“The less he understands something, the more firmly he believes in it.”

– Wilhelm Reich, Listen, Little Man!

Are you an American citizen if you were born here or merely if it looks like you were born here in the eyes of police and immigration officers? Do all American citizens enjoy the same constitutional rights or are the rights of some citizens circumscribed by the color of their skin? Does a birth certificate carry more weight than the language you speak or the way you speak English? Has the Trump purge of immigrants really been about immigrants (it clearly isn’t about criminal immigrants) or about particular kinds of ethnic descent?

Consider the case of Brian José Morales García, a 25- year-old American citizen living in Austin, Texas, who was stopped by Texas cops, turned over to federal immigration officials and quickly deported to Mexico.

In April, Morales García was on his way to work installing air conditioning units when his entire construction crew, including his boss, was pulled over by state police outside of the central Texas town of Fredericksburg.

Morales García told the cops he was a US citizen. They didn’t believe him. They’re paid not to believe people. They’re paid by the Feds to turn over as many suspected undocumented people as possible. The exact amount Texas law enforcement is being paid to arrest suspected undocumented people for the Feds is kept secret. But some departments are being paid as much as $1000 per officer and 25% of their salaries. Other incentives include the Feds buying local sheriff’s departments cop cars and other equipment.

The Supreme Court doesn’t care, either. Racial profiling stops in the name of immigration enforcement operations are just fine by them, even when the arresting officer isn’t quite sure what your ethnicity is. Your “apparent ethnicity” is reason enough for the cops to pull you over, interrogate you and haul you into jail until you prove you are in the state legally. In fact, your “apparent ethnicity” may be reason enough to deport you. The burden of proof has been flipped on its head. It’s on you to prove your American citizen, not on the cops to prove you’re not. Brett Kavanaugh called these stops a minor inconvenience and assured his fellow justices that when the detained person proves they’re a US citizen, “they’ll be free to go after a brief encounter.”

Morales García’s “brief encounter” lasted more than 120 days.

After his arrest, Morales García was booked in the Gillespie County jail. Then he was turned over to Border Patrol.

Morales García told Border Patrol the same story: He is a US citizen. He was born in Denver, Colorado. He lives in Austin. His parents are from Mexico. He has repeatedly crossed the border and back to see them legally, showing border guards his papers. He said he has his birth certificate and Social Security card in his apartment in Austin to prove his citizenship.

Border Patrol didn’t believe him. They, too, are paid not to believe people. The entire immigration purge has become a bounty-hunting operation, where immigration officers have quotas to meet and are paid per arrest, no matter if the arrest holds up.

What kind of documents do Americans need to prove they are Americans? Morales not only had his birth certificate and Social Security card at home, where most Americans keep such documents, but he also had his hospital records, which show that he’d been admitted to a Denver Hospital on the same day he was born.

It didn’t matter. Neither the Texas cops nor the federal immigration agents cared enough to look. They had no incentive to allow Morales García to prove his citizenship. That isn’t what they’re paid to do.

Does every American need to carry their birth certificates with them at all times or just people who “appear” to be members of an undesirable ethnic group in the eyes of cops and immigration agents? What is an undesirable ethnic group in the US, anyway?

Why did Texas police pull over the pickup truck Morales García was riding in to begin with? The police report said the truck was lit up for a “window tint” violation. Really? In sun-blasted central Texas? This was a pretext stop. I think it’s safe to assume the truck was pulled over for the very reason Kavanaugh wrote they could pull it over: the people inside fit the profile of what the cop considered to be a suspect ethnic group. It was a case of textbook racial profiling, but racial profiling for profit. Easy money. No probable cause to worry about. You didn’t even have to fret if you’d detained the right people. In immigration arrests these days, anything goes.

Brian Morales García certainly isn’t alone. A ProPublica report found that in the first nine months of Trump’s second term, federal immigration agents had arrested 170 US citizens on the Kafkaesque charges of being in the US illegally. DHS was picking up right where it left off when Trump was evicted from the White House in 2021. According to a GAO investigation in July of that year, from January 2016 through December 2020, federal immigration agents wrongly arrested 674 and deported at least 70 American citizens. By wrongly, I mean illegally. But not “wrong” for Trump and his gang of xenophobes, who have vowed to end “birthright citizenship” one way or another. And by “birthright citizenship” I really mean “citizenship” altogether, because at that point the government is handpicking the “citizens” it likes and denying basic constitutional rights to those it doesn’t.

Morales García was lucky he had documents to prove his citizenship, even if the government didn’t want to see them. He was lucky his brother and mother lived in Denver and could get his records and vouch for his identity. He was lucky he was able to retain a good immigration lawyer by the name of Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch.

But all of these strokes of luck didn’t stop Brian Morales García from being deported to Mexico.

