It took Jeanine Pirro two decades of televised loyalty to become Donald Trump’s top prosecutor in Washington. It took one honest court filing to put her on the chopping block.

Trump is now actively considering removing Pirro as U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, according to CNN — two sources say the president is “furious,” fumed about her all weekend, and that it’s “highly likely” she loses her job. A senior administration official says Trump was “blindsided” by her filing: “The president did not know beforehand that she was going to do that.” The two spoke by phone Saturday. The conversation, per a source read out on the call, “wasn’t pretty.”

Her crime: telling a judge the truth about the Reflecting Pool.

Trump spent the spring bragging about his $14 million makeover of the Lincoln Memorial’s signature water feature, rushed to completion for the America 250 celebrations — complete with a no-bid contract handed to Atlantic Industrial Coatings. When the new blue liner started peeling within weeks, the president had an explanation ready: vandals with box cutters, working their way down the pool — “cut, cut, cut.”

The administration found its vandal in David Hearn, a 67-year-old three-time Olympic canoeist who says he paused a 64-mile bike ride on June 19, reached into the pool to feel the already-peeling liner, and left. On July 2, a grand jury indicted him on a felony carrying up to 10 years in prison — over a two-square-foot section of liner. Pirro herself stood at a podium and said he “violently” ripped it up. His lawyer, Norm Eisen, called him a scapegoat and warned that if touching the Reflecting Pool is a felony, “every American is at risk.”

Then, on Friday, Pirro’s office quietly detonated the whole story. Her dismissal motion revealed that a National Park Service engineer had flagged the “peeling” liner to the contractor about a week before Hearn ever stopped his bike — and that damage sat in the center of the pool, where no vandal would wade. The renovation, the filing said, was “hasty and botched.” Interior, Pirro wrote, stonewalled her office through “dozens and dozens” of requests before slowly trickling out documents that would have prevented the indictment entirely.

Trump’s response has been a masterclass in shooting the messenger. On Monday he told reporters Pirro “choked“ and “folded like an umbrella,” blaming a “vicious” judge — and when asked directly whether her job was safe, he snapped at the reporter: “You’re fake news. Don’t ever talk again.”

Note who isn’t in trouble. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum — whose department did the withholding, and who is still publicly backing the vandalism theory — retains the president’s full confidence.

And note what Trump conceded, mid-rant: he admitted it’s difficult to make out who’s actually on the tapes he keeps citing — before insisting the vandalism was “for all to see.”

Pirro hasn’t said a word publicly since Saturday.

Fifty days into Mitch McConnell’s disappearance from public life, the entire public record of his existence amounts to two photographs and a stack of written statements.

Not one second of video. Not one syllable of audio. Not one reporter in the room.

That void has become the story, because Kentucky’s governor has now demanded McConnell either fill it or leave the Senate. In a letter sent July 28, Andy Beshear called on the 84-year-old senator to “directly and verbally address the people of Kentucky and provide proof of your capacity to serve, or resign.”

Verbally.

That single word carries the weight of the letter. Beshear isn’t asking for another written statement, anyone in his office can read those. He’s asking for the one thing 50 days of updates have conspicuously failed to produce: McConnell’s voice.

And then the letter presses even harder.

Beshear wrote that he was sending it “under the assumption that he is capable of reading and responding verbally, and not incapacitated by means of consciousness or cognition.” If he can’t respond, Beshear said, the letter should instead be treated as a “demand” for his clSenate staff “to be honest and transparent with the people of Kentucky.” Think about that for a second. A sitting governor, in writing, openly acknowledging the possibility that a sitting senator may not even be able to read the letter addressed to him.

Nearly a week later, there has been no verbal address. No reported response to the letter at all.

Look at what that demand is running into. After an ambulance was photographed outside McConnell’s Washington home on June 14, his office stayed silent for weeks before releasing information a little at a time: a July 12 disclosure that he’d fallen and been “briefly unconscious,” along with assurances there was no heart attack, stroke, or tumors. Then came two bedside photos with his wife, Elaine Chao, followed by a note from the Office of the Attending Physician saying he was “not yet medically cleared to leave the rehab facility.” No physician has put a name on any of it. No timeline has been provided. Beshear himself told CNN he doesn’t know whether the photos are an “accurate portrayal” of McConnell’s condition.

People in Kentucky have noticed. At Saturday’s Fancy Farm picnic, the political tradition McConnell had attended for more than four decades, the crowd repeatedly chanted, “Where’s Mitch?” at the stage he didn’t appear on. His office, meanwhile, released a written statement about how much he’d miss the “pork and mutton.”

Beshear isn’t interested in pork-and-mutton updates. He also sent a letter to Majority Leader John Thune, promising to “insist” that the Senate “fully investigate his condition” and “begin the process if warranted” if McConnell refuses to appear. There are only three ways that process ends: death, resignation, or expulsion.

And Beshear has already signaled what he thinks happens if the seat opens. Kentucky Republicans passed a 2024 law — over his veto — stripping the governor’s power to appoint a senator and requiring a special election instead. Beshear has claimed the state constitution gives him appointment power anyway, said he’s willing to fight the law in court, and told Katie Couric that if a vacancy comes, “a lot of options are on the table, and I’ll look at all of them.” Asked directly whether he’d appoint a Republican to a Republican’s seat, the Democratic governor has declined to say.

Meanwhile, the silence carries a legislative cost. McConnell’s absence has stalled the Appropriations Committee because Republicans’ 15-14 majority disappears without his vote.

This could all be over in about ten seconds. A short video. A few spoken words.

Instead, his office keeps releasing photographs.

Mitch McConnell’s office wants Monday’s update to close the book: a new photo, a statement from the senator, a note from his doctors. Recovering from a fall. Working hard. Back soon.

None of it makes sense.

Start with the therapy. The doctors’ note is specific about one thing and one thing only: rehab — multiple sessions a day, fall prevention, childhood polio and his mobility. Every sentence is about his legs. Six weeks after an ambulance crew answered a call at his home, there is not one word about his heart. Not one word about his cognition.

Second: the fall. That’s the official story — he fell at home June 14, was briefly knocked unconscious, caught pneumonia in the hospital. But at 8:36 that morning, D.C. dispatch sent an Advanced Life Support ambulance to his address for an “unconscious” person. On the recording, a medic reports “CPR in progress.” A dispatcher calls it in as a “cardiac arrest.” His name is never spoken and nobody has confirmed who the patient was — we are not telling you McConnell had a cardiac event, because nobody outside that house can. But healthy people who trip don’t typically get CPR. So which came first that morning — a fall, or whatever made a dispatcher say “cardiac arrest”? His July statement denied a heart attack, a stroke, broken bones, a hemorrhage — a lawyerly list of everything it wasn’t. In six weeks, the words on that tape have never once appeared in a statement from his office. Not confirmed, not denied, not acknowledged. If the audio is wrong, saying so takes a sentence.

Third: can he speak? His colleagues say he’s sharp — John Thune describes phone calls, his staff says he’s briefed daily on Senate business. Take every word at face value. It’s still a fact that in 43 days the public has gotten no interview, no video, and not one second of his voice. Every word attributed to Mitch McConnell since June 14 has arrived typed. A man well enough for daily defense-appropriations briefings and “therapy” can record 30 second video saying hello to his constituents. He hasn’t. Why?

Fourth: the doctor. Monday’s note came from the Office of the Attending Physician — and no physician signed it. Not one doctor named, in six weeks of updates. The most documented man in the Senate is being vouched for entirely by people without names.

Fifth: the photo itself. Put the two side by side. In the first one, two weeks ago, McConnell sat up in a hospital bed holding a newspaper — the oldest proof-of-life device there is, the hostage photo's date stamp. In Monday's photo, the newspaper is gone. Nothing in the frame dates it at all; you have only his office's word that it was taken Sunday. And the man in it looks worse, not better — grayer, more diminished, more propped than seated, a bruise on his left eye — which is a strange trajectory for someone six weeks into a strenuous daily rehab program that his doctors describe as working. Sen. Ron Johnson, citing an unnamed source, has claimed the first image was old; that's unverified, and his office could kill it in a sentence. It hasn't.

Where is Mitch McConnell?

There is a rendering of the new Penn Station in which the first thing you see — before a train, a track, a departure board — is the name Donald J. Trump, etched in stone beneath a presidential seal.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy wrote to three Senate committees on Wednesday, asking them to direct Amtrak to rename New York Penn Station. The letter also seeks $1 billion for the $8 billion rebuild and permission to siphon property tax from the blocks around it. It never says what the new name should be. It asks Congress to authorize a renaming and leaves the name to be filled in later.

