Author’s note: I wrote this before last night’s events at the White House Correspondence dinner. Initially, I planned to hold this post and write something more current, but I’ve decided to leave this one as is. Mostly because whatever aspect(s) of last night you’re upset about —guns in America, mass shootings, our current politics, conspiracy theories, our current political media, or something else entirely — the way forward is to fight for the future we want. Recent events don’t change that.

-Melissa

Donald Trump started the redistricting war, but we finished it. This week, voters in Virginia, a key swing state, sent a decisive message to the Trump Regime: Stop messing with our elections.

I love everything about how Democrats engaged in this fight, starting with the fact that we fought it in the first place. When Trump started demanding red states push through redistricting bills, I fully expected Democratic leadership to make speeches and statements about Trump subverting democracy, and do nothing more while he went ahead and reengineered the makeup of the House.

Instead, we mounted a fight, starting in California. Even better, every mainstream Democrat from Speaker of the House Hakeem Jeffries to former President Barack Obama got on board, urging Democrats in California and Virginia to vote for blue state efforts to counter Trump’s dirty tricks. It felt so good to see Democrats acknowledging reality and fighting the system that exists now rather than pretending the old one was still in place.

Two big takeaways. The first is that when we fight, we win. We won’t win every time, but you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. The more frequent complaint from Democratic voters is that the party isn’t fighting hard enough. When party leadership shows up with more than just rhetoric, voters will show up too.

Second is that we can continue to fight smart and get creative. MAGA is doing everything it can to destroy America, taking it apart piece by piece and selling to the highest bidder. American Democracy as we knew it is gone, rapidly evolving into a system of competitive authoritarianism. The system is broken and beating the current Regime requires a new playbook.

My sense is that the last couple of years have radicalized many of us. We’ve grown tired of fighting to preserve a system that’s long gone and what I hear from people more and more is: What can we create? What can we build? What comes next?

The redistricting fight shows us what’s possible. We can and should bring that energy and innovation to every fight moving forward. From expanding the number of Justices on SCOTUS and revamping our court system to rewriting the social contract of what a government by and for the people should be providing. From electing insurgent outsider candidates like Zohran Mamdani and Katie Wilson to public office, to insisting on full accountability and prosecution for the criminals in the Trump Administration. With creativity and innovation, we can stop playing defense and start to build a better America for the future.

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ICYMI

• More Than 70 Minnesota Children Detained in Operation Metro Surge, Data Shows (Sahan Journal)

• War Memes Are Turning Conflict Into Content (Wired)

• The Cascading Consequences of the Terror Campaign Against Children’s Literature (Rick Perlstein)

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Coda

Questions or feedback? Reply directly to this email or leave a comment below. I love hearing from readers, and many of your ideas and questions have become articles. I read everything you send and respond to most messages.

That’s all for this week. Talk again next Sunday!

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Since SPLC has both shared information with law enforcement agencies in the past, and touted this work to donors, press, and in their own publications, I’m not sure how Blanche and the DOJ think they’ll be able to prove fraud.

Or maybe they don’t care. Because the harassment from the State is the point. Neoreactionary MAGA influencer, Curtis Yarvin, gave the game away when he tweeted about the charges:

“What’s cool is that I don’t really see a strong legal case that the SPLC shouldn’t be able to run these kinds of wacky black ops. That means DOJ is prosecuting the SPLC just because it (kind of) can. If so this would be an unusual sign of “finally getting it.””

To put it another way, the DOJ is prosecuting SPLC just because it can. Because Trump and the MAGA Right want to punish their opponents, especially an opponent with a track record as successful as SPLC’s. The DOJ claims that SPLC’s actions actually further empowered hate groups, but that claim is ridiculous. As Chris Geidner details in Law Dork SPLC’s lengthy history of fighting hate groups, starting with how the organization bankrupted the KKK 40 years ago, having used the same evidence-gathering techniques speaks for itself.

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Geidner also uses quotes from a Klan newsletter from that time, decrying SPLC’s tactics, another data point that everyone -- including the hate groups they targeted -- knew that SPLC infiltrated their groups and paid informants as part of that work. The KKK knew even then that SPLC was out to destroy them.

Bryan Fair, SPLC’s Interim President and CEO, said in a video message about the indictment, “they have made no secret of who they want to protect, and who they want to destroy,” but I think it goes further than simply protecting hate groups. The Trump Regime is morphing the Federal Government apparatus into a mega hate group. Every action and policy, from ICE abductions to Hegseth’s purging people of color and women in military leadership, to the ever-growing list of civil rights rollbacks across government agencies, and even the destruction of USAID by DOGE. The Trump Regime is using every lever it can pull to enshrine and enforce white supremacy over America.

I was glad to see SPLC come out swinging right before the charges were announced, allowing them to frame the debate somewhat. I hope that posture continues. Certainly, SPLC has the resources to fight back forcefully. It should use every lever and resource available

SPLC is an organization I like a lot, and I’ve enjoyed strong professional relationships with folks who work there, as well as folks who cut their teeth at SPLC, over the course of writing this newsletter. I’m an activist, not an investigative reporter, and SPLC is an organization whose work I’ve often cited as I help readers understand the MAGA Right. I’ve also learned a great deal from their researchers and investigators, folks who have always been generous with their time and patient with my questions. I want to be clear that I stand in absolute solidarity with SPLC in this moment and encourage others to do the same.

