiple arrests, WVTM 13 reported. The news station quoted a leader of the Birmingham chapter of Black Lives Matter as saying they planned to disrupt businesses until their demands, including the release of police body camera video, were met.

Homewood police said in a press release shortly after Southall’s arrest on state charges that detectives obtained evidence he attended a protest at the park on the day of the alleged arson.

The police allege Southall traveled from the protest to Walmart, and accuse him of filling “a shopping cart full of rags, blankets, charcoal bags, small engine fuel, and paint thinner,” then pre-positioning “the shopping cart in a clothing aisle,” before returning to the protest.

Southall was charged in state court with arson and first-degree criminal mischief.

The police said at the time they were working with the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms “on pursuing federal arson charges.”

Colburn was arrested on identical charges.

AL.com reported that detectives testified that Colburn accompanied Southall from the protest to Walmart and the two loaded the cart together, then left in a car that investigators determined was registered to Colburn.

Later, investigators said, a woman wearing a blond wig, identified as Colburn, returned to the store and ignited the cart.

Whetstone told Raw Story he doesn’t buy prosecutors’ claims.

“It’s not even Mercutio’s MO,” he said. “Never has he done anything like that. Being who he is, he’s going to set a shopping cart on fire? What the hell kind of sense does that make?”

Federal prosecutors obtained an indictment for arson in late October. A month later, a grand jury returned a superseding indictment adding the charge of material support to terrorists.

Southall and Colburn could not be reached for comment.

An announcement by the FBI’s Birmingham office last week did not mention the defendants’ ties to Black Lives Matter, but characterized them as “violent actors.”

“Let it be clear: While peaceful protesting is a protected right, arson and destruction of property are violent crimes that will not be tolerated in our community,” Special Agent in Charge Dave Fitzgibbons said.

Baumgartner told Raw Story: “It’s not surprising they would levy this charge given that their focus has shifted [to the left]. They’re focusing on these left-wing or anarchist groups. Coming at them with all the tools in their toolkits is definitely in line with their stated strategy.”

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for Northern Alabama did not respond to a question about whether AG Bondi played any role in the decision to charge the defendants with terrorism. A spokesperson said the office did not comment on ongoing litigation.

‘Federal crime of terrorism’

Federal statute makes it a crime to act in support of “an offense identified as a federal crime of terrorism.”

Federal prosecutors have applied the material support to terrorists charge to white supremacist groups and activists, recently including Dallas Erin Humber, the leader of Terrorgram Collective, who is linked to a mass shooting targeting LGBTQ+ people in Slovakia and a deadly school shooting in Brazil, in addition to plots to assassinate politicians and attack the power grid.

The United States, Canada and New Zealand have all designated Terrorgram as a terrorist entity.

In another case, in 2022, four white supremacists pleaded guilty to material support to terrorists, for plotting to carry out coordinated attacks on the power grid in an attempt to instigate race war.

The charge is also being used to pursue violent nihilist groups.

Writing with Barry Jonas, Baumgartner noted in the journal Just Security that in October, for the first time, federal prosecutors indicted a leader of 764, a nihilist network, for conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists.

The government alleges that 764 leader Baron Martin manipulated child victims to self-harm.

Baumgartner and Jonas wrote: “By charging Martin with conspiring to provide material support for terrorists, the shift represents a long-overdue recognition that such conduct is not just depraved — it is terrorism.”

Last week, Canada became the first country to list 764 as a terrorist entity.

A closely related and better-known statute making it a crime to knowingly support “a foreign terrorist organization” has been used frequently since the Sept. 11 attacks to prosecute American citizens who attempted to join jihadist groups such as al-Qaida and ISIS.

Baumgartner said federal prosecutors now appear to be utilizing the material support charge with increasing frequency against defendants across the ideological spectrum.

Last month, prosecutors in Texas obtained an indictment against eight defendants for providing material support for terrorists, regarding an attack on an ICE facility.

The government has named one defendant as firing a weapon at law enforcement, while alleging others ignited fireworks, destroyed a surveillance camera, and vandalized vehicles and a shed.