Border Patrol didn’t make any effort to prove that they had detained someone who was in the US illegally. They acted as if they didn’t want to know the truth. They didn’t make any effort to contact Morales García’s family, even to let them know he’d been detained. Instead, they tried to keep his family and anyone else from finding him by moving him to five different prisons before finally putting him on a plane to Mexico.

Morales García’s family didn’t learn about his arrest until his brother Miguel got a call from a reporter at Univision. Miguel is a US citizen. He was also born in Denver. But what does that mean? What did it mean for Brian?

Miguel works in a local McDonald’s. He resembles his brother. He doesn’t speak great English. He was rightly worried that if he contacted Border Patrol about his brother, they might come after him as well. What’s to stop them?

“I got scared,” Miguel told the Texas Tribune. “I’m worried about being questioned.”

You see how this works, right? You see how the arrest and deportation of someone like Brian Morales García can cause fear to cascade through a community of people who have a fundamental right to be here and left in peace.

That’s why ICE and Border Patrol don’t care if they arrest, rough up or deport American citizens. They don’t even care if these arrests become public. They want people to live in fear of them, to be terrorized.

Brian Morales García is married. At the time of his arrest, his wife was three months pregnant. He wasn’t on welfare or SNAP. He wasn’t in a gang. He didn’t fit any of the slanderous stereotypes slapped on his “apparent ethnic group.” He was an American citizen with a job in the blistering Texas sun. He was living the work ethic conservative politicians and media blowhards continually lionize as symbolic of the American character.

It didn’t matter. None of it mattered. What mattered was the shade of his skin, the language he spoke, the sound of his name. His own government, the government funded by the income taxes he dutifully paid, didn’t believe anything he honestly told them. And then they lied about him to justify his wrongful arrest and deportation from the country he was born in.

When Brian Morales García finally won the right to reenter the US last week, he was met at the Laredo crossing by his lawyer, Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch, who had all of the documents that proved Brian is who he said he was. But how long will that matter? He looks the same as he always has, a little older maybe, more stressed out certainly. And those looks make him a target, regardless of where he was born or what he does for a living.

Morales García told the Texas Tribune: “Am I supposed to just accept that if I get pulled over again, it’ll be the same thing?  Will it be the same treatment?”

What does it mean to be an American? You tell me. I really don’t know anymore. I do know this: Brian Morales García shouldn’t just “have to accept” this wretched situation. The real question is: how much longer will we tolerate it?

+++

+ Gas was back up to $5.11 a gallon in here in Clackamas County this morning, as Trump launches new waves of airstrikes on Iran.

+ Most of Trump’s belligerent threats have rung hollow. But there’s some precedent for his plan to “destroy” Iran’s economy. Look what he’s done to the US economy…

+ Scott Bessent: “Once the market understands that we are focusing on fiscal consolidation, and that we are, uh, trying to bring the market back into equilibrium, uh, in a thinly traded market, I think, uh, you know, I’m confident that bonds will continue declining. We’ve got a spike in oil prices today that I don’t really understand.” Saying it, don’t make it so, Scott…

+ What kind of Americans are you, if you can’t withstand a little “crack spread“….? “The margin that oil refiners demand for producing fuels like gasoline, heating oil and diesel has climbed to some of the highest levels in history, putting more upward pressure on prices of petroleum products that American consumers and companies depend on – even as the price of oil seesaws around $90 a barrel. That promises to heap more pressure on an already strapped public – even if the full economic impact of higher energy prices might take a while to fully trickle down to the U.S. economy. Prices at the pump are already marching higher, and future winter heating bills could be steeper as well, as talks between the U.S. and Iran stall.”

+ If I remember my struggles through statistics class accurately, the “bottom 60 percent” would more properly be called the “vast majority.” 

+ Trump’s schizonomics: “We don’t need their [Canada’s] product. So if we cut off trade with that country, we just made $40 billion. You do a few countries like that, and we become a big money machine…We could do tremendous good for ourselves by just not trading with countries. We lose with Mexico $195 billion a year. They have nothing that we have to have, I mean. Hot tamales, tomatoes, a couple of things.”

+ Mexico is the US’s largest trading partner, with bilateral goods and services trading topping $970 billion a year.

+ This assessment is not from the Wall Street Journal’s news pages, but its wacky editorial page. Not an op-ed, but from the editorial board: “Trump will impose 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico for no good reason.” 

+ “Dr” Mehmet Oz: “If we could just get the average American to feel so healthy, so with it, so vibrant that they want to work just one extra year, that’s worth $1 trillion to our GDP every year.” 

It’s not about enjoying your life or your grandkids’ lives, but making more money for corporate America until you collapse or get pushed aside by a bot…

+ Tim Cook retired this week as CEO of Apple. He will become executive chair of Apple’s board, for which he will be compensated with $47 million worth of Apple stock.