I also won’t pretend SPLC is perfect. In 2019, the organization fired founder Morris Dees for decades-long abuses of power, including sexual harassment. And former staffer Michael Edison Hayden recently wrote an article detailing a toxic work culture, including union busting, and a loss of organizational courage that led to his departure.

SPLC also largely scaled back the Intelligence Project, probably to avoid the exact scenario they now find themselves in. As they’ve pointed out in their own press around the charges, SPLC no longer works with paid informants, and that part of the organization has been shut down.

Again, I support SPLC against this abuse of power from the Trump Regime. But there’s a lesson here that institutions have to absorb. Obeying in advance and capitulating under threat won’t save you. So many institutions of all stripes have done a version of what SPLC did when it ended its work with paid informants. It didn’t stop the Trump Regime from coming for SPLC, and it won’t stop the Regime from coming for all of us in the future. But this stance weakened individual institutions and has made it more difficult to collectively resist the Trump Regime.

Cowardice is contagious, but so is courage. I understand how steep the cost of standing up to the Trump Regime can be, and the reality that many organizations won’t have the resources to survive that fight. I also think it can be a fine line between protecting the institution and waving the white flag, so I have empathy for staff and boards tasked with making these calls. But as Curtis Yarvine made plain, Trump and MAGA will keep abusing their power to target organizations doing good and vital work. Because they can.

Meanwhile, it’s worth remembering that those who have taken Trump on in court and other arenas come out the victor most of the time. We also got a huge win in Virginia this week, with voters passing a redistricting bill and winning a national gerrymandering fight that Trump started.

What’s happening to SPLC will happen to other organizations and individuals. Pam Bondi was fired and replaced with Todd Blanche because Trump believed she wasn’t targeting his political enemies quickly or aggressively enough. Blanche is auditioning to make his acting appointment permanent, and I expect him to follow up with more investigations and ridiculous charges.

Our call to action is clear. Choose courage and solidarity over fear and capitulation. It’s the only way to win.

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Donald Trump is the attention economy president. He doesn’t care if you love him or hate him. He just wants you fixated solely on him. Politically, this has worked well for him. I don’t believe Trump is always playing 3D chess or manufacturing distraction after distraction, but he does seem to understand better than any other politician how to exploit the attention economy to his advantage.

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The problem with the attention economy is that people get bored easily. Remaining the main character online requires constant effort, and, over time, your content generally has to become more shocking and/or extreme. Otherwise, you risk being tuned out entirely. Arguably, this happened in 2020 when Americans voted Trump out for Joe Biden, a candidate whose entire premise was boringness and a promise to return to normal. It didn’t stick, and Trump managed to find his way back, but I do try to remind myself that the man has lost our attention before, and likely will again.

Perhaps it’s already happening. Trump’s approval ratings and polling have tanked. And the MAGA coalition seems more interested in picking fights with him or trying to position themselves as his successor, than supporting his agenda. Replies to his posts on TruthSocial, literally a social network built specifically for Trump superfans, are increasingly negative, with MAGA fans upset about the war in Iran. Staunch Trump supporters are openly debating whether or not he might be the Antichrist.

Like Trump, the rest of MAGA lives and dies by the attention economy. They crave views, clicks, and money. These days, Trump’s best utility is that he’s easily exploited for that purpose. The so-called MAGA civil war is probably good business for MAGA influencers and creators, especially since legacy media loves to cover the infighting, further amplifying their content to a bigger audience.

Much as I’d like to declare Trump an irrelevant Lame Duck and move on, we can’t count him out, even as his influence is starting to wane. The Trump operation has the most sophisticated online outreach operation I’ve ever seen. The White House frequently works with MAGA creators, Trump has been a guest on multiple MAGA and MAGA-adjacent podcasts, and the right-wing online media machine is well-funded and resourced. Trump and his aides have invested in building up this media ecosystem for over a decade now, and even as I watch some of MAGA’s top influencers fight to come out on top, I’m not sure anyone else can keep this coalition together as the powerful force it’s been once Trump is gone… which makes it more difficult to abandon Trump entirely, even for those who want to.

There’s also no counterweight on the Left, for reasons that are both financial and cultural. I think we’re in a better place than we were in 2024, and I appreciate some of the efforts I’ve seen to resource and support lefty content creators. But what I hear consistently from people working in that space is that we don’t have the scale we need to really create and elevate an ecosystem. And as David Plouffe recently wrote for the New York Times, “[a] successful campaign in 2026 must operate like a full-time production studio,” something he doesn’t seem confident that Democratic campaigns are built to do right now.

We were reminded of the influence and potential power of lefty content creators this week when California Congressman Eric Swalwell was forced to suspend his gubernatorial campaign and resign from Congress due to credible sexual assault and harassment allegations against him. After receiving multiple tips, creators Mrs. Frazzled, AKA Arielle Fodor, and Cheyenne Jackson worked online and off with Swalwell’s victims to bring the story to light, using the attention economy as a tool to help elevate the women’s stories.