‘Cause of justice’

Birmingham is a Southern city known as a cradle of the Civil Rights movement, where the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. launched a massive desegregation campaign in 1963, in which child marchers were met with police dogs and firehoses.

In his famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” King excoriated “the white moderate” and called himself an “extremist for the cause of justice.”

Of the two activists now facing federal charges, Southall has a long history of activism — which has seen him singled out by Trump for verbal abuse.

In November 2015, the activist was forcibly ejected from a Trump rally in Birmingham.

After Southall disrupted the event by chanting, “Black lives matter,” the Washington Post reported that video showed him falling amid a throng of white men who appeared to kick and punch him.

A Post reporter observed a man put his hands on Southall’s neck and a female onlooker shout, “Don’t choke him!”

“They said, ‘Go home, n-----, and somebody punched me,” Southall told Al.com.

Speaking to Fox News, Trump reportedly said: “Maybe he should have been roughed up, because it was absolutely disgusting what he was doing.

“I have a lot of fans, and they were not happy about it. And this was a very obnoxious guy who was a troublemaker who was looking to make trouble.”

‘Untethered from reality’

Despite Trump’s hostility, conservative efforts to get Black Lives Matter designated as a terrorist group did not gain traction in his first term.

In 2017, the FBI drew criticism for an internal assessment that appeared to classify BLM activists as “Black Identity Extremists” who posed a threat of lethal violence.

Three years later, a law enforcement training group characterized BLM protesters as “terrorists.”

It also drew rebuke, one advocate for police reform calling the characterization “untethered from reality” and worrying that it could lead “to people dying unnecessarily.”

In the South, the Ku Klux Klan long waged a campaign of terror which succeeded in intimidating Black people from exercising their right to vote and ousting multiracial governments. Whetstone noted that the U.S. government has never designated the Klan as a terrorist organization.

“Black Lives Matter ruffles a few feathers, and they want to call us terrorists,” he said. “This is just one small step in how they normalize punishing anyone who is associated with any liberation movement. They’re trying to criminalize it.”

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump's handpicked board of trustees voted on Thursday to add Trump's name to the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, while allegedly muting the objections of Democratic members of the board and likely in violation of federal law that named the Kennedy Center by statute.

Democratic lawmakers reacted to the news with disgust and dismissal, telling Raw Story the rename will not stick and will be reversed swiftly when they retake power in Washington.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) had one of the most forceful reactions, speculating MAGA allies will eventually try to rebrand the White House.

"Well, I mean, he appointed all the sycophants to the board," she said. "So I mean, they're going to name the White House — they're going to try to name the White House after him before we're done with this, and then we're going to take the White House back and we're going to fix it all. Enjoy having two years of that."

Asked for comment, Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-PA) mockingly claimed that the Longworth House Office Building will have his name added to it because he says so.

Boyle added, "Everything's about him, the plaques that he actually put up, plaques with his, with his nonsense" — a reference to a series of juvenile plaques installed below various former presidents' pictures written by Trump himself.

Rep. Don Beyer (D-VA) took a similar position to Ocasio-Cortez.

"An infinite ego. You know, I mean, I just, it makes Stalin look humble. The board that he handpicked, it's embarrassing and, and it won't last very long."

WASHINGTON — Republican leaders’ refusal to consider extending Affordable Care Act subsidies set to expire at year’s end is weird, according to at least one senior GOP senator, after the issue erupted and fueled high drama in the House this week.

“It's just strange,” Sen. Mike Rounds (R-SD), who sits on the Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, told congressional reporters.

“We had the vote last week, and … now the House passed [its own measure], and we're going to have a vote, and of course, that’s not going to go anywhere.

“There could have been a one-year extension. Maybe there was a chance to have enough votes … we need 60 votes here. I want to vote on something that can actually pass, and I don't know why that's not our plan.”

No one really knows what Republicans’ plan is — other than to craft a plan.

While swing-state Republicans have been freaking out — especially the four endangered moderates who crossed Speaker Mike Johnson when they formally crossed party lines Wednesday — GOP leaders have, basically, shrugged off widespread fears of Obamacare subsidies expiring on New Years, leaving millions of Americans bracing for brutal rate hikes.