He never says the new name. He doesn’t need to.

That’s because he said it out loud last August, asked whether the station would keep its title: “Trump Station, he figured, has a nice ring to it."“

The developer chosen to build it doesn’t use a P in its logo for Penn Station. It uses a T, probably not for “Train.”

This shouldn’t be surprising. Trump has done this before. Many, many times.

This is a man who spent forty years putting his name on buildings and has spent this term putting it on the country. Fifteen days ago, Palm Beach International Airport became President Donald J. Trump International Airport. The State Department stuck his name on the U.S. Institute of Peace. He wanted Dulles. He wanted the Kennedy Center. Penn Station — busiest rail hub in the Western Hemisphere, 600,000 bodies a day, in his hometown, on the site of the building New York is still mourning — was always the prize.

He just told everyone he never asked for it, but he has tried extortion.

On October 1, the administration froze $205 million owed to the $16 billion Gateway tunnel under the Hudson, citing a review of diversity practices in contracting. The shutdown ended in November. The money stayed frozen. In February, reporting surfaced that Trump had offered Chuck Schumer a trade: back the renaming of Penn Station and Dulles, and the money moves. Schumer told him he had no authority to rename anything.

Then Trump, on Air Force One, said Schumer suggested it to him. Unions suggested it. Democrats. Republicans. Everybody suggested it. Schumer was online within the hour calling it an “absolute lie.”

Four days later his own press secretary took the story back. Asked why the president wanted the name changed, Karoline Leavitt said it was something he’d floated with Schumer. Then, unprompted: why not.

Which brings us to the part that should worry them. Trump’s handpicked board voted his name onto the Kennedy Center in December 2025. A federal judge tore it off in May in a 94-page ruling issued, pointedly, on John F. Kennedy’s birthday. Workers unscrewed the letters in June. An appeals court refused to put them back this month.

He put the name on a memorial to an assassinated president and dared a court to take it down. A court did. He is now going through Congress instead — the one route that would survive a court.The letter also seeks $1 billion

Jerry Nadler, whose district holds the station, called it a hostile takeover and pointed out nobody has said who pays. Kathy Hochul swore in March that the Moynihan Train Hall would be renamed “over my dead body.” Yesterday her spokesman said the governor is focused on actually building the thing.

New York already lost one Penn Station — demolished in 1963, a loss so obscene it produced the city’s landmarks law. This time the building survives.

Now it’s the name on the demolition list.

Yesterday, McConnell’s office reached out through an intermediary, of course, and asked me to delete this post naming the senior staff who run his DC office. Public employees, public titles, paid by you.

I said no. Here’s the record they’d rather you not sit with.

June 14, 8:36 a.m. — A dispatch call goes out for an “unconscious” person at McConnell’s D.C. address. An advanced life support ambulance is sent. Six minutes later, a medic radios “CPR in progress.” At 8:43, the dispatcher relays it as a “cardiac arrest.” The senator isn’t named in the audio. It’s his address.

June 14, later that day — His office announces he’s been admitted to the hospital and is “receiving excellent care.” That’s the whole statement. No cardiac arrest. No CPR.

June 15 — Senate Majority Leader John Thune and Whip John Barrasso tell reporters they’ve spoken with him. One day after the ambulance.

July 2 — After weeks of silence, the office issues a new statement: he “continues to improve” and is “working closely with his staff.” Every press inquiry after that gets the same statement, recycled.

July 12 — 28 days in, McConnell finally speaks. In writing. He had a fall, was “briefly unconscious,” picked up mild pneumonia. His doctors ruled out broken bones, concussion, heart attack, stroke, tumors, hemorrhages. Notice what that very thorough list never mentions: cardiac arrest.

Today — 40 days since the ambulance. One undated photo. Zero video. Zero interviews. Brief calls to political allies, arranged by his office. And a request that I delete a post.

I answer exclusively to my subscribers. That direct accountability is the entire point of independent journalism.

The corporate press asked politely, got a recycled statement, and moved on. Independent journalists stay on the story. We continue asking questions when met with silence, because stonewalling from a taxpayer-funded office about a sitting senator’s fitness to serve is an active decision, made by people on the public payroll, to withhold critical facts from voters.

The FDA apologized this weekend. Not to the roughly 7,000 Americans confirmed or suspected to be battling weeks of what health officials politely call “watery, sometimes explosive” diarrhea.

To the lettuce company.

That company is Taylor Farms, the produce giant whose shredded iceberg sits at the center of the largest parasite outbreak in years. Last Thursday evening, with the outbreak raging, Taylor Farms executives met with the White House and the FDA to distance the company from the outbreak and air complaints about the government’s investigation — a sit-down first reported by The New York Times.

Three days later, the government’s only hard evidence against the company evaporated.

Late Sunday, the agency announced that its one and only positive test in the nationwide cyclospora outbreak — a sample of Taylor Farms shredded iceberg that had tested positive just 24 hours earlier — was a false positive. Lab experts “re-reviewed” the result, the agency said, and it doesn’t count. Taylor Farms went further: the FDA “made a mistake... FDA has not identified a single positive product test result.” The company says the agency apologized to it directly.

The Saturday notice announcing the positive test has since been scrubbed from the FDA’s outbreak updates.

And then there’s the money. FEC filings show Taylor Fresh Foods, the company’s parent, wrote a $1 million check to MAGA Inc., the super PAC bankrolling Trump’s political operation, in March 2025 — less than a week after the FDA announced it would shelve the Food Traceability Rule, the biggest food-safety reform in a decade, designed specifically to trace contaminated produce through the supply chain during an outbreak exactly like this one. The rule now sits on ice until July 2028.

To be clear: no one has produced evidence that the donation or the meeting caused the reversal. But the timeline — outbreak, White House access, positive test, apology — is doing plenty of talking on its own. “Like most people, I assume FDA is lying here” to protect a Trump donor, went one reaction in a weekend pile-on that Raw Story rounded up under the word “horrifying.”

Meanwhile, the outbreak itself hasn’t gone anywhere. The CDC has lab-confirmed 1,645 infections tied to shredded iceberg served at Taco Bell across five states, is investigating 5,100 more, and Michigan alone counts over 5,000 cases and 102 hospitalizations. Taylor Farms recalled iceberg shipped to 27 states between June 29 and July 16 — while blaming a single unnamed “independent farm” in central Mexico and declining to publish a list of which restaurants and grocers got the product. The FDA admits it can’t make them.

This is also the same supplier whose recalled onions were linked to the McDonald’s Quarter Pounder E. coli outbreak in October 2024 — and whose Mexican salad mix was fingered in a cyclospora outbreak all the way back in 2013.

FDA inspectors are now headed to the company’s Guanajuato plant. Until they find something, the official source of the largest parasite outbreak in years is, once again: nobody.

The governor of Kentucky picked up the phone twice — and twice, someone on the other end suggested Mitch McConnell was dead.

Not tipsters. Not trolls. Agencies. “Not state agencies,” Andy Beshear specified — which leaves exactly one level of government to wonder about.

Beshear dropped the bombshell in a Katie Couric interview published Wednesday, explaining why he’d spent early July publicly demanding answers about the 84-year-old senator’s vanishing act. “It had been a month before anything had been put out, not even an official statement from Senator McConnell,” he said. “In fact, I’d gotten two calls from different agencies — not state agencies — suggesting he’s passed.”

He never said which agencies. He never said exactly when. And McConnell’s office, asked to respond, went with its signature move: nothing.

Rewind to June 14. McConnell is found unconscious at his Washington residence and rushed to the hospital. Then — silence. No diagnosis, no timeline, no statement. For nearly a month, the most powerful Republican in modern Senate history simply ceased to exist in public, while GOP colleagues issued eerily similar testimonials about “lengthy” phone calls with their “old friend” and the internet convinced itself he was brain dead or worse.

Somewhere in that vacuum, by the governor’s account, the death calls came in.

By July 11, Beshear had had enough, publicly telling McConnell to end the “crazy speculation.” The next evening came the now-infamous photo: the senator beside wife Elaine Chao, clutching a July 12 Washington Post like a hostage holding the day’s paper. The statement blamed a fall, brief unconsciousness, and pneumonia — no stroke, no heart attack, no tumors, per the Capitol’s attending physician. The internet declared the photo AI; a Washington Post forensic review authenticated it. Sleuths fixated anyway — the bruised hand, the missing wedding ring — and Chao, fresh off a China trip during her husband’s hospitalization, was photographed Tuesday slipping out of the rehab facility in a face mask.