Fodor and Jackson initially experienced some backlash from the Left and were accused of doing the Republicans’ work for them. I’m interested to see how Swalwell will impact how campaigns and advocacy groups interact with them in the future. One of the cultural issues I worry about is that allies will now be more cautious about building relationships with creators, especially since this all began after Fodor spoke positively about an initial Zoom meeting with Swalwell organized by his campaign.

We don’t do imperfect allies all that well as a movement, something that holds us back and makes our funders overly cautious. Hopefully I’m wrong, and candidates who aren’t predators and advocacy groups will be even more enthusiastic about content creators like Mrs. Frazzled in a post-Swalwell world, rather than backing off.

The Left isn’t just competing with the MAGA Right, but also with commercial platforms and creators. One thing I love about What’s Resonating, a daily newsletter that monitors trending topics online, is that it presents left and right wing content alongside what politically neutral accounts are talking about online, and the places where political and non-political content do and don’t intersect. Meanwhile politics and entertainment continue to exist almost as one vertical, with TMZ launching a DC outpost just this week to cover politics with its brand of viral video gossip content.

You might find the attention economy exhausting (I certainly do!), but it’s not going away. If anything, I think it will get worse before it gets better, especially as the platforms continue to push short-form video content on users.

I don’t think we can ever replicate the ecosystem that Trump and MAGA created, but I also don’t believe we want to. The MAGA media is built around one personality, and even as it’s fracturing, Donald Trump remains at the center of that universe. That might be sustainable for a time, but it’s not how the left builds power and we don’t want to become our own cult of personality. However, we can adopt some of the practices that we know worked well for Trump, and candidates who want to win should absolutely find ways to compete in the attention economy, especially content creators, and build an ecosystem that works for us rather than against us.

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ICYMI

Meta Cafeteria Workers Did What Execs Won’t: Took on ICE and Won (Wired) The best story you’ll read all week. I promise.

Inside Trump’s Effort to “Take Over” the Midterm Elections (ProPublica) A comprehensive report. One for the bookmarks.

The Neo-Nazi Enforcer Who Helped Build Peter Thiel’s Online Influence Empire (Byline Times) I continue to be amazed at how much we’re learning about the so-called alt-right, AKA MAGA 1.0, via the Epstein files. This one’s a long but worthwhile read, and longtime readers will recognize many of the names mentioned here.

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I’m gonna give Mrs. Frazzled the final word this week. Her videos on gentle parenting various politicians are how I first discovered her content, and they crack me up every time. Enjoy this supercut of her doing her thing. I’ll talk to you again next Sunday!

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Vice President JD Vance has a new book coming out this year: a memoir about his conversion to Catholicism. To promote the book, he and his boss, Donald Trump, have decided to pick a fight with the Pope.

The beats of this one are both extremely online and extremely predictable. Vance threatening the Vatican, Trump piling on, Trump portraying himself as an AI-generated meme Jesus, Vance Pope-splaning theology to Pope Leo, Pete Hegseth mistaking Pulp Fiction quotes for scripture, and Pope Leo’s brother receiving at least one bomb threat that’s now under criminal investigation.

This post is available to paid subscribers now and will be available to everyone on Tuesday.

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This week I have a special treat for y’all: a guest post from Ashley Hildebrand. When JD Vance’s latest interaction with the Vatican made the news this week, the first person I thought of to give us the necessary context and analysis was Ashley. Thankfully, she was game.

-Melissa

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Almost exactly one year ago, Pope Francis passed away… only a few hours after meeting with Vice President JD Vance, a vocal convert to Catholicism. And a few weeks later, Catholic Cardinals from around the world picked a Chicago-born pope whose most recent tweets included sharing articles criticizing Vance’s policy priorities.

The jokes nearly wrote themselves – “If JD Vance were a real Catholic, he’d die of guilt,” was my personal favorite, but there was no shortage of people calling out the fact that Vance had not one but two popes who knew who he was and thought he was wrong.

I’ve built my career tracking the influence of Catholicism on U.S. politics, so with the Catholic Church and Vance and the White House back in the news this week, I was thrilled that Melissa reached out to me. I believe that Vance’s conversion to Catholicism story is a common pattern in the United States: man wants power, sees the highly structured and patriarchal order of the Catholic Church, and leverages their pre-established base for his own political gain.

If you’re not familiar with the pattern, start with Paul Weyrich and his role in the Religious Right’s journey from segregation to anti-abortion advocacy. Weyrich helped shape this concept of Christian nationalism to replace democracy with a theocracy. It’s not often recognized that Weyrich – founder of the Heritage Foundation – was Catholic, not Evangelical, and viewed his work as a political fight rather than a religious one.

For its part, the institutional Catholic Church in the U.S. welcomed the support – and so began a trajectory that led us to where we are today. In 2010, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) pulled their support for the Affordable Care Act because of abortion, and when Catholic Sisters paved the way for its passage, the USCCB and the Vatican responded with a censure that accused Catholic Sisters of “radical feminism” and “being silent on the right to life from conception… a question that is part of the lively public debate about abortion.”