+ According to the auto industry analysts at Edmunds, the share of used cars selling for more than $30,000 is now at 35.8%, up from 16.8% in 2019.

+ As driverless taxis are expanding in US cities, Uber announced it is laying off 10 percent of its staff.

+ The US House adopted a resolution to denounce socialism “in all its forms.” Does this include the Pentagon?

+ Here’s Stephen Semler’s chart on the denial of food assistance to impoverished American families. What kind of people brag about inflicting hunger on mothers and children? Usually they’re people who’ve never missed a meal and often have never even troubled to cook one for themselves…

+ A new report by the Economic Policy Institute concludes that

workers in ‘right-to-work’ (RTW) states are paid 6.7% less on average than workers in non-RTW states, more than double the 3.2% wage penalty found in similar research a decade ago. The wage penalty translates to over $4,000 less per year for a median full-time worker in an RTW state and is even steeper for women (7.3%), Black (9.7%), and Hispanic workers (10.0%).

+ I respect the findings and analysis, of course, but don’t understand why liberal groups like EPI concede to the propaganda of the right by calling them “right to work” instead of “union-busting” states….

+ From the latest Pew Research survey on which Americans identify as “working class”…

Republicans are more likely than Democrats to identify as working class–even after taking economics, occupation, education and other factors into account. Overall, 67% of Republicans and Republican leaners say “working class” describes them well, compared with 55% of Democrats.

The partisan divide is nearly identical among Americans with and without bachelor’s degrees. Among college graduates, 56% of Republicans identify as working class, compared with 44% of Democrats.

The partisan gap is widest among upper-income adults. Upper-income Republicans are 23 percentage points more likely than upper-income Democrats to describe themselves as working class.

Among Americans with few financial stresses, 60% of Republicans identify as working class, compared with 39% of Democrats.

+ It’s a measure of how ideologically stunted the Democratic Party is that they not only allowed the Republicans to claim the mantle of a working-class party but actually encouraged them to do so, because, in Chuck Schumer’s fatal assessment in 2016, “We’ve got the suburban women.”

+++

+Reporter: Can you explain to the American people, if this is not a war, what exactly is it?

Trump: A lot of people don’t call it a war. I call it a military conflict because it’s small potatoes for us. It’s not a big thing.

+  What “Small Potatoes” means to a billionaire war-monger…

Direct costs of the Iran War (to the US): $42 billion
Indirect costs of the Iran War (to the US): $100 billion
Number of US troops KIA in the Iran War: 18
Number of US troops wounded in the Iran War: 794
Increased energy costs to US consumers from the Iran War: $87 billion

+ So the US is back to bombing wedding parties, this time in Iran, where an airstrike in Kuhestak killed 68 people.

+ We’ve sacrificed national health care to dump an almost unlimited amount of money on an Army whose helicopters keep crashing without taking a single shot from Iranian gunners …No wonder Hegseth wants to hide the test results from multi-billion-dollar US weapons systems.

+ Top Pentagon brass warned Trump and Hegseth that extending military operations against Iran would likely be futile and would weaken US military strength and readiness in other regions. That Hegseth needs to be warned about this shows just how dumb or inebriated he must be: “Several U.S. military leaders have advised Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that prolonging large-scale operations against Iran is unsustainable and risks weakening their ability to confront threats elsewhere, including the U.S. homeland, according to people familiar with a recent assessment prepared for the Pentagon chief.” The warnings went unheeded. In fact, one might speculate that Hegseth and Trump ordered the latest round of airstrikes on Iran as a deranged (and self-defeating) rebuke to their own generals.

+ Trump’s biographer Michael Wolff, who also wrote two books on Fox News, says that Roger Ailes used to call Hegseth “General Vodka.”

+ How Hegseth shot his wad (of missiles)…According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Pentagon has fired nearly two-thirds of its stockpile of Patriot missiles, as well as large shares of other ballistic missile interceptors. The CSIS says it will take until 2029 to rebuild the Patriot supplies to pre-war levels…

+ According to the latest casualty reports from the Pentagon, which are likely vastly understated, at least 750 US troops have been injured in the Iran War.  Do head injuries count? I’ll refer you to Trump’s dismissal of traumatic brain injuries suffered by US troops after a bombing in Iraq in 2020 as mere “headaches and a couple of other things.”

+ The scale of Iran’s victory gets more impressive every day. Take from former Drug Czar Barry McCaffrey…

+ Naming an overpriced and obsolete-by-the-time-it-sets-sail aircraft carrier after a draft-dodging billionaire con artist (instead of a black war hero who saved hundreds of lives) is genius, just genius! (They named one after Clinton, so the precedent’s been set. As so often, Clinton opened the door to a new age of political vulgarity, which Trump has now metastasized into every precinct of the government.)