Beshear is not treating the photo as case closed. He wants a video, a call-in, anything a functioning senator does. His office, he says, has had zero contact with McConnell’s since June 14.

And the governor has already revealed his next move. “I might make some news right here,” he teased on Al Sharpton’s show Sunday — before pointing to a Kentucky constitutional provision he says lets him “appoint all state officers” when a vacancy hits — the GOP’s 2024 special-election law be damned. If the seat opens, the Democratic governor may simply name a successor and dare Republicans to sue. State Rep. Josh Calloway is already warning him off, and one name floating for the pick, per the Washington Times: Charles Booker — the Democrat already running for the seat.

The clock makes it combustible. If the vacancy comes after August 3, the untested law leaves no window for a special election — the seat sits empty until January, unless Beshear grabs it and the courts decide.

“If we end up there — and I hope we don’t — there’s at least going to be probably a disagreement,” the governor said.

Seventeen days to the deadline. Still no video.

Elon Musk has 40 days to find out if he’s a felony defendant.

A bipartisan Wisconsin panel — three Democrats, three Republicans — voted 5-1 Thursday to refer the world’s richest man to prosecutors, finding probable cause that his $1 million voter checks before the April 2025 state Supreme Court election were election bribery. In Wisconsin that’s a Class I felony: up to 3.5 years in prison.

Rewind to March 30, 2025. Musk takes the stage at a Green Bay convention center wearing a cheesehead, which he flings into the crowd, and tells more than 1,000 people the race will steer “the course of Western civilization” — possibly “the entire destiny of humanity.” Then he hands oversized $1 million checks to two voters. One of them, Nicholas Jacobs, chaired the Wisconsin College Republicans. Random drawing, indeed.

Musk knew exactly how it looked. His original post announcing the visit was deleted and revised, and after critics pointed out he’d initially promised money to people who had already voted, the winners were hastily rebranded as PAC “spokesmen.” Wisconsin’s attorney general sued to stop the checks; the courts let them go out anyway. The commission has now concluded what the lawsuit couldn’t stop: the social media offer of $1 million to people who voted was made “in order to induce them to vote in that election.”

And what did $20 million-plus buy him? His candidate, Brad Schimel, lost to Susan Crawford by 10 points — in the most expensive judicial race in American history, north of $100 million. Schimel even lost Brown County, the home turf where Musk wore the hat, by 3 points.

Musk’s verdict on the defeat: “The long con of the left is corruption of the judiciary.”

The corruption-of-the-judiciary crowd may want to check the docket. A watchdog lawsuit seeking to ban Musk from ever paying Wisconsin voters again is pending in Brown County. A judge last month ordered Musk to testify under oath in a class action alleging his 2024 giveaway defrauded petition-signers because winners weren’t actually chosen at random. And through it all, Tesla has been suing Wisconsin over its dealership ban — a case that could land before the very Supreme Court Musk spent millions trying to flip.

Now the decision belongs to one man: Brown County DA David Lasee, a Republican, who hasn’t said a word about the referral. Neither has Musk’s camp. Neither has Musk — a notable silence from a man who never met a legal fight he wouldn’t live-post.

The clock started Thursday. Lasee has 40 days to decide: no charges, and Musk walks away clean — or he can put the world's richest man on trial for handing out checks in a cheesehead hat.

The checks cleared 15 months ago. Elon's bill is still being written.

The water is gone from the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool again, and what’s left on the bottom is two long, parallel scars of shredded blue paint.

Photos of the drained basin started ripping across social media Monday, and the reading was instant and brutal: those aren’t knife cuts. Those are tire tracks — and everyone knows whose.

Because there is video. On May 7, while the fresh “American Flag Blue” coating was still going down, Donald Trump’s motorcade — including the roughly 20,000-pound presidential limousine known as The Beast — rolled straight across the empty pool floor so the president could inspect the color he’d personally picked. NBC cameras caught the convoy crossing wet paint and leaving tire marks behind. The White House wasn’t embarrassed. Communications chief Steven Cheung posted the video himself, captioned “they see me rolling!”

Three days earlier, Trump had stood at the pool bragging that the new coating was indestructible. “If you had a knife, you can’t even cut it,” he said on May 4. “So strong, so powerful. It’s like powerful rubber.”

Within weeks of the pool refilling, the uncuttable coating was peeling off in chunks and the water had turned swamp green. Trump’s explanation: vandals. Sick people with “a box-cutter or a knife of some kind,” he said, who slashed a 350-foot slit in the lining. Six people were arrested. One of them, former Olympic canoe racer David Hearn, has pleaded not guilty — he says he stopped mid-bike-ride, touched a flap of lining that was already loose, and got swarmed by Park Police and held five hours without a phone call.

Coating specialists never bought the knife story. The blue material is polyurea, which needs each layer applied inside tight curing windows — and this job was crushed into roughly eight weeks to hit a July 4 deadline it missed anyway. The pool spent America’s 250th birthday behind a fence.

Now it’s empty for the second time in three months. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum laid out the plan with a straight face: “Drain the water, clean up the fireworks stuff. Repair the vandalism that was done. Fill it back up again.”

The repair bill tells its own story. Trump launched this as a $1.5 million spruce-up. It now stands at $14.7 million and climbing — flowing through a no-bid contract to Virginia’s Atlantic Industrial Coatings, the same firm now hired to redo its own work. Asked about the timeline and the new cost, the owner declined to answer. Senator Richard Blumenthal has a probe open into the contract.

The White House has heard the tire-track theory and hates it. “This is dumb and unfounded,” spokeswoman Taylor Rogers snapped when it first surfaced in June. Even the skeptics’ experts stop short of a verdict — the motorcade, one coating-industry chair said, is one of several suspects in a proper failure analysis, alongside the rushed job itself.

But here’s what no one in the administration has explained: why the convoy drove across an unfinished pool floor at all. Or why the damage keeps showing up where the internet swears the wheels went. Or how a coating a knife supposedly couldn’t cut got slashed for 350 feet by a guy on a bicycle.

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I was watching Trump meet with Putin the way you watch a dog sniff at an electric socket: fascinated, slightly horrified, and dimly aware that if something went wrong, it would be both catastrophic and oddly satisfying. The commentators on television kept talking about “historic optics” and “geopolitical shifts,” while I sat there on my couch, fascinated by Putin’s face filler. Between him and Trump, it felt like a contest to see who could be more visually exhausting. Both men are exceptionally hard to look at — one too smooth, the other too sagging — like two wax figures left too close to a space heater.

Trump, of course, looked like he was actively decaying — slumping and bloated in a way that suggested the Big Macs were finally winning. There he was, shaking Putin’s hand as though it might suddenly turn into a novelty buzzer. And when it was all over, he declared to Fox News that Zelenskyy — poor Zelenskyy — was the one who now had to “get it done.” The phrase was repeated with such confidence you’d think “it” was a minor plumbing repair rather than the survival of a sovereign country.

I couldn’t help but imagine Zelenskyy, sitting in Kyiv, hearing this clip and pausing like I did when my dentist once told me I had “a lot of interesting teeth.” What do you even do with that? Do you thank them? Cry? Pretend it’s normal?

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In case you missed it:

• Following California Governor Gavin Newsom’s redistricting plan to add more Democrat seats to Congress, more blue state Governors have announced plans to follow suit

• No matter how hard Alex Jones tries, he is going to lose InfoWars as a result of repeatedly smearing school shooting victims as “crisis actors” - and he may actually lose it to The Onion this time

• E.J. Antoni is Donald Trump’s latest hire, but his resume is a bit strange: he’s an economist for The Heritage Foundation, one of the authors of Project 2025, and he was LITERALLY A PART OF THE JANUARY 6 INSURRECTION

All that and more in today’s ICYMI!

How does that one meme go - ‘Some men would rather buy Twitter for $44 billion than go to therapy’? In the case of Donald Trump, it’s more like ‘Some men would rather sell Alaska to Russia than admit they’re in the Epstein files.’ 