Pope Francis, elected in 2013, didn’t solve the US church’s “middle management problem.” While he was famously outspoken on issues like caring for the environment and lamented the Church’s singular focus on abortion at the expense of migrants and people in poverty, he didn’t change the environment that allowed people like JD Vance to rise to power. Less than two months before the 2024 election, Francis criticized both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, meddling by calling on Catholic voters to choose the “lesser evil” and saying, “both are against life, be it the one who kicks out migrants or be it the one who kills babies.” He failed to see the real threat posed by a Trump/Vance win and now we’re dealing with the consequences. And while I wouldn’t have expected him to endorse a candidate, he could have just said nothing!

And so, the USCCB continued to prioritize abortion. In 2021, The Catholic Bishops tried to deny communion to Catholic President Joe Biden over his support for abortion. In 2022, the Archbishop of San Francisco officially denied communion to then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. And after Roe v. Wade was overturned and states took up ballot measures to address abortion, the Catholic Church spent millions of dollars in Kansas, Ohio, Florida, and elsewhere (despite the fact that only 1 in 10 US Catholics agree with the official church teaching that abortion should be banned outright).

Knowing all this is plenty to leave me – a lifelong Catholic – feeling jaded about the U.S. church, no matter what a pope says. For as refreshing and beloved Pope Francis was (and I will always cherish one of his final jabs at Vance’s ordo amoris tweet), the final years of his papacy were a far cry from the early days where outlets were running “Who said it: Bernie Sanders or the Pope?” comparisons.

When Leo was selected it was major news – a U.S. pope! – but the general consensus was that he’d be someone who would stabilize the ship from the liberalness of Francis and would generally be a milquetoast bureaucratic pope pulling a little from the more traditional parts of Catholicism and a little from the playbook of Francis’ more liberal moments.

After nearly a year of Pope Leo, I think I feel somewhat hopeful that he will inspire people against the Trump/Vance philosophy. Here are just a few examples: Catholic Cardinals are speaking out about defunding ICE, Catholic news outlets are running opinion pieces saying Vance’s immigration comments are an insult to our faith, and even conservative Archbishops are leading prayers outside of immigrant detention centers. Pope Leo accepted the resignation of Trump’s pal on the Religious Liberty Commission, Cardinal Timothy Dolan. And the statements Pope Leo has made recently about the war in Iran are pointed and direct – you can’t get much clearer than “Jesus does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war.”

This week, The Free Press was first to report that back in January, the Trump/Vance White House threatened the Vatican and claimed that the U.S. can do “whatever it wants – and that the Church had better take its side.” It was so bad that it was the reason Pope Leo canceled any plans to visit the U.S., his home. The hubris of the White House shouldn’t be surprising, but we’d be remiss if we didn’t also acknowledge that it’s a continuation of the pattern of a man in U.S. politics telling the Catholic Church to get in line behind him. Historically, the church usually does, because it prioritizes alignment on abortion and traditional gender roles above everything else.

Pope Leo’s election gave the world another globally influential U.S. figure who could be a foil to Trump and by extension, Vance. From now to 2028, we’re unfortunately all stuck on this runaway train as one man (Trump) attempts to usurp democracy to remain in power, another (Vance) attempts a rise to power in his own right as heir-apparent, and a third (Pope Leo) balances the influence that he plays on the global stage as both American and leader of the Catholic Church.

It really boils down to this: JD Vance, like so many before him, uses the trappings of the church to prop up his own agenda rather than live out the fully rounded teachings 53 million Catholic Americans learned in Sunday School. A Trump/Vance presidency and the threats they pose to the future bring us closer to a Christian nationalism that Paul Weyrich dreamed of and our founding fathers warned against. It’s certainly surprising, though not unwelcome, that the leader of the Catholic Church might be the best chance we have to push back against their political crusade for power. I don’t know if the Pope can help us protect world peace or preserve American democracy – I know not to put all my trust in the institution of the church – but I hope he does.

Ashley (Wilson) Hildebrand is Vice President of Communications at Issue One. She has previously worked at NETWORK Lobby/Nuns on the Bus, the Friends Committee on National Legislation, and Catholics for Choice. Follow her on Twitter at @APdubs.

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The Cover-Up (COURIER) I love this new project from my colleagues at Courier Newsroom. A searchable database of everything publicly released about Jeffrey Epstein, along with news and analysis to help us all parse through it. The database even allows you to bookmark items and make your own lists.

Inside the Daily Mail’s Creator-led Content Playbook (DigiDay) This is both a fascinating and terrifying read. “DMG Media joins a string of media companies — including CNN, Yahoo, The Washington Post, Future and Bustle Digital Group — building their own creator networks to reach younger audiences and attract new advertisers. The push reflects a broader shift among publishers to build closer ties with creators as platforms like YouTube and TikTok continue to dominate attention, particularly among younger audiences.”

Could Trump Be Removed Under the 25th Amendment? 5 Things You Should Know (The Root) A handy primer on all things 25th Amendment. Just in case we might need to know more about it in the not-too-distant future.

Once ‘Ultra MAGA’, Trump Supporters Fume About Iran on Truth Social (New York Times) Even on Trump’s official fan forum, folks are angry about the war in Iran.