Most Republicans remain unmoved, even after Democrats have successfully raised alarm bells about the unaffordable rate hikes for months, including by using the issue as fuel for the longest government shutdown in history.

Just last week, the GOP-led Senate failed to pass dueling health-care bills. In response to a Democratic measure to extend COVID-era insurance subsidies another three years, rank-and-file Republicans cobbled together a last-minute measure aimed at promoting health savings accounts over Obamacare exchanges.

Both failed by a vote of 51-48 in the chamber where 60 votes are needed to pass most bills.

Then the four moderate House Republicans dramatically crossed the aisle, joining a Democratic-led discharge petition to force a vote on a Democratic measure that would extend subsidies for three years.

Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA), Mike Lawler (R-NY) , Rob Bresnahan (R-PA) and Ryan Mackenzie (R-PA) were the members who chose to cross Speaker Johnson, underlining the Louisianan’s lack of control of his party ahead of next year’s midterm elections.

“We have worked for months to craft a two-party solution to address these expiring health-care credits,” Fitzpatrick said in a statement.

“Our only request was a floor vote on this compromise, so that the American People’s voice could be heard on this issue. That request was rejected ... Unfortunately, it is House leadership themselves that have forced this outcome.”

The Democratic proposal will now get a vote in the new year — but only after subsidies lapse.

Observers noted that in July, three of the four Republican rebels voted for the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” the GOP budget measure which contained massive cuts to spending on Medicaid, another key health-care resource for millions of Americans. Fitzpatrick said no then too.

This week, the picture grew more confusing still, as a separate House GOP health bill passed.

Seen as barely even a bandaid, as it doesn’t address the expiring subsidies, it has no chance of gaining 60 votes in the Senate, according to South Dakota Sen. Rounds.

‘24 million people’

Gridlock aside, it seems most everyone on Capitol Hill loves a bit of political drama — even at the end of a year of relentless chaos.

“This is huge,” Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) marveled to Raw Story after learning that a fourth Republican had signed off on the discharge petition.

“This is, like, huge for my district.”

The member of the progressive “Squad” of lawmakers was far from alone.

“I think it's a big victory, and it's a victory for the American people,” former House Majority Leader Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-MD) told Raw Story.

“We need to pass that, put it over in the Senate and see whether they have the courage to do what's right.”

Securing a House vote does nothing to dislodge Republicans on the other side of the Capitol, though.

And Senate Majority Leader John Thune is insulated from House rules, including on discharge petitions.

There are Senate Republicans who like their moderate House colleagues fear the electoral repercussions of failing to extend subsidies, but nowhere near enough to buck leaders and secure an extension.

Still, with the 2026 midterms just around the corner, Rep. Glenn Ivey (D-MD) and other Democrats are celebrating the four Republican moderates’ decision to buck Speaker Johnson and force a vote on extending health insurance subsidies.

Like Sen. Rounds, Ivey also marveled at the larger GOP’s continued opposition to helping so many Americans, however dire their need.

Despite “24 million people” facing a financial cliff when ACA subsidies expire, Ivey told Raw Story, “Republican leaders weren't listening to that.

“I don't know what they were listening to. I just don't understand what they're doing, and in the Senate they’re saying they’re not going to move something forward anyway.

“So I'm like, ‘Worst of all possible worlds, from a Republican standpoint.’

“We hit 218 so we got the votes to move [the discharge petition], but they don't want to bring it to the floor, and then the Senate Republicans want to block it. It's crazy.”

Let me take off my psychotherapist hat and simply speak as a parent, an adult, a businessman, a citizen, and a human being.

There is something deeply and fundamentally wrong with Donald Trump.

Wednesday night’s speech demonstrated it. He didn’t need to trash-talk Joe Biden, or try to claim that the country was “dead” when he came into office, or exaggerate his accomplishments, or lie about the state of things. None of that was necessary.

He didn’t need to put depreciating comments under the pictures of prior presidents in the White House, or replace Joe Biden’s picture with a autopen.

This ends when we decide it ends. When we stop treating pathology as entertainment and cruelty as strength.

These are the kind of things junior high school boys do. And not even most junior high school boys; just the really dysfunctional ones. The bullies. The ones who are desperate to be part of the in crowd, but always on the outside looking in. The ones no one wants as friends.