That’s more or less the vibe in America right now: Donald Trump is doing things increasingly more erratically and desperately than ever before. He’s meeting Vladimir Putin to allegedly put an end to the invasion of Ukraine, but he told the American people he was meeting Putin in “Russia,” something that concerns the people of Alaska just a little bit. He’s federalizing Washington D.C., having deployed the National Guard as a result of his boy Big Balls getting beaten up by a random gang of little girls.

And he’s even trying to say that Texas is “entitled” to five more Congressional seats, seemingly in an attempt to rig the midterms.

Yeah. About that…

Blue State Gerrymandering?

Blue state Governors are teaming up to stop Donald Trump from stealing the 2026 midterms - by gerrymandering?

It all started with the Texas plot to redistrict in an attempt to create five more Congressional seats for Republicans. To avoid voting on the redistricting in a vote Democrats surely would have lost, Texas Congressional Democrats simply fled the state to kill the vote a few weeks ago. Just yesterday, they announced that they would finally be returning, following threats of arrests, removals from office, and countless fines (which, to be fair, is something that WILL happen in the best case scenario).

Yet Governor Greg Abbott is undeterred by the delay, with Texas Republicans announcing they would end their current special session today and immediately start a new one. But you know who was inspired to fight back against this clear attempt at election rigging? California Governor Gavin Newsom, who announced this week he’s going to have a special election on November 4 to have California voters decide on redistricting in the blue state.

The goal, Newsom said, is to redraw the maps to give California an additional five seats - which would effectively cancel out any gains made in Texas by Republicans. This plan, known as The Election Rigging Response Act, is still somewhat in the works, with lawmakers having until August 22 to create a redistricting measure to put on the ballot, but sometime soon we should have the rough new district lines drawn out in a map.

Response to the move has been opposed by Republicans and some independents, but Democrats, for the most part, seem energized by Newsom’s actions. It gives off the impression of somebody actively fighting not only to give Democrats a fighting chance in a now-rigged system, but to protect democracy itself (and not just my special hat, in my store now okay sorry for the plug). 

Yet the move has also seen states across the nation rushing to get into this redistricting game. Maryland Governor Wes Moore said “all options are on the table” when it comes to redistricting, something Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker has also stated. New York actually has laws against gerrymandering, but Governor Kathy Hochul is exploring all options available to potentially revise those laws. According to NPR, the gerrymandering requests are going both ways now, however, with Missouri, Indiana, and Florida looking to get in on the action for Republicans, too.

Let me be clear: under any other circumstances, redistricting for blatantly partisan reasons is bad. It’s typically a sign of an easily exploitable system being taken advantage of, and the only real losers in these situations are the voters. But folks, we’re through the looking glass right now looking into the eye of a really volatile storm. Donald Trump is all but admitting he plans to steal the 2026 midterm elections, and if redistricting across the country is the most effective way to combat this, then we absolutely need to do whatever we can to save the things that ACTUALLY make America great ALREADY.

The Completely Satisfying Death of InfoWars

It finally happened: three years after losing a set of lawsuits for defaming the families of children whose lives were lost in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting back in 2012, Alex Jones is officially going to lose everything.

When Jones initially lost the cases, he was on the hook for $1.4 billion, something he was unable to pay as a result of his bankruptcy. Yet three years have gone by with little being done to procure the money for the families, so a Texas judge ruled this past Wednesday that InfoWars was to be liquidated - and everything sold off following the liquidation would be used to pay back the families what they are owed.

One of the first steps here, according to The New York Times, is for a court-appointed receiver to take possession of InfoWars’ parent company Free Speech Systems, LLC, within the week. This includes everything Jones physically owns for the show, such as mixing boards, microphones… and all intellectual property. I’m assuming that means all of Jones’ weird supplements, but it also includes the rights to basically everything Alex Jones has ever made.

But it gets better. Because The Seattle Times broke it down a bit further and revealed that there is a lot of uncertainty over the timeline for most of this, and the only thing we REALLY know is that the receiver is going to change the locks on every building Free Speech Systems owns by this weekend. This leaves Alex Jones in an uncertain place, not knowing if he’ll even be able to stream next week at all

According to the Times, he stated he was certain someone was going to buy Infowars to keep it on the air. Yeah, about that. According to The New York Times:

“Last year, a bankruptcy judge ordered that assets from Infowars be sold to pay the families. The Onion, a satirical website, won an auction to acquire Infowars, saying it wanted to turn the site into a satirical platform that would ridicule the kind of conspiracy theories that Mr. Jones has spread.

But in December, a judge rejected the sale, saying that the auction didn’t maximize the amount of money it would provide to Mr. Jones’s creditors. Instead, the judge suggested the families pursue their case in state court. The ruling on Wednesday, from a state court in Texas, came as part of a continuation of their efforts.”

And according to this headline from The Hill:

“Judge clears way for The Onion to revive bid for Alex Jones’s Infowars.”

Folks, do you remember around a decade ago when Peter Thiel helped finance Hulk Hogan’s defamation trial against Gawker, effectively destroying Gawker out of what seemed to be sheer and utter spite? It’s a case that’s widely regarded as one of the absolute worst things that has ever happened to the free press in America, and is part of why Peter Thiel is viewed as one of the most insidious men behind the scenes in American politics. Well, and there’s also… that other thing.

The purchasing of InfoWars by The Onion, in any case, would be the exact opposite of Peter Thiel’s destruction of Gawker: a net positive for the press, a decimation of one of the worst forces of disinformation in America, and a likely contributor to a future video of Alex Jones openly weeping about the death of his poor baby.

But I don’t know if I buy the death of InfoWars. I think it’s just a crisis actor.

MORE STORIES YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:

• Following several months of embarrassingly low jobs data, Donald Trump has hired Project 2025 co-author E.J. Antoni to head the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Turns out he was also a January 6 insurrectionist, meaning Antoni is probably just REALLY BAD AT NUMBERS, since he’s denying low jobs numbers AND a landslide election loss for Trump!

• Following up on THAT story, it’s now being reported that CONSERVATIVES don’t want Antoni in office, either. 

• A THIRD war plans leak has hit the group chat: 404 Media has revealed that this time, it was an ICE agent who added “a random person” to a group chat, exposing every detail of a manhunt they were on to catch an alleged murderer.

• Mark Zuckerberg has gone out of his way to kiss the ring of dead pedophile Jeffrey Epstein’s best friend Donald Trump at every opportunity since 2024. His company Meta also recently had data leak showing that its chatbots could “engage a child in conversations that are romantic or sensual.” I’m sure the two aren’t related in any way.

• Back in 2015, Republicans believed strongly in a conspiracy theory known as Jade Helm that claimed Obama was going to federalize cities to declare martial law. It was so silly that even Barack Obama said it was silly. Steve Benen at NBC has noticed the irony in who was concerned about it then and who embraces it now.

• Former Trump fixer Michael Cohen went on the Tara Palmeri Show to discuss the “one” Trump-Epstein case he ever worked on, and he may have accidentally confirmed more details regarding the “Katie Johnson” case.

• “RFK Jr. Awkwardly Hauls Dr. Oz Up a Cliff in Bonkers MAHA Stunt,” writes The Daily Beast. “This is the single dumbest government ever,” writes Keith Edwards.

• Donald Trump was bullied by virtually every European leader for his braindead meeting with Putin. Reportedly, Trump was “fuming” after the call, and what I wouldn't give to see footage of that call.

• A British pub’s employees told management they would “stage a mutiny” if a reservation was accepted for JD Vance. A reservation was accepted for JD Vance. The pub was forced to shut down. 

• Under Trump’s new tax law, veterans are likely not going to have work requirement exemption for food stamps. I never thought I’d see a day where Republicans would be so far gone they can’t even PRETEND to care about the well-being of veterans.

• A number of rabbits have been seen in Colorado with “horn-like warts,” which scientists say are harmless. Listen. If they’re so harmless, then why are THE GUARDIAN literally calling them “demon rabbits”?

• A Department of Justice employee threw a sandwich at an ICE agent’s face and now faces federal charges. Again: he threw a sandwich at an ICE agent, was fired from the DoJ, and faces felony assault charges. 

• Reporters Without Borders, an organization that tracks press freedoms across the world and are the originators of the World Press Freedom Index, have been deemed by Russia to be an “undesirable organization.” It could have to do with the fact that Russia has effectively banned independent media, has currently 50 known jailed journalists, and out of 180 countries monitored by the organization, is ranked 171st.

• Ron DeSantis has announced a sequel to Alligator Alcatraz: a new immigrant detention facility he’s called “Deportation Depot.” It’s only a matter of time before DeSantis really meets the alliteration where he wants it to go and creates his own SS.