EFF is Leaving X (Electronic Frontier Foundation) Analytics don’t lie. “We posted to Twitter (now known as X) five to ten times a day in 2018. Those tweets garnered somewhere between 50 and 100 million impressions per month. By 2024, our 2,500 X posts generated around 2 million impressions each month. Last year, our 1,500 posts earned roughly 13 million impressions for the entire year. To put it bluntly, an X post today receives less than 3% of the views a single tweet delivered seven years ago.”

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Blatant Self-Promotion

Jeremy Bauer-Wolf interviewed me for New America’s Mythbusting Accreditation series. We talked about the Right’s attacks on higher education in the U.S. and the strategy behind it. (Yes, I managed to reference both Christopher Rufo and Curtis Yarvin.) You can read or watch here.

I believe in celebrating the wins, and today fascism took a resounding hit. In Hungary’s election, Orbán and his party lost spectacularly — and he’s already conceded to his opponent. The victorious party, Tisza, is projected to win 135 out of 199 seats in the legislature. As Woody Guthrie would say, “all you fascists bound to lose!”

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COURIER’s newly-launched Epstein investigation project

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I believe in celebrating the wins. Wisconsinites got a big win this week when former Assemblywoman and Wisconsin Court of Appeals Judge Chris Taylor easily won her race for the Wisconsin Supreme Court, expanding the court’s liberal majority to 5-2.

Liberal judges have won the last 4 statewide elections for these seats, and as The DownBallot points out, things “could get even worse for conservatives if they lose next year’s race to replace Justice Annette Ziegler, another conservative who has announced that she will not run again. If liberals score another pickup in April of 2027, the soonest that conservatives, who were in the majority from 2008 until 2023, could win back control would be 2033.” That’s huge.

This post was made available to paid subscribers and patrons early and is now free to read.

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Politically active people often follow Wisconsin Supreme Court races closely, even if they have no history or association with the state. Court races were nationalized because millions of dollars in special-interest spending from the right poured into them, and everyone from local billionaire Diane Hendricks to Elon Musk has contributed. In 2011, when Scott Walker turned Wisconsin into a “laboratory for oligarchs,” all politics in Wisconsin instantly became international news, including the 2011 state supreme court race, where the majority flipped from liberal to conservative, further empowering Walker.

Scott Walker and his cronies used now having the majority to their advantage, decimating public programs and services and reengineering the political and academic culture of the state. Including an aggressive redistricting bill that enshrined Republican majorities in the State House and Senate. Laboratory for oligarchs is an apt phrase because I absolutely believe that Walker’s actions in Wisconsin were a direct inspiration for Project 2025, and a signal to billionaires everywhere that the American Right was more than happy to put America up for sale whenever and wherever they came to power.

Wisconsin is one of a handful of cautionary tales in the states that Americans didn’t pay close enough attention to. The good news is that we can learn from Wisconsin’s victories. In addition to winning and expanding the majority on the state supreme court, there was the election of Governor Tony Evers in 2019, which reduced the Republican majority in the Wisconsin State Assembly and broke the Republican hold on the supermajority in the State Senate. The Wisconsin Democratic Party has become an organizing and fundraising juggernaut, largely due to Ben Wikler’s tenure as State Party Chair.

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I lived and worked in Wisconsin from 2008-11, experiencing Walker and the Tea Party Republicans’ win firsthand. Over the years, I’ve seen my former colleagues run for and hold elected office, volunteers deepen their involvement rather than disengage, former interns now running organizations, and local bloggers doing all of the above, with some still writing about politics regularly. Many of these folks are still close friends, and I know fighting the good fight against what seemed like an insurmountable foe could be heartbreaking. But they kept at it.

It’s much easier to destroy things than to build them. Something that MAGA Republicans exploit as they dismantle America piece by piece. But that doesn’t mean their victory is inevitable. Even when it might feel that way.

Nationally, Tuesday’s election results in Wisconsin and the special election in Georgia bode well for this year’s midterm elections. Winning big in November would give us more power to curb the Trump Regime’s continual power grab. We have to ensure the election is free and fair, and then we have to vote MAGA out of every office we can. We have the momentum. We can win this.

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Donald Trump has always believed that he is the law. He exists in a world where he can do whatever he likes without consequence, and the rest of us are forced to live by his whims. And, crucially, he’s managed to build a coalition of folks willing to fight for his right to rule by force or too scared to stand up to Trump and his MAGA army.

Three examples of this from this week. The Regime issued an executive order that attempts to ban mail-in voting and Federalize elections. Trump also attended the Supreme Court arguments on Birthright Citizenship in person, which is both unprecedented and highly inappropriate for a sitting president to do in a system of government built on a separation of powers. His presence was obviously intended as a threat to the Justices, though court watchers seem to think Trump will lose the case anyway. Finally, Trump fired his staunchly loyal ally Pam Bondi as Attorney General, replacing her with Todd Blanche, his personal lawyer.

Meanwhile, there’s a disconnect between those who say but he can’t do that and those who point out that he’s absolutely doing that. Well-meaning people take both views (I refuse to say both sides), and, understandably, get frustrated at folks who don’t see it the same way.

I find this discourse frustrating, especially on Bluesky, where the conversation tends to be incredibly earnest. People often call me a doomer for pointing out the obvious: Trump has no intention of this next election being free and fair, and his plan all along has been to destroy our system of government from within.