+ Hegseth has fired or demoted nearly every woman in the top ranks of the US military, but has his wife, another Fox News blonde, basically running the Hegseth Show at the Pentagon from behind the scenes…

+ It’s more likely that Jeffries really wanted to know how “affordable” the condos were going to be at Kushner’s planned beachfront casino in Gaza and how long it was going to be before all the Palestinians were evicted from the Strip and he could safely move in…

+ Netanyahu on how he manipulated the US into going to war against Iran. I’m sure he vastly overstates his power of persuasion. Trump had been gunning for Iran since the 2016 elections…It took a long time to get the US to come to its senses, but I finally got it to attack Iran due to my influence over its leaders through 1000 hours on American television…” 

+ Angie Nixon, the Democratic nominee for the US Senate in Florida: “I believe that Netanyahu is a war criminal who needs to answer [for] his crimes. And I do not support sending any money or any weapons to Israel at this moment. No, I don’t.”  This sounds radical, because we so rarely hear it expressed so directly by politicians. But in reality, it’s the position of 75% of the members of the Democratic Party and 60% of the US population…

+ It’s hard enough for Americans to learn geography without Trump constantly changing the names of large bodies of water whenever he gets peeved at a neighboring country (or loses a court ruling). No surprise even most Republicans don’t support the rechristening of Lake Ontario…

+ Trump on Canada: “They think they’re a state, but they’re not a state.” Glad that’s settled…

+ Dwight McDonald on the bombing of Nagasaki: “The Bomb is the natural product of the kind of society we have created. It is as easy, normal and unforced an expression of the American Way of Life as electric iceboxes, banana splits, and hydromatic-drive automobiles.”

+++

+ When it comes to sea temperatures, there are no more “norms,” just widening deviations from them…

+ Copernicus Climate Change Service reported that average global sea surface temperatures have reached a new high, hitting nearly 70 degrees Fahrenheit late last week for the first time in thousands of years. This mark surpassed the previous record set in March 2024.

+ The Paris Climate Accords are already obsolete. The 1.5C goal set in 2015 can’t be reached, according to the latest US climate report. Even under the most optimistic scenarios, global heating will breach 1.8C with dire consequences for agriculture, water supplies, extreme weather events, glacial melt, ecosystem breakdowns and the submersion of coastal areas and islands.

+ In April, all 50 of the world’s hottest cities were in India. Mumbai wasn’t one of them, even though it recorded its first 40C day in March and is likely to endure its longest “summer” in history.

+ With an average mean temperature of 16.5C, this was the hottest summer on record for the UK.

+ Since 2015, global investment in oil has fallen by 37%, while investment in renewables has grown by 88%. The US is now the exception.

+ According to data from the Storm Prediction Center, Illinois has experienced 243 tornado reports so far in 2026; that’s more than any state for a full calendar year dating back to 1950.

+ If you’ve never seen a glacier, you’d better hurry up….

+ In the last year, Trump’s Forest Service and private timber companies saturated forests in the West with a record amount of glyphosate (Roundup). MAHA!

+

Slouched at his desk in front of a group of ranchers (or at least people in expensive cowboy hats, silver and turquoise jewelry, Lucchese boots and cowboy chic couture resembling that worn by the cast of “Yellowstone”) Trump signed an executive order demanding that the Interior Department delist the gray wolf from the Endangered Species Act and urged the ranchers to start gunning down wolves.

Trump: “Anybody have a problem with the Mexican gray wolf?

Rancher: “They’re a big problem.”

[There are only an estimated 319 Mexican gray wolves in the wild in the US, but there are more than 2 million heads of cattle within the wolf’s natural range in New Mexico and Arizona.]

Trump: “Not a great idea, right? Although they are beautiful looking. But you don’t think they are beautiful, do you? And what do they do, rip the herd apart?”

Rancher: “They will kill your livestock, they will kill your dogs, your horses.”

[Horses and dogs are not part of a wolf’s diet.]

Sec. of Agriculture, and former Cotton Bowl Queen, Brooke Rollins: “But sir, the problem is, because they are on the endangered species list, they can’t shoot them. They have to sit and watch them destroy the herd.”

Trump: “You can shoot them as of today.”

Rollins: “Well, [Interior] Secretary Burgum has to do a little magic, but yes.”

[No, they can’t. Mexican and Gray Wolves are protected under the Endangered Species Act.]

Trump: “How do you like the idea that I’m letting you do that? And that will totally solve the problem, right?”

[It won’t do anything to solve the problem of high beef prices.]

Rancher: “Well, uh, I guess.”

Trump: “But you’ll be able to protect your herd. And right now you can’t do anything. It’s illegal, right?”

[Government killers at Wildlife Services are already authorized to kill “problem” wolves.]

Ranchers: “We’ve seen it take hundreds of family ranches and it’s just gone.”