• Deepfake videos are being pushed online of AI-generated doctors giving medical misinformation. Not at all concerning: CBS News’ investigation found 100 KNOWN examples of this. 

In case you missed it:

• ‘Big Balls’ of DOGE fame was assaulted, and now Trump has threatened a federal takeover of Washington D.C.

• Jim Acosta has made basically everybody very mad following an interview he conducted with an AI avatar of a shooting victim

• Charlie Kirk has proposed arresting more people… to solve homelessness

All that and more in today’s ICYMI!

This might be a hot take, but I think Donald Trump’s on the Epstein list, guys.

Everything about the developments in the Epstein saga as of late feel like a very public and poorly disguised attempt to launder that point of view out of existence. First, Trump tried gaslighting the American people into thinking the Epstein saga was never a big deal. Then, he denied being a part of that world altogether. And now, after a conviction for sex trafficking, which followed a dismissed perjury charge for LYING about said sex trafficking, he expects us to believe anything Ghislaine Maxwell has to say?

But there’s more to life than the slow drip of Epstein updates. This is an unusually packed news week, so there’s a good chance you may have missed out on some, and maybe even most, of the following stories. This week, we’ve got everything from an alleged hate crime hoaxer making his triumphant return, to Linda McMahon being trolled on live TV, to the following:

TRUMP IS COOKING UP SOMETHING WEIRD

On August 5, 2025, 19-year-old Edward Coristine, also known as Big Balls of DOGE, was on his way to his car in Washington DC when he was allegedly surrounded by 10 young men and was viciously assaulted. Following the assault, Trump took to Truth Social to share a photo of the young man, battered and bleeding and missing his shirt, claiming that crime in DC was “totally out of control.”

And then he drops the bomb:

“If D.C. doesn’t get its act together, and quickly, we will have no choice but to take Federal control of the City…The Law in D.C. must be changed to prosecute these ‘minors’ as adults, and lock them up for a long time, starting at age 14.”

You know, the Epstein list intro has been a recurring bit so far on ICYMI; it’s been a way to talk about the Epstein updates without having to make this the “Epstein list newsletter.” But how am I supposed to talk about the fact that Donald Trump is proposing making 14 year olds adults, an ODDLY SPECIFIC AGE TO NAME, without ALSO talking about the fact that he is alleged to be a client of a dead man who trafficked 14 year old girls alongside his convicted madam, who ABDUCTED and GROOMED those 14 year old girls? Is this an attempt at a Reverse Uno of those memes that tell you “Wow, did you know Jared Leto credits ‘nine women’ with his success? Google nine women to find out more!”

But what makes this even more suspicious is that this is yet another one of Donald Trump’s attempts to seemingly declare martial law for minor reasons. As Nicholas Nehamas and Campbell Robertson write for the New York Times, “The president has floated the idea of a federal takeover since the earliest weeks of his second term, a threat bolstered by legislation introduced by congressional Republicans who want to impose their policy agenda on the city’s Democrat-led government. The city has had a limited degree of self-government since the Home Rule Act of 1973. So far, Congress and the Trump administration have taken a series of smaller bites out of Washington’s autonomy, including handing the city an unexpected $1.1 billion budget hole and creating a federal “D.C. Safe and Beautiful” task force to work with local police officers.”

And I’m not just saying this is for “minor” reasons, for NO reason: later in the article, the Times point to DC’s falling crime rates, with officials pointing out that violent crime in the city had reached a 30-year low - 26 percent lower than 2024. This actually matches with findings that Trump’s own FBI found a few days ago that violent crime has been RAPIDLY declining, not just in DC, but across the country. 4.5% down, in fact, from 2023 to 2024. This includes a 14.9% decrease of murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, an 8.9% decrease in robbery, and a 5.2% decrease in rape.

I’m not going to pretend that Big Balls wasn’t assaulted by a gang of teenagers, because the photographic evidence seems to point to that being a reality. But I’m also not above speculating that Donald Trump would SEE that happening and use that as a way to potentially take over DC AND redefine what an adult actually is. Because if a 14-year-old is actually an adult in the United States… did Ghislaine Maxwell even commit a crime? Does it legally matter if Donald Trump was involved?

Charlie Kirk Solves the Housing Crisis (by making it worse)

There’s a housing crisis that’s exacerbating the amount of homeless people there are in America. According to USA Today, homelessness increased over 18% from 2023 to 2024, with over 771,800 known people living without a home in the United States. Again: that’s just what we know. And the problem seems to be getting worse and worse by the day.

How do we solve it? A rational solution can be found by the National Alliance to End Homelessness, who suggest we start by addressing systemic issues forcing people out of their homes, like a lack of affordable housing and limited healthcare access, as well as creating an emergency response system that can provide people with immediate shelter, support services, and clear roads to permanent housing.

Seems like it’s a lot harder than it sounds, but it sounds like THE most rational place to start… but if you’re Charlie Kirk, nope, those ideas are BAD. In a clip from his podcast shared by The Daily Beast, Charlie Kirk believes that the absolute best way to solve homelessness… is by arresting them.

“One of my hopes is to turn the Republican party into a resolutely stronger party on crime,” Kirk said. “We are not harsh enough on crime in this country...and this is not just about stopping criminals. If you enforce the law, housing will be cheaper because more of the country will be livable.”

The Daily Beast goes on to correctly point out that Charlie “does not have a formal background in finance, economics, or real estate” and that he is also a “college dropout.” Needless to say, this is an absolutely hilariously wrong idea from Charlie, especially because it comes only a few months after a study found that criminalizing homelessness does not work. As stated in the abstract:

“Local criminalization policies draw on the logic of deterrence to levy costs on individuals who engage in behaviors that are closely associated with various public concerns, such as those criminalizing behaviors associated with homelessness, thereby potentially reducing community-level costs. Yet, it is unclear whether the presence of these policies can be relied upon to reduce the frequency of a social crises within a local municipality…Contrary to the deterrence logic, the results indicate that these local criminalization ordinances cannot be relied upon to reduce the social crisis rate (i.e., the number of people experiencing homeless) and therefore do not provide the intended community-level benefit.”

Charlie Kirk is not only wrong, he’s PROVABLY wrong. Not that this is a surprise in any way, but in this particular instance, it’s worth highlighting that he is wrong about something that the equally stupid and malicious Trump administration COULD adopt if they were convinced by his insanity.

MORE STORIES YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:

• Hey, that was pretty crazy when Tulsi Gabbard announced Russiagate was a hoax, right? Would be even crazier if it turned out she ignored CIA experts and released the information before it was ready, and EVEN CRAZIER if the advice was so “classified” spying methods weren’t revealed to the public.

• Jim Acosta has “interviewed” an AI avatar of Joaquin Oliver, a teen who died in the Parkland shooting, that was created by the deceased teen’s father. It’s… it’s something.

• HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has revealed that Donald Trump calls him “three or four times a week” and asks him, and I quote: “Where are you? Why aren’t people healthier yet?” 

• SHOCKING NEWS: Donald Trump lied about banning Jeffrey Epstein from Mar-a-Lago after discovering he was a creep! He was a member until October 2007 - a year after he was indicted. Most honest man in America!

• Jussie Smollett allegedly faked a hate crime and definitively ruined his career in the process; or did he? Six years later, he’s back on a “military boot camp-style” reality show called Special Forces. Nobody REALLY stays canceled forever!

• Elon Musk has KILLED America… or more specifically, the America Party, with reports coming out that he has ghosted his third party consultants and hasn’t even filled out the paperwork to create the party.

• After DOGE cut hundreds of jobs from the National Weather Service, which evidence shows is part of why the Kerrville flooding was so bad, the National Weather Service have announced 126 new jobs.

• Elon Musk keeps talking about how family friendly the new Grok is. In other news, Grok made deepfake nude photos of Taylor Swift without being prompted (the photos are NOT in the link).

• Remember earlier when Donald Trump said he wanted teenagers to be considered adults? That news came on the heels of OTHER news that ICE is now recruiting teenagers! We are truly in Hell.

• It might sound insane to say this, but ChatGPT is telling teenagers the kind of things that adults get accused of grooming for. According to Euronews, a new study has found that ChatGPT is encouraging 13-year-olds to get drunk and high… and is also writing suicide notes for them.

• “GOP Senator Changes Child Rape Law After Relative Accused of Sex With Minor.” I mean, the headline tells the whole story, no?