I think it’s vital to name what Trump is attempting and his real agenda. Especially since he and his Regime aren’t even bothering to hide it anymore. However, acknowledging the reality doesn’t mean that the Regime will ultimately succeed. They’ve had some big wins, but we’ve also managed to stop them multiple times in the courts and out in the streets.

To put it another way: Trump can and will get away with as much as the American people and the institutions that hold us together as a nation allow. Acknowledging that doesn’t mean we’re helpless to stop him. It means we all have a role to play, and that we’re in a fight on all fronts.

Trump doesn’t plan on the midterm election being free and fair, so it’s on us to ensure that he fails. We should also fight to win every seat that can be contested. So that MAGA’s power is weakened in the Federal, state, and municipal governments. Then we’ll need to pressure those we helped win to live up to what they promised us as candidates.

Beyond that, we have to organize on every front. I was pleased that two of the calls to action coming out of NoKings were a general national strike on May 1 and a call to organize in hyperlocal groups -- both modeled on how Minnesotans mobilized to resist ICE's occupation of their state. Elections and politics alone won’t be enough to save us, and if we want to build a better nation, we’ll need to get creative and try new things constantly, learning from one another along the way about what works.

I’m not a hopeful person by nature, but with every day I find myself feeling more optimistic about what’s possible. Most Americans don’t want to live in a fascist hellscape, and every day more of us realize that’s exactly what Trump and his MAGA base want America to be. We should be clear-eyed about who Trump is, but we can be just as clear-eyed about how to beat him.

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Blatant Self-Promotion: I spoke with The American Prospect’s Naomi Bethune about the MAGA crowdfunding rage machine and how it negatively affects grassroots fundraising for everyone.

Thanks for reading. There’s no newsletter this Sunday, but I’ll be back to it next week. Paid subscribers, please enjoy some bonus ICYMI links below!

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One quarter in and 2026 is moving just as fast as 2025. Before you can wrap your head around one batshit news cycle, another rears its ugly head. The Trump Regime continues to demand our constant attention and it does a number on our brains and our nervous systems. At least it does on mine.

And yet 2026 feels more hopeful. All around us, people are fed up and willing to do something about it. There are mass mobilizations like yesterday’s No King’s Day and hyper-local efforts happening in libraries, churches, and local haunts. A growing number of Americans recognize that ICE is an occupying force and are working to protect their neighbors from its terror. I’m even seeing some small signs of life from institutions. (You’re late to the party, but welcome.)

This week I wanted to revisit some of the more important posts I’ve written in 2026 – the ones that get to the crux of what’s happening, how Americans are reacting, and what we can do to rise up against the Regime.

We’re all domestic terrorists now

The events in Minnesota put into sharp focus what being a parent in America is like right now. If the parents in your life are radicalizing in real time, this one explains why that’s happening.

With a little help from my friends

As the events in Minnesota unfolded, I noticed hyper-local organizing efforts forming in real time. I have some thoughts on why that is, and several inspiring examples you sent me about what’s happening in your backyards. This post, more than any other, has informed my thinking recently.

QAnon helped hide the cabal in plain sight

The Epstein files have caused a lot of us to rethink the last decade or so, and there are so many threads to unpack: his influence, his network, and how it impacted all of our lives in ways we’re still processing. The thing that sticks with me is how QAnon and the Epstein files both show that they were onto something, but ultimately allowed themselves to become dupes for the very class they thought they were exposing.

The Great Unraveling

The MAGA coalition isn’t holding up well under the weight of Epstein and Iran, and cracks have emerged. Some of the key players are seeking to become the next God Emperor, taking control of the base, while others are looking for an exit ramp.

Thoughts on the Cesar Chavez revelations

The horrific revelations about Chavez continue to reverberate across the left. My heart breaks for Dolores Huerta and her fellow survivors. I also think this is a key moment for us to consider the stories we tell, and how much Americans in particular lean into story and myth over history.

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That’s all for this week. I hope yesterday filled your cup and gave you hope. Large-scale mobilization events are a good reminder that we’re not alone. Even when we might feel like it. I’m taking next week off for the Easter holiday, but I’ll talk to you again in two weeks!

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Happy Friday, Super supporters! Thank you so much for supporting Ctrl Alt-Right Delete with your hard-earned money. I know that times are tough and the economy has us all on age so I greatly appreciate the continued support for my work. I will keep doing all that I can to bring you the information and analysis you need to fight the Trump Regime in ways …

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Joe Kent’s resignation as Counter-Intelligence Chief was front-page news but I believe it was underreported. At the very least, its significance was downplayed in the media coverage.

Kent is as MAGA as MAGA gets. He’s an election denier with ties to right-wing extremist groups. A failed congressional candidate, his political activism in Washington State included organizing anti-public health rallies, spreading false conspiracy theories during Covid, calling for Anthony Fauci to be charged with murder, and appearing at at least one event for the Three Percenters, a right-wing militia group. This is a man who worked hard to get into Trump’s orbit as a MAGA faithful.