[The wolves haven’t taken one family ranch. Banks and private equity have taken many, but not because of wolf predation.]

Trump: “And they would be able to protect if they had the right to shoot them?”

Rancher: “The state of Washington has fought us tooth and nail. Won’t allow your team to come in, won’t allow us to do anything.”

[At least 25 wolves were killed in the state of Washington in 2025.]

Trump: “Okay, you’re allowed to go and take care.”

The rancher shakes his head, knowing the law better than the president.

Trump: “No, no. You’re allowed to. We have no choice.”

Rancher: “If you say so, sir.”

Ranchers are richly compensated for every suspected wolf kill, even if the livestock perished because of their own mismanagement and its corpse was nibbled on by a wolf, coyote or bear. Ranchers can receive up to five times the market value for calves and three times the market value for mature cattle. In Colorado, ranchers are paid as much as $15,000 per wolf-killed cow. In other words, ranchers are making a killing from wolves killing their livestock. Most beef in the US is “grown” in feedlots, while most ranches are hobby or lifestyle operations that enjoy lucrative tax breaks and valuable water rights.

Not a lot of wolves prowling the largest cattle feed lot in America, Blackshirt Feeders in Nebraska, a Canadian-owned company that keeps 200,000 cows on site at any given time…

+ How much is the life of an endangered wolf worth? $139.50, according to the state of Colorado, which is the token amount of a fine they levied against a slob coyote hunter who illegally killed the radio-collared breeding-age female.

+ Either Trump’s really lost his feel for what’s going on out there with his people or, more likely, is past the point of pretending to care…

+ Former US Senator Kyrsten Sinema (and former Green Party member) goes on Fox to defend Data Centers: “It just shows that China has done an excellent job at spreading misinformation across the country around data centers. They really have done a good job convincing folks that their electricity and energy costs will go up, which is not true.”

+ North Carolina Republican Senate candidate Michael Whatley: “You gotta remember that this opposition to data centers is not organic. This is being ginned up.”

I’m ginned up, are you? If you’re not ginned up, get ginned up! Who’s got the gin? Make it Tanqueray for me.

+ Contra Whatley, a Fox News Poll explains why Americans loathe data centers…

+ And it’s not a “fringe” issue. The loathing of these water-sucking, power-gnawing monstrosities cuts across the political spectrum. Consider it relative to some other topics of alleged popular aversion…

+ Percent of Americans who believe the 1969 moon landing was faked: 10%

+ Percent of Americans who believe climate change is a hoax: 15%

+ Percent of Americans who believe 9/11 was a false-flag attack by the US government: 15%

+ Americans who refused to get vaccinated for COVID: 22%

+ Americans who oppose solar farms: 25%

+ Americans who think work-from-home and social distancing mandates were a mistake: 30%

+ Americans who oppose data centers: 75%

+ Calling Trump’s oil deal with Venezuela a “deplorable grab,” Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, economics editor of the Telegraph, said it is a “fools errand” because the oil reserves of the Orinoco are “much too expensive to extract and are best left to the crocodiles.”

+ Sean Duffy, Sec of Transportation/Reality TV star (dud?), who believes that bicycle lanes are woke impediments to the smoldering flow of car and truck traffic: “You know the stop/start button on your car? I hate that thing. Thank you, Lee Zeldin! He’s gotten rid of it, and the first cars without the stop/start button are rolling off the line.”

+ Over to you, Melanie…

+ Though no one talks about it anymore, COVID-19 is still killing as many as 42,000 Americans every year and sending 240,000 to the hospital.

+ Since RFK Jr has become HHS,  the number of refusals in US hospitals of vital newborn Vitamin K shots (which helps blood to clot) has increased by 57% since the beginning of the year. Pediatricians are expressing mounting fears that the refusals increase the risk of catastrophic bleeding in newborns.

+++

+ Great denials in American politics…

Nixon: “I’m not a crook.”

Clinton: “I didn’t have sexual relations with that woman, Ms Lewinsky.”

Christine O’Donnell: “I’m not a witch.”

John Edwards: “That’s not my baby!”

Trump: “I don’t wear a wig.”

+ Speaking of celebrity wigs, the autopsy report on Whitney Houston’s body described her wig as being sewn on.

+ The combined population of the three states (Idaho, West Virginia and Wyoming) where Trump has a positive approval rating: 4.4 million.  Population of the 47 states where Trump has a negative approval rating: 338.2 million.