• After over 40 years, The Howard Stern Show is coming to an end.

• The Atlantic have conducted a fascinating investigation into why the Proud Boys are so irrelevant in 2025. Spoiler alert: Enrique Tarrio is a fed, the group is splintered, and the pardoned January 6 insurrectionists are unsure about their loyalties.

• In just six months, Donald Trump has already accomplished nearly half of Project 2025.

• Iran has executed one of its nuclear scientists, alleging that he was a spy for Israeli intelligence outfit Mossad.

• Somebody called Laura Loomer “Trump’s Rasputin.” She is now calling herself that.

• Linda McMahon had exactly the day she deserved.

• An Epstein victim has written the Department of Justice, stating “I am not some pawn in your political warfare.” 

Donald Trump is not trying to win the next election. He is trying to invalidate it. With his latest move — a mid‑decade census aimed at excluding undocumented immigrants — and the firing of the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after an unfavorable jobs report, he has laid bare the strategy of the autocrat in decline: if you can’t win under the rules, change them.

This is not just a policy proposal. It is a direct assault on the United States Constitution, which mandates that the census count the “whole number of persons” — not citizens, not voters, not the politically convenient, but persons. That constitutional clarity is being replaced with exclusionary data, produced by a system where the storyteller now controls both the microphone and the script.

Let’s be honest — no numbers that emerge from this Trump‑controlled census, or any economic metric overseen by appointees loyal to his narrative, can be trusted. When the July jobs report revealed only 73,000 jobs added and massive downward revisions to May and June, Trump reacted not by addressing the economy — he shot the messenger. BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer was summarily fired, accused of rigging the numbers without a shred of evidence.

And to be clear: this mid‑decade census is not authorized by Congress. It has no constitutional mandate. It has no moral legitimacy. It is a propaganda mechanism, parading as a policy initiative. And when you pair that with a staffing purge meant to silence or replace statistical guardians, you’re breathing life into an authoritarian rule.

If those we rely on to provide objective information — from the BLS to the Census Bureau — can be fired for telling uncomfortable truths or ignored for counting the inconvenient, then we are no longer in a representative democracy where voters choose their leaders.

We are in a system where leaders choose their voters.

I used to think the White House was big enough. Not “big” like Texas or a suburban Cheesecake Factory, but big enough for the modest goal of running a country. You have the Oval Office, the Lincoln Bedroom, a press room for pretending you have answers—why mess with that? But Donald Trump apparently woke up one morning, glanced at 245 years of democratic tradition, and said, “What this democracy needs is an event space.”

They’re calling it a ballroom, but that’s like calling a cruise ship a canoe. Ninety thousand square feet—nearly twice the size of the White House itself—slapped onto the East Wing like an afterthought from a man who thinks restraint is a character flaw. It’s a $200 million “privately funded” project, which is to say: funded by a mystery bag of money we’re all pretending not to see.

I’m not sure how this is legal. Shouldn’t Congress have to approve “making the White House unrecognizable”? If the president wanted to replace the Statue of Liberty with a Chick-fil-A, we’d at least have hearings, right? But apparently, as long as you call it “private money,” you can bolt a luxury conference center to the side of the People’s House and no one can stop you.

Read more

This is for all the democracy defending Americans who want to counteract the MAGA hat - it’s something you can wear and something that, if you see someone else in it, you know you’re on the same team.

Ordering now ensures the hat will ship within a week, and they’re only going to be available for a limited time, so act quickly if you want a piece of Keith Edwards history. Thank you for supporting me for all these years - and thank you for supporting democracy.

In one of the most horrific examples of a Nightmare Blunt Rotation imaginable, it’s looking increasingly likely that Donald Trump is going to drop a #pardonbomb on the three worst people imaginable: convicted sex pest Sean “Diddy” Combs, disgraced ex-Congressman and convicted fraudster George Santos, and convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell. Possibly even on the same day.

You may have noticed a lot of seemingly unrelated news dropping all at the same time over the past few weeks. On August 4, Christopher Wiggins for Advocate reported that Donald Trump said he had “the right” to pardon George Santos, but “nobody’s asked.” Incidentally, within a few hours, it was reported that Marjorie Taylor Greene had sent a formal letter to the Department of Justice, requesting that Trump grant Santos clemency for his crimes.

And just one week prior, on July 29, Dominic Patten reported for Deadline that Trump was “seriously considering” pardoning Diddy. Insiders told Patten that this wasn’t just a small murmur being made at the White House, but it had evolved from “just another Trump weave to an actionable event.” Trump later said pardoning him would be “hard” because of Diddy’s very public hatred of Trump’s presidency, all while conceding that Diddy had been found “half-innocent.”

Which leads to what John Mac Ghlionn at The Hill refers to as what will become Donald Trump’s “defining moment” in office: the pardon of Ghislaine Maxwell, a convicted sex trafficker and friend of Trump’s. This has seen more press coverage and speculation than either of the other two on account of Donald Trump’s connection to Jeffrey Epstein, the deceased co-conspirator in the sex trafficking operation and former best friend of Donald Trump. 

Like Diddy, Trump has stated that it is his “right” to pardon Maxwell should he please. Yet the very strongly rumored pardon, coming off of Maxwell getting moved into a federal prison camp so posh it’s been nicknamed “Club Fed,” has sparked backlash not only from Democrats and some of his base, but from the survivors of Epstein and Maxwell’s trafficking and their families. The most reported example, of course, being the family of Epstein whistleblower Virginia Giuffre, who have literally BEGGED Trump to not pardon the woman who trafficked their now-deceased sister.

“The government and the president should never consider giving Ghislaine Maxwell any leniency,” Giuffre’s family said in a statement. “Ghislaine Maxwell is a monster who deserves to rot in prison for the rest of her life for the extraordinary violence and abuse she put not just our sister Virginia through, but many other survivors, who may number in the thousands.”

I think today might be as good of a day as any to remind people why it would be a complete travesty for any and all of these people to be pardoned. What were they convicted of? What does Trump look to gain from pardoning them? And what is the most likely outcome from him pardoning them?

Read more

In case you missed it:

• Trump is BULLDOZING the White House

• The U.S. is slipping further and further down a Human Rights watchlist

• Donald Trump was DESTROYED by the president of Mexico

All that and more in today’s ICYMI, my new weekly newsletter.

Death, taxes, and Donald Trump’s placement on the Epstein list: these are the only things truly certain in life. 

To be honest, with the sheer scale of misinformation that Donald Trump and his administration have thrown at us over the past few weeks, I’m surprised that the Epstein list scandal has not only stayed alive, it’s seeing updates coming multiple times per day. You may have noticed that over on my YouTube page, this week alone, I’ve covered the story behind the missing minutes from the Epstein prison video being found, Trump flipping out over an Epstein survivor going public, Melania being outed as an Epstein girl, Trump slipping up and admitting he’s read the Epstein files, and Trump making a strange admission that Epstein “stole” one of his employees (more on that one later).

And yet, what if I told you there was more? There’s always more. Despite the fact that none other than Sydney Sweeney temporarily derailed the river of Epstein news, the focus is renewed. We are so back, y’all, and to kick off this week’s newsletter…

VIRGINIA GIUFFRE’S FAMILY IS PRETTY PISSED AT TRUMP:

In case you missed it, Donald Trump admitted that Jeffrey Epstein “stole” a 14-year-old girl from Mar-a-Lago. But it wasn’t just any 14-year-old: it was Virginia Roberts Giuffre, debatably the most well-known of Epstein and Maxwell’s survivors, who had previously implicated Prince Andrew, Alan Dershowitz, former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, Jean-Luc Brunel, Les Wexner, hedge fund manager Glenn Dubin, and former MIT professor Marvin Minsky. More often than not, when you hear stories about Epstein’s very famous friends that allegedly raped young girls, they’re a story that originated from Giuffre.

Giuffre tragically passed away in April of this year, so she can’t confirm or deny whether Epstein “stole” her. However, her surviving siblings have come forward with concerns over Trump stating she was “stolen” because to them, it seems to imply that Trump knows more than he’s letting on.

“It makes us ask if he was aware of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell’s criminal actions, especially given his statement two years later that his good friend Jeffrey ‘likes women on the younger side … no doubt about it,’” Giuffre’s two brothers and her sisters-in-law told The Atlantic. “We and the public are asking for answers; survivors deserve this.”