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But as I’ve written about previously, thanks to Epstein and Iran, the MAGA coalition has found itself bogged down by constant infighting. Trump isn’t in as strong a position as he once was, and as his health continues to decline, his followers are either looking for exit ramps or vying for their faction to take the movement over. Kent, who describes himself as a non-interventionist, made it clear in the resignation letter that he strongly disagreed with Trump over Iran. He accused Trump of being duped by an Israeli disinformation campaign, helped along by the American media, into doing Israel’s bidding over America First as a foreign policy doctrine.

Kent’s antisemitism is obvious. His resignation letter never outright says Trump has fallen prey to a global Jewish conspiracy, but when he’s talking about Israel being assisted by the American media, there’s no ambiguity about who and what he’s referring to. Or as Jason Sattler so eloquently put it on Bluesky: “The divide between those who want Jews to go to hell after Jesus returns and those who want Jews to go to hell now.” Kent is also sending a warning signal to the MAGA faithful: it looks like Trump chose the wrong side and might in fact be controlled by foreign interests and putting them over America’s interests.

Kent is making his loyalties clear. In the MAGA civil war, he’s aligning himself with the antisemitic Tucker Carlson/Nick Fuentes wing of the coalition. And he’s doing it in the most public way possible, using whatever leverage he had left. Kent and the Regime have continued to snipe at one another all week, with Kent airing his grievances during an interview with Tucker Carlson and Trump’s FBI announcing they’d opened an investigation into Kent for leaking.

It puts pressure on JD Vance, who sees himself as Trump’s successor and is working overtime to keep both factions happy while remaining loyal to his boss. Vance has gone out of his way to refuse to denounce anyone and throw as much red meat as he’s able to the Carlson/Fuentes folks to keep them in line. As more folks go the way of Joe Kent and Marjorie Taylor Greene, choosing an early exit, that will become a more difficult task for Vance. I suspect Vance is waiting for the right moment to knife Trump, but who knows what the next few months will bring.

One final thing to note: Kent’s faction of MAGA was sidelined during Trump’s first term in favor of more “mainstream” (read: aligned with evangelicals) Republican figures. They forgave Trump and came home both on January 6 and when Trump ran again in 2024, but my sense is they went into Trump 2.0 with their eyes open. These folks aren’t about to be sidelined again, and they plan on becoming the dominant MAGA faction once Trump is no longer in power. Whether they can keep the coalition together, and whether they’d accept Trump’s current Vice President to lead them, remains an open question.

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Democracy Report 2026: Unraveling the Democratic Era? (V-Dem Institute) If you only read one thing this week, it should be this report. Liberal democracy is taking a hit around the world, and as of this year, the US is no longer considered one. The report is a global snapshot with heavy emphasis on the United States’ rapid loss of rights and freedoms over the past year. If you want the tl;dr version, The Cause has a good rundown of the key takeaways and what they mean for us.

Manosphere Influencer Brags About Dining With Barron Trump (The Daily Beast) Interesting tidbit of news from Netflix’s new Inside the Manosphere documentary (which I haven’t yet watched). It’s always interesting to me how openly MAGA creators talk about the importance of being in proximity to Trump’s family. We’ve seen a lot of that with Don Jr. but this is the first report of MAGA creators talking about being close to Barron. Strategically it makes sense for them to do.

Inside Jeffrey Epstein’s Push to Cleanse His Past Online (New York Times) I’m guessing (and hoping) that a lot of the people and firms Epstein hired to do online reputation repair probably scammed him. Quote: “He never fully sanitized his web presence before he was arrested again, in 2019, and charged with sex trafficking. But the effort at times allowed Mr. Epstein to maintain an air of respectability and preserve social contacts he might have lost had his crimes been more prominent online.”

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Happy March Madness to all who celebrate. Shout out to all my fellow UK fans rooting for the Kentucky Men’s and Women’s teams, But no matter who you root for, I hope you enjoy my personal favorite sports event of the year. May your brackets go the distance!

I’ll see you again next week!

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The first time I heard the name Cesar Chavez, I was 4 or 5 years old. My mother and grandmother were arguing about the value of participating in a boycott. I believe the food in question was grapes. (A quick Google search suggests I remember this correctly.) The argument was over whether my Grandmother refusing to buy grapes would actually make a difference to anyone. My grandfather was a Teamster, and we were a pro-union family. It didn’t matter how much her grandkids liked them, Mamaw would not be buying grapes at the store that day.

If you’ve ever been politically active in any way, you probably know the story of United Farm Workers and its leaders, Cesar Chavez and Delores Huerta. It’s an example used in just about every labor or political training I’ve ever taken or facilitated. In part because Marshall Ganz, a leading scholar, researcher, and training on social organizing movements spent years working alongside Chavez at UFW. The Sí se puede, the UFW motto, is so well-known that candidate Barack Obama made an English version of it, Yes we Can, the cornerstone of his primary night speech in New Hampshire, and one of his most-remembered viral videos.

So for anyone who has ever admired the work of United Farmworkers, Chavez, Huerta, and their fellow organizers, the New York Times story detailing that Cesar Chavez sexually assaulted and abused multiple women and girls over the course of his career, including Delores Huerta -- who publicly confirmed her abuse for the first time -- the news was devastating. The article was one horrific detail after another, confirmed by multiple sources. I can’t even imagine what it must feel like for the survivors.