+ A presidential campaign run against private equity, health insurance companies, Flock cameras and data centers would wipe the floor with any contenders…

+ Texas’ AG Ken Paxton, who is running for the U.S. Senate against James Talarico,  owns 15 houses. He lists three of them as his primary residence, for which he blames the Texas Constitution…

Yeah. So in Texas, the Constitution used to require that youut if you’re a statewide officeholder, you have to move to the capital. So I used to live in Collin County. I had when I became attorney general, I bought a condo in Austin so that I could live in the capital pursuant to what the Constitution required. Well, then my wife became a state senator. She wanted to buy a house, and by the way, that became my primary residence because it was required by the Constitution. So, when we bought a new house, we moved our primary residence to – to a house. So that was both were dictated by the Constitution, and then they changed the Constitution. They got rid of that requirement that you have as a statewide officer that you have to have a residence, or you have to live, whatever that means, in – in Austin. And so when that happened, I moved back to Collin County. So this idea that somehow that’s fraudulent- they, of course, aren’t following Texas law. They don’t really – either don’t realize or they’re being deceptive about what was required under the Texas Constitution that was changed. So this, this is just a con job by James Talarico again because he doesn’t want you to know that he’s a radical leftist…

+ Trump:

Kristen Welker, the Unpopular ‘Hostess’ of the once great Meet the Press, now considered Meet the Fake Press, just stated that Donald Trump has ‘mixed results’ on his Endorsements of Candidates … Because of this purposeful inaccuracy, she will be reported to the FCC for rebuke or punishment … The Press is a Disgrace to our Nation, and I hope that Chairman Brendan Carr, and the fine people of his Commission, will take this Threat to our Country very seriously. Thank you for your attention to this very important matter of Fake Polls and Commentary! President DONALD J. TRUMP

+ Michael Donnelly: “Trump’s even a sore winner!”

+++

+ DHS is using an obscure law to circumvent court rulings in order to spy on journalists, unions and liberal non-profit groups. “Even after judges rejected the same ploy, the Trump administration is going directly to social media and telecommunications companies.” Trump knows by now that the courts have no means to stop him from ignoring their rulings and orders…

+ Milo Yiannopoulos on his arrest and deportation(Apparently it’s funny when it happens to Haitians, Salvadorans, and Mexicans and an outrage when they come after you): “I didn’t really understand the physical reality of how institutionalized the brutality is in America. The manner in which they arrest you, they put you in manacles; everybody is arrested like an MS 13 gang member.  It was physically degrading. It was frightening. I don’t think I’ve ever been frightened like that before. I was weeping like an old woman for an hour. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.”

+ The Trump pogrom was never about deporting criminals. In all of 2025, Trump’s DHS arrested 18,883 people for deportation with no criminal records. In the first seven months of 2026, they’ve already arrested 25,424 people without any criminal history.

+ As they kicked 5 million American families off of food aid, the Trump White House is offering white South Africans $4500 in living expenses to move here…

+ The average wait for most Indian immigrants to get a green card: 179 years.

+ The Omaha school district, the largest in Nebraska, is demanding that local cops stop using those electric shock gloves (now in the hands of ICE officers from coast to coast) on its students! As usual in America, teens are the testing ground for new weapons of police brutality…

+ With its ranks depleted and demoralized, the FBI is apparently lifting its restrictions on hiring agents who have worked as prostitutes, stolen from their employers or engaged in other petty crimes. But were these ever barriers to employment by the Feds? One might have presumed they were prerequisites…

+ Every day you think it can’t possibly get more depraved, then, of course, it does. This week, the White House put up on its website video games where people–and I suspect you know the kind of people I mean- can build a border wall and play a Border Patrol agent chasing and capturing brown-skinned people along the Rio Grande.

+++

+ Norman Mailer: “Will the time come when we can cease concerning ourselves with the fiction that the rich need large profit incentives in order to keep our economy going? Just as a poor man does all he can to survive under the most wretched circumstances, so will the rich continue to be rich (although less so) if their profits are reduced by the recognition that a modern society cannot take an honest breath until it manages to provide for all of its citizens.”

Unfortunately, I think the answer to this, thirty years after said this during his Chubb Lecture at Yale, is no…Not this society, anyway.

+ A new Reuters poll finds that 89% of Americans believe that corruption in government is “widespread.” But how many of them think, to rework the line from Wall Street, that “corruption is good”, as long as your guy’s the one doing the grifting?

+ Trump continued to buy and sell oil and gas stocks throughout his war on Iran. Trump’s one-third Roy Cohn, one-third Jay Gould and one-third Baby Huey…

+ As his family tries to open a crypto bank, Trump boasts about Bitcoin, crypto and prediction markets, all scams: “We’re ensuring that America remains the undisputed leader not only in Bitcoin and crypto, but also in technologies like prediction markets.” On one of the largest prediction markets, Polymarket, only 31 percent of the accounts made a profit, and 69 percent lost money. If Trump’s casinos performed at that level, they might not have gone bankrupt. A Wall Street Journal report found only 0.1% of Polymarket accounts captured between 51% and 67% of all platform profits. Meanwhile, the top 1% of successful traders capture over 76% of total earnings.