According to her siblings Sky and Amanda Roberts, and Danny and Lanette Wilson, all of the recent news getting to the bottom of the Epstein list is bittersweet, because on one hand, the press is finally getting to the bottom of Epstein and Maxwell’s depravity… but on the other hand, they just lost their sister a few months ago, and they’re horrified by the potential for Ghislaine Maxwell to receive a pardon for her testimony to Congress.

“If our sister could speak today, she would be most angered by the fact that the government is listening to a known perjurer, a woman who repeatedly lied under oath and will continue to do so as long as it benefits her position,” the siblings wrote in a statement, referring to Maxwell’s overturned perjury charge.

Lost in the sauce of this story is that Trump admitted to more than one girl being “stolen” by Epstein, which means that there is currently another potential Epstein survivor out there that ALSO worked at Mar-a-Lago. This is just another “coincidence” in the long, storied history of Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein’s friendship, just like the coincidences that Trump rode on Epstein’s jet eight times, or that Epstein was at Trump’s wedding, or that the two had a Victoria’s Secret party where they were the only men present, or that Trump knew Epstein well enough to send him a cryptic naughty birthday letter.

Yeah. It’s just one big coincidence.

Human Rights Org Specializing in Civil Society Does Not Find United States a Civil Society:

CIVICUS, a global civil society alliance, defines themselves as “an influential network of organisations at the local, national, regional and international levels, and spans the spectrum of civil society.” They’ve been keeping tabs on countries via a Watchlist that monitors whether or not they’ve begun to “decline” as a civil space. To put it simply, they’re looking to see which countries have begun to plunge into fascism, or are CONTINUING to plunge into fascism.

On July 30, they issued a press release raising some concerns about civic freedoms on six countries: El Salvador, Indonesia, Kenya, Serbia, Turkey… and the United States of America. I’ll say that again: on a list outlining countries falling into fascism, the United States is sitting pretty alongside El Salvador and Turkey.

“The United States appears to be sliding deeper into the quicksands of authoritarianism. Peaceful protests are confronted with military force, critics are treated as criminals, journalists are targeted, and support for civil society and international cooperation have been cut back,” said Mandeep Tiwana, Secretary General of CIVICUS, in the press release. “Six months into Donald Trump’s second term, a bizarre assault on fundamental freedoms and constitutional safeguards has become the new normal.”

So… why is the United States sliding deeper into authoritarianism? According to CIVICUS, it’s a rise in political violence, with the assassination of Minnesota Representative Melissa Hortman being directly cited, alongside the crackdowns on peaceful assembly and protests, the rise in deportations, the National Guard and Marines being deployed to Los Angeles, and the attacks on journalists Lauren Tomasi and Mario Guevara. But that’s not all, because they also highlight the defunding of PBS, NPR, and local stations, as well as the rollback of foreign aid, slashing humanitarian, and development and global health programs.

The press release is somehow even longer than Donald Trump’s history with Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, and CIVICUS makes a compelling case that the United States has become “narrowed” - in their list of rankings, that means the U.S. is a state where people can exercise their rights and freedoms, but “violations of these rights also take place.” Compare this to countries that are doing fine, or “open,” with “both enables and safeguards the enjoyment of civic space” and its citizens live in lower levels of fear, or the worse off, or “closed” countries, that are in “complete closure - in law and in practice - of civic space.”

That means the United States is slipping far beyond its reputation as “home of the free,” and it’s all Donald Trump’s fault.

I’m not really sure what we can do about this except get Donald Trump out of office, and even then, is it too late to fix what Trump has already done? As we’ll see in a story later on about DOGE, the damage has already been done - and might be completely irreversible.

MORE STORIES YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:

• On X, an alleged “bombshell” was dropped by Tulsi Gabbard claiming to prove Hillary Clinton created a “treasonous” plot to frame Donald Trump for colluding with Russia. The New York Times has revealed this is based off the work of - get this - Russian spies.

• DOGE was supposed to eliminate government fraud and waste, wasn’t it? To nobody’s surprise, it didn’t. Instead, it wasted $21 billion, and is projected to continue to waste $29 billion per year from aid organizations affected by the shuttering of USAID. I guess the real government fraud were the friends we made along the way.

• The Smithsonian has removed Donald Trump from an exhibit on impeachment within their American history museum, with the exhibit now slated to claim that only three presidents have ever faced impeachment in U.S. history. Which is strange, since Donald Trump is the only president to have ever been impeached twice, and we all know how much Trump likes to flex on things nobody else can claim.

• Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has exposed his own game and revealed that the long con is to privatize social security. I don’t have a joke for this, it’s one of the more disturbing pieces of news this week that’s been unfairly buried.

• De minimis shipments, the tax loophole that allows duty-free low value shipments of $800 or less from overseas, will be dead on August 19. Another win for the “kill all poor people” initiative set in place by Donald Trump, experts claim that low-income families are going to be hit with anywhere between 10.9 and 13 billion in additional costs.

• President of Mexico Claudia Sheinbaum has once again destroyed Donald Trump, by getting yet another extension on Donald Trump’s big “beautiful” tariffs on Mexico. The woman the Washington Post once called “the world’s leading Trump whisperer” is less a whisperer than a wrecking ball, and I wouldn’t be surprised if she ended up convincing Trump to tariff himself instead of Mexico.

• $200 million for a new, tacky gold ballroom at The White House, in place of the East Wing - and only The Daily Beast seems to have noticed that the East Wing used to be Melania Trump’s wing. Meaning: Trump is tearing down his wife’s part of The White House. Easily the most divorced guy energy he’s exuded in his second term.

• Senate Democrats are investigating the Paramount-Skydance merger following their quick $16 million settlement with Trump. But Skydance disputes that they broke any laws, specifying they stuck to anti-bribery laws - yeah totally, they just really like Trump and wanted him to have some money. Makes sense.

• I’m not sure we’re going to see a month this year without meaningful protests against Donald Trump. 50501 has announced that, following the success of the No Kings protests, more than 300 demonstrations are set to take place across the US on August 2. Fun fact: August 2 is just a day later than the two year anniversary of Mike Pence publicly denouncing Trump for his Jan. 6 indictment.

• “Radioactive wasp nest found at site where US once made nuclear bombs,” says ABC News. Is this nature’s revenge against that time Trump tried to kill all the bees?

• In the latest case of “water is wet,” it turns out Los Angeles protesters, the same protesters that kicked off what became the No Kings protests, were arrested on false pretenses. What - the Trump administration lying? That doesn’t make ANY sense.

• Nate Silver has released an analysis of the media’s focus on Jeffrey Epstein, asking the question of whether the Epstein saga is the new Russiagate. As of right now, the top comment reads, “Leave it to Nate to write a galaxy brained take about how the Republican president of the United States being credibly associated with a child sex trafficker is bad news for the Democrats.”

• One of the authors of Project 2025, Paul Dans, is going to challenge Lindsey Graham in the 2026 Republican primaries. Paul Dans edited ALL of Project 2025 and co-wrote the chapter declaring that most governmental bodies need to be privatized, so this would be a true example of replacing a paper cut with a stab wound.

• El Salvador has removed term limits and has extended the presidential term to six years, meaning Nayib Bukele can run for President indefinitely.

• The official GOP X account has posted a meme stating that Donald Trump is “making automobiles great again.” Unfortunately for him, the car is a Lada - a Russian automobile. Make Russia Great Again?

There’s a furious debate happening for the soul of decency raging across Twitter, Threads, TikTok, and anywhere debate can take place online. One that separates the smart from the dumb. The strong from the weak. The Nazis from the normies. One that draws the thickest possible line in the sand and asks the question:

Is Sydney Sweeney promoting eugenics?

This debate stems from a recent string of ads released by American Eagle featuring the White Lotus star, most of which rely on Sydney Sweeney’s sex appeal and a bit of dumb wordplay - many of them include a variation of the phrase, “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans,” because get it? She’s hot? Great GENES ahem great JEANS? PS. buy our jackets too.

But there’s one in particular that has set the internet on fire, leading to one of the most sudden backlashes we’ve seen yet in 2025…

Read more

After half a year of news cycles resetting every five minutes as a result of the Trump administration “flooding the zone,” we’ve finally settled into a steady drip-flow-drip-flow rhythm based around one story and one story alone: Donald Trump’s placement in the Epstein list.