This man is sick. And he’s inflicting his sickness on our country. And he’s surrounded himself with sick people, or at least with people willing to tolerate his mental, emotional, and spiritual sickness.

As well as people who share his sickness: There’s also clearly something wrong with man-children like Stephen Miller, Pete Hegseth, and Kash Patel.

With these men, it goes beyond the normal sellout type of person willing to do anything for wealth and power, the kind of behavior we see in people like Pam Bondi or the administration members who’ll swear that the 2020 election was stolen.

There’s a deep cruelty combined with a pathological insecurity and a level of hate and intolerance for others that’s shocking. Anybody who’s ever played any sort of role in leadership is looking at this administration aghast. The leaders of the rest of the rest of the world must be in shock.

There’s a deep sickness at the head of this government. The childishness. The violence. The bloodlust that we see off the coast of Venezuela. The willingness to sanction rape and murder and land grabs in Ukraine. The enthusiasm to bring our country to the brink of war. Plastering gold-painted geegaws all over the White House.

And then Wednesday night Trump goes off for 20 minutes quite literally shouting at the country like an old man yelling at kids on his lawn. Ranting about Black Somalis. Bragging about nonexistent victories and peace deals. Just making s--- up.

No president of the United States has ever behaved this way. Probably no governor or mayor has ever gotten away with this kind of psychopathology and obscene behavior.

It’s embarrassing. It’s humiliating America.

It’s setting a terrible example for our young people. Children who were just entering the early years of public school when Trump first ran based on a racist rant in 2015 are now graduating from high school thinking that this is normal.

That, in and of itself, is a disaster for their and America’s future.

And now he has an “armada” poised off the coast of Venezuela trying to provoke a war with that nation.

It’s also becoming increasingly clear that he was right in the middle of it all with Jeffrey Epstein, and is now frantically trying to avoid questions about the teen modeling agency and talent show he owned back in those days.

He’s gutted America’s principal agencies of soft power, the Voice of America and USAID, strung Ukraine along for almost an entire year as their people get slaughtered, and accepted hundreds of millions of dollars worth of naked bribes from foreign autocrats and American business leaders.

He’s deployed masked, secret police into our cities who are gleefully brutalizing brown-skinned people and anybody who tries to document their hugely unAmerican activity.

He kowtows before Vladimir Putin and China’s president Xi, and embraces murderous dictators who’ve ordered the killing of an American journalist and routinely cut the heads off of their own people. He tore down the East Wing of the White House in defiance of federal and local law, history, and respect for “The People’s House.”

It’s reached the point where we’re now confronted with a hard truth: This isn’t about left versus right anymore or even politics as usual. It isn’t about tax policy or border policy or whose yard sign we prefer.

This is now about whether we’re willing to normalize sickness in power.

Whether we tell ourselves comforting stories because confronting the actual reality in front of us is frightening.

Whether we allow cruelty, lying, and instability to become the cultural baseline simply because calling it out makes dinner conversations awkward or costs us friends or clicks or donors.

Turning points in history don’t usually announce themselves with marching bands. They creep in while decent people look away, hoping the fever will break on its own.

But it never does. Fevers break only when the body fights back. Democracies survive only when citizens decide that character still matters, that truth still matters, that children deserve better examples than tantrums and threats and gold-plated vulgarity.

Silence is not neutrality: It’s consent.

If you’re reading this, you still have agency. Use it. Talk to your neighbors. Support journalists and organizations willing to tell the truth. Show up, vote, organize, refuse to laugh it off, refuse to excuse it, refuse to become numb.

Demand leaders who are adults, not bullies. Who are steady, not sick. Who see power as a responsibility, not a toy.

This ends when we decide it ends. When we stop treating pathology as entertainment and cruelty as strength. When we remember that democracy is not self-executing; it requires citizens who are awake, engaged, and unwilling to surrender their moral compass for the illusion of order.

We don’t need to be perfect. We just need to be brave enough to say: this is wrong, and we will not accept it.

The future is watching us right now, and one day our children will ask what we did when it mattered. Let’s make sure we have an answer we can live with.