+ The House edge in both roulette and slots is about 5.26 percent (twice as high as in European casinos) and in blackjack it is only 0.5 percent. Your chances of getting burned on the predictive markets are much higher, unless you’re getting inside information from the White House or other sources.

+ Reporter: The perception is you’re sitting at Commerce and you’re able to control what Cantor-Fizgerald is getting in terms of fees with your sons running that company. It looks like a conflict of interest. What’s your response?

+ Sec. of Commerce Howard Lutnick: It’s just not. I’m no longer involved in my own companies at all, and this is just minor stuff anyway.

+ As for Lutnick himself, the Wall Street Journal reported that he pocketed more than $250 million last year.

+ Those “Freedom Fuel” gas stations that Trump has been promoting, as his answer to Mamdani’s city-owned grocery stores, have apparently been selling stolen fuel. You didn’t think they’d buy their own, did you?

+++

+ When the shit hits the fan and there’s no toilet paper to mop it up.

+ I’m not a fan of Canada’s Mark Carney. But telling Trump “no deal” is, in fact, the only way to deal with him; yet so few have shown the guts to do it…

+ There’s a weakness in the Flock, Luke…

+ JD Vance: “I think that there are, like, things about the world that make me feel like I’d not be shocked if the Antichrist was walking among us. I mean, my view on it is — so, one, do I think that we’re in the end times? I don’t know.” I guess it depends on what form the Antichrist takes. Some eschatologists might consider he’s working for him.

+ Speak of the Devil, Colorado Republicans nominated Victor Marx as their candidate for Governor. Marx is a Christian Nationalist who has described himself as being a combatant in “demonic warfare” and boasts that he has performed exorcisms, not just of demons but of Satan himself. Marx described the encounter with Lucifer in a 2020 podcast uploaded to YouTube: “I’m going to tell you right now, I was praying for a girl in a youth prison, the largest one in Texas, maximum security. This girl started manifesting a demon. It was so real that all the other locked-up girls, all the other gang members, man, they all kind of huddled in a corner.” Marx claims the demonic entity announced, “I am Satan.”

If you think I’m joking, I’m not,” he assured his audience. “This demon was — it was horrible — just really manifested pretty nasty. It’s a little girl. … She’s a little girl, a pretty girl, just adorable, just like a little girl you want to bring home and just make her your daughter, except she had a demon in her. “All of a sudden this demon goes, ‘I guess you’re going to say I’m possessed.’” And I just — I just started laughing. I was like, ‘I don’t think I have to. It’s kind of obvious.’ I mean, really, that’s — I just snickered, which makes the devil mad. “I was like, ‘Well, whoever you are, you know, Christ, you got to come under the authority of the Lord Jesus Christ right now. ’Because, see, Satan, he’s not equal to God. He’s a created being. He’s a fallen angel, right? Long story longer, that girl did get delivered.

+ Bryce Crawford: “On a scale of 1-10, 10, how confident are you that you’ll go to heaven?”

+ JD Vance: “Oh man, that is a tough question. It’s high, but it’s not 10. It’s a 7 or an 8. I’m always one of these people who is going to have little doubts and if you’d asked me that question a year ago it was probably a 5 or a 6…I’d say the difference is – and again, all respect to God – you know, I still occasionally have doubts like, ” Is this actually real?”

Has Polymarket set the odds on Vance getting into Heaven?

 + When it comes to heresy, Vance’s remarks on entering the celestial kingdom probably rank up there with Arianism, Docetism, Nestorianism, and Monophysitism, though given the forgiving nature of Pope Leo from the Southside, he’d probably be given a Papal indulgence–not for Vance’s racist and sadistic treatment of Haitians, however. For that heresy, Vance will probably be consigned to the supreme sanction from his Church–exorcism by Victor Marx!

+ Susan Faladi on the “Barbie Backlash”: “Mr. Trump’s return to power resembled a sack of Troy — with women getting the sack. … The administration that insists ‘there are only two genders’ seems determined to make it only one.”

+ REM’s Michael Stipe, FOIA expert? From the New York Times review of Kai Bird’s new Roy Cohn biography, American Scoundrel…

“American Scoundrel” is an elegant retelling of the lurid Cohn story, but it’s also something more. Bird makes ample use of F.B.I. materials that he obtained only after the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press filed a lawsuit on his behalf. Cohn was three times indicted on charges of bribery, perjury and extortion, and in each instance was acquitted. Six weeks before his death, he was disbarred. The F.B.I. files help Bird catch Cohn in numerous lies. In sworn testimony from 1974 (acquired by the R.E.M. frontman Michael Stipe, an unexpected collector of Cohn memorabilia), Cohn — who was “audacious about his tax insolence” — claimed he had lost millions of dollars in the stock market. An F.B.I. memo shows that was not true.

+ We’ll kill the hostage, unless you submit to our demands…Kennedy Center version.