The irony isn’t lost on me that the one thing that has finally managed to wrestle control of the messaging away from Donald Trump’s fat fingers, is also the one thing his base would not stop talking about for an entire decade. And now that we’re discovering everything from Donald Trump’s coded love letter to a dead pedophile to the fact that Epstein once pleaded “the fifth, the sixth, and the fourteenth” in regards to whether he’d ever seen Trump with underage girls, there’s even more irony in the fact that the opponent very suddenly does NOT want to talk about this. C’est la vie, I guess.

But while I’ve been tirelessly keeping you updated over on my YouTube with the latest in the saga of the “Never-Aged Enigma,” the world keeps turning and the news keeps churning. 

So, now is as good a time as any to introduce my new weekly newsletter, where I’ll be covering some of the biggest stories from throughout the week that I’m not covering over on YouTube. The zone is still being flooded, and we need to learn how to swim.

HOW TO BURN $1.26 BILLION IN THE MOST INHUMANE WAY IMAGINABLE

Buried three paragraphs into a memo released Monday from the Department of Defense is a curious announcement: Acquisition Logistics, a company from Virginia, has been awarded a “$231,878,229 firm-fixed-price contract” to create a 5,000 capacity immigration detention center for ICE. Though it is worth pointing out that despite the nearly $232 million advance, the contract is ACTUALLY worth $1.26 BILLION. Located on Fort Bliss army-owned land, this is going to be the single largest immigration detention center in the country, since despite Alligator Alcatraz also being able to hold 5,000, this new Fort Bliss detention center will have 5,000 beds.

All of this is interesting, because Acquisition Logistics is

• A small company that specializes in supply chain management

• A relatively new company, founded in 2008

• And most importantly, an inexperienced company, with little-to-no documented experience in detention centers

This inexperience shows in the Fort Bliss Project’s plans to detain immigrants in tents, rather than rooms, which is raising red flags for immigration advocates who correctly point out that it’s unlikely the living standards will even meet the already low standards set by current detention centers because, again, it’s five-thousand tents in a poorly-constructed space in the already volatile conditions of west Texas. 

As pointed out in New Republic, this news came out around the same time as a Human Rights Watch report that shows that it’s “now routine for basics like access to time outside of cells and meetings with lawyers to be denied. Medical emergencies are dismissed or met with punishment. Lockdowns are declared to cover for ICE’s being short-staffed. One man reported that he and others were forced to eat “like dogs,” bent over with their hands restrained behind their backs.”

As of right now, we are witnessing one of the biggest mass human rights violation events in American history, and we’re witnessing it happen in real time. If you find yourself approached by ICE, just remember: you have the right to remain silent. Remain calm, and don’t run. You have the right to a warrant from a judge before letting anyone into your home. You have the right to a lawyer. And document EVERYTHING. 

PARAMOUNT TRIED GLAZING TRUMP. SOUTH PARK BLEW UP THEIR GAME.

You’ve probably seen a lot of the clips online already from this Wednesday’s episode of South Park, and the absolutely brutal critique of Donald Trump - but have you seen any of the parts where South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone systematically tear apart Paramount, their parent company? This might be one of the most savage takedowns in television history - and it could lead to more manic Trump posts, lawsuits, and possibly the cancellation of South Park itself. I’m not joking about any of this - The White House have already released a statement, claiming South Park hasn’t “been relevant for over 20 years” and their popularity is hitting “record lows” due to “hanging by a thread with uninspired ideas in a desperate attempt for attention.”

For anybody who hasn’t seen the episode, there are a few intersecting plots at work, but the most important one to know is that Jesus Christ, the person, has literally been forced into hanging out at South Park Elementary, which leads to the residents of South Park protesting - and being sued by Donald Trump for $5 billion. The reason this plot is important is because it introduces us to a few concepts that explain why this is one of the boldest pieces of television ever produced. 

• Donald Trump is an egomaniac with a very small penis, who threatens litigation over increasingly frivolous things, such as a painter making his penis anatomically correct or an Instagram commenter asking his boyfriend Satan (yes - Satan) if Trump is on the Epstein list.

• The only reason Jesus is being forced into schools is as a result of this litigation, which is requiring him to be in schools. When he reveals this, he goes on a hushed rant to the town that directly names Paramount, Stephen Colbert, and a “merger.”

That last point is important, because it reveals that South Park isn’t just ripping Trump to shreds for no reason - they’re getting revenge on their parent company Paramount. Why? To put it as simply as I can: two lawsuits happening in tandem directly led to delayed production on South Park, and Trey and Matt were not happy about it.

In Lawsuit #1, Donald Trump was suing Paramount on the grounds that 60 Minutes had edited an interview with Kamala Harris in a deceptive way, which CBS (owned by Paramount) denied doing. Despite the lawsuit being completely baseless and clearly built on nothing more than a wounded ego, Paramount decided to settle out of court for $16 million with Trump, on top of an additional $20 million in “coverage” of Trump. This move was criticized by EVERYBODY, including Stephen Colbert - whose Late Show was canceled two weeks later on the grounds that it was “purely a financial decision,” but is very transparently politically motivated. Paramount clearly wanted to suck up to Trump to get out of his crosshairs. As we’ll soon see, that likely did not work. 

Lawsuit #2 is far more complicated and spans many, many years. The shortest way I can put it is that South Park’s exclusive streaming rights were in a years-long tug-of-war between HBO Max and Paramount Plus, which coincided with Parker and Stone trying to negotiate a higher overall deal for themselves. THIS, however, was complicated by a long-delayed merger between Paramount and Skydance… a merger delayed due to complications with the FCC, who have to approve any such mergers… the FCC, run by Donald Trump, a man who was in the process of suing one of the companies in the merger.

Because of the delayed merger, Parker and Stone were in purgatory, having had to delay the release of season 27 by two weeks, which resulted in them publicly slamming Paramount for the merger being a “shit show.” But finally, on the evening of July 21, Parker and Stone inked a new deal for themselves to be EXCLUSIVELY at Paramount for five years, valued at $1.5 billion. 

And not even two days later, they released an episode lambasting Paramount for being cowards that accused the president of being a fragile litigious weirdo that is in bed with Satan. Oh, and in case you missed the subtlety, the episode ends with the town settling with Trump for $3.5 million, and creating a court-ordered pro-Trump PSA (which is a very convincing deepfake)  that involves a fat Donald Trump walking naked through the desert.

It’s insane. It’s all insane. Trey Parker and Matt Stone are BEGGING Donald Trump to sue them and Paramount, right after Paramount settled their last lawsuit - and it’s, strangely, one of the strongest and most potent acts of resistance against this administration in 2025 we’ve seen yet.

ICYMI:

• French president Emanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte are suing Candace Owens for 22 counts of defamation, due to Candace Owens “staking her entire professional reputation” on the claim that Brigitte Macron is actually a trans woman. In response, Owens told Macron to “bring it.” Famous last words?

• Disgraced former congressman George Santos begins his 87-month prison sentence today, following his guilty plea to wire fraud and aggravated identity theft. He spent his last day of freedom doing what he’s best at: being incredibly annoying on Twitter.

• Remember Pete Hegseth? He’s disappeared into the ether in recent days due to his lack of involvement in Epsteinworld, but his Signalgate fiasco is getting worse behind the scenes for him, with The Washington Post revealing that the information he provided about a U.S. bombing campaign in Yemen came from a classified email marked, and I quote… “SECRET.”

• According to the United Nations, 9% of all children are “severely” malnourished in Gaza right now.

• Would you believe me if I said some people out there don’t think Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is ENOUGH of an antivaxxer? Famous for being anti-vaccine, RFK is somehow being sued by the anti-vaxx organization Children’s Health Defense for failing “to set up a task force to promote safer childhood vaccinations.” “This is not the Bobby we knew,” they’re quoted as saying, though I’d argue he’s the exact same Bobby _I_ know.

• Here’s another throwback: Kim Davis, the woman famous for a disgusting fashion sense AND denying gay couples their marriage licenses in an attempt to overturn Obergefell v Hedges, is BACK… unfortunately. She and her unfortunate skirt are trying once again to be heard by the Supreme Court to see if her First Amendment religious liberty rights were infringed upon when she unsuccessfully fought Obergefell a decade ago.

• In New York, there’s a work placement program for youth known as the Summer Youth Employment Program that pays its workers with prepaid debit cards. Somehow, a “hack” has gone viral on TikTok involving the cards being able to withdraw nearly endless amounts of money - resulting in $17 million having been withdrawn in just three days.

Don’t say TikTok never did anything for you, kids!