+ Organizers of a kickboxing tournament held in a city-owned arena in Orlando booked a match pitting a Jewish fighter named Ben Azoulay, who claimed to be fighting for Israel, against Paul Miller, a man who goes  by the ring name of the Gypsy Crusader, who had served time in federal prison for trying to instigate a “race-based civil war.” When Miller entered the ring, he began shouting anti-semitic slurs at Azoulay and twice gave a Nazi salute, as someone in the crowd waved a Nazi flag. Next summer they’ll probably be squaring off on the Ellipse of the White House…

+++

+ Many of the headlines commemorating the death of Gloria Steinem at 92 read like this: “Feminist icon, trailblazer, journalist.” They leave out one very salient episode of her career: her years as a paid CIA operative running the anti-communist Independent Research Service in the late 50s and 60s. There was, of course, nothing “Independent” about the “service.” It was an agency front group, fully funded by the CIA. The “research” it did was on left-leaning student activists, often conducted by sending undercover operatives to spy on their activities on campuses and at youth festivals. Though Steinem eventually cut ties with the Agency, her brand of feminism downplayed class-based politics.

+ After Gloria Steinem (RIP) was photographed at numerous social outings with Henry Kissinger in the late 1960s and early 1970s, she got so much flak from members of her own nascent feminist movement that she felt compelled to distance herself from speculation that she’d been “dating” the blood-stained diplomat, who once claimed that “power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.” When asked about Steinem’s denial that she was his “girlfriend,” Kissinger replied that he still felt hopeful she’d eventually submit to his, uh, charms: “After all, she did not say that if nominated she would not accept, or if elected she would not serve.”

+ Steinem defended Bill Clinton against every allegation of sexual misconduct, including rape, claiming that all of his “advances” had been “welcome.” She later defended her support for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 primaries over Sanders, who many younger women were enthusiastically backing, by saying condescendingly, “When you’re young, you’re thinking, ‘Where are the boys?” The boys were with Bernie.

+ The Financial Times: “Feminism didn’t kill the male breadwinner model, the economy did.” No kidding…

+ Suzanne Nossel, a former chief executive of the free expression group PEN America, on the Robert Mapplethorpe’s Foundation’s cowardly decision to refuse Kai Bird’s request to use Mapplethorpe’s harrowing portrait of Roy Cohn for the cover of his biography for fear that Trump would try to strip their tax exempt state: “The idea that a photograph of a dead mobster lawyer could somehow qualify as political activity, even under the Trump administration, is hard to fathom. And yet, we’re in an environment where no one feels they can rule anything out.” There’s no question Mapplethorpe would have been disgusted by the affair.

+ If there’s one thing that could make me sympathize with Natalie Harp, Trump’s Human Printer, clearly a disturbed, emotionally fragile woman, whose misguided devotion is being exploited by a creepy old man, it’s being the subject of a bitchy Maureen Dowd column…

+ Drugs found in Tom Petty’s body at autopsy: fentanyl, oxycodone, acetylfentanyl, despropionyl fentanyl,  temazepam, alprazolam  and citalopram. I’ve long said, just stick to heroin; it’s much safer than what Big Pharma wants to pump into you.

Oregon certainly has its problems. But then you wake up, read a story like this, and even the most intractable issues fade away for a few minutes as you marvel at the wonder of it all…

+ Francis Bacon: “I should have been, I don’t know, a con-man, a robber or a prostitute. But it was vanity that made me choose painting, vanity and chance.”

+ There’ll never be another Dolly Parton. In fact, it’s hard to imagine there ever was one…

Booked Up

What I’m reading this week…

American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey from McCarthy to Trump
Kai Bird with Susan Goldmark
(Simon and Schuster)

The Disappearers
Marlon James
(Riverhead)

Agrippa
Robert Harris
(Doubleday)

Sound Grammar
What I’m listening to this week…

Cut You Where You Was
Henry Threadgill Zooid
(Pi)

So Much for Goodbyes
Billy Strings
(Reprise)

Life in Small Spaces
Black Marble
(Sacred Bones)

Scrupulous Unscrupulousness

“There is a certain gesture of virility, be it one’s own or someone else’s, that calls for suspicion. It expresses independence, the sureness of the power to command, the tacit complicity of all males. Earlier this was called with awed respect the whim of the master… Its archetype is the handsome dinner-jacketed figure returning late to his bachelor flat, switching on the indirect lighting and mixing himself a whisky and the soda: the carefully recorded hissing of the mineral water says what arrogant mouth keeps to itself: that he despises anything that does not smell of smoke, leather and shaving cream, particularly women, which is why they, precisely, find him irresistible. For him the ideal form of human relations is the club, that arena of a respect founded on scrupulous unscrupulousness.”

– Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections From a Damaged Life