America is a nation that doesn’t let the facts of history get in the way of a good story. (For better and for worse.) It’s one of the reasons our culture has been so dominant for so long. Stories are a powerful way for us to understand ourselves and our shared values. To pass those values from one generation to another. But we also whitewash and erase. We focus on tales of charismatic leaders (mostly, but not always, white and male) at the expense of everyone else in the room or in the fight. We erase the details that were less than flattering. We erase the people exploited and/or left behind.

In cases of abusive behavior, women are often called upon to bury the truth. We’re asked to ignore a man’s unacceptable behavior and focus instead on the good he’s done. We’re told that exposing abuse and corruption tarnishes not one man, but the entire movement/company/congregation/government around him. Huerta, in her public statement, acknowledges this reality and the lengths she went to keep her abuse a secret, saying. “I carried this secret for as long as I did because building the movement and securing farmworker rights was my life’s work. The formation of a union was the only vehicle to achieve and secure those rights, and I wasn’t going to let Cesar or anyone else get in the way.”

I hope that Huerta’s speaking out brings her peace and that she doesn’t face backlash for confirming details of her abuse publicly. I’m angry that she and her fellow survivors were abused in the first place and that they were compelled to stay silent. The New York Times interviewed 60 people for the story, suggesting that Chavez’s behavior was an open secret. For decades, countless people opted to protect Chavez over his victims, for the sake of the Farmworker movement.

Now that the myth has been punctured by truth, Chavez’s story is being rewritten in real time. Government agencies are covering statues of him while towns and cities race to rename public buildings and cancel celebrations honoring him. In Los Angeles, Janice Hahn, who sits on the LA County Board of Supervisors, has suggested renaming the upcoming public holiday Cesar Chavez Day to “Farmworker Day.”

I like Hahn’s suggestion. The story of the Farmworker movement shouldn’t be erased because of one man’s abusive behavior. It was never about just one person, or even a small circle of people. Only last week I wrote about highlighting the doers, and there are thousands of doers here, each with a story worth telling. As Delores Huerta said to close out her statement: “The Farmworker movement has always been bigger and far more important than any one individual. Cesar’s actions do not diminish the permanent improvements achieved for farmworkers with the help of thousands of people.”

America loves a good story, and the Farmworker movement story is one we should keep telling. One man’s abusive behavior doesn’t change what happened. But it’s time to let go of the neatly packaged myth and embrace a messier and more holistic version: one where thousands of farmworkers, over decades, stood together in solidarity and changed the fabric of America forever.

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“I just want to find the doers, you know? Not the talkers but the people who just go out and do shit and get it done.”

I overheard someone say this at a brewery last weekend, and it resonated. No idea what they were talking about, as it could have been anything. But I’ve been thinking a lot about doers lately, and the value of just showing up, even when you don’t necessarily know what you’re doing.

After the election last year, I encouraged readers that instead of looking for the helpers, it was on us to become them. Calling on us to find ways to build community, show up for one another, and cultivate joy. It was clear to me that no one was coming to save us and that the systems and guardrails many of us had relied on for so long had faltered beyond repair.

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I’m always on the lookout for doers. People who turn their frustration, anger, despair, and fear into concrete action. And whenever someone comes to me looking for ways to cope with anxiety about the world, taking action is what I suggest. Find ways to help and plug in. The barrier to entry is low, and the minute you’re taking action, things start to feel less hopeless. Especially as you meet friends and neighbors who also want to make the world a better place.

Right now I’m reading To Catch a Fascist by Chris Mathais. I know most of the stories Mathias tells and consider some of his subjects friends, and yet I still find myself really inspired by them. I love how Mathais centers the book not on the far-right figures that we know all too well, but on the anti-fascists who stepped up to take them on and expose them to their communities as white supremacists who intended to cause harm – most without any institutional support beyond their fellow Internet friend. Their work was invaluable to anyone working to oppose the MAGA Right and to journalists covering the movement. But instead of accolades, many of these folks weren’t taken seriously, were marginalized, and faced attacks from Trump and his followers with no support from the broader left or general public. Even as they continued to do work that helped keep us and our communities safe.

Meanwhile I’ve been thinking a lot about what to cover in CARD and what stories I tell. At this point, the MAGA Right isn’t a rising movement but the Regime in power. We understand them differently now than when I started this newsletter a decade ago because we’re all living in the country and the world they’ve sought to create. I really struggle with how to cover the movement without giving it the oxygen and attention it desperately needs to survive… especially since there’s not as much cost to your neighbors knowing you’re a Nazi as there was back then. I’m not going to stop covering the MAGA Right, but I have been covering them differently over the last year, with less emphasis on outside figures and groups, and more emphasis on the State and the power it holds.

Moving forward, I want to highlight the stories of doers. Partly because I know from our latest reader survey and from your emails that you want more of that content too. You want more strategies and ideas for how to fight back, and I can’t think of a better way to do that than by sharing ways people are activating and innovating. Selfishly, because these stories inspire me too. I’ve been collecting them over the last few months, and when I start to feel despair creeping in, reminding myself of all the doers out there refills my cup.

So here’s my ask: Who should I talk to or learn more about? Who in your community is out there, and what networks and groups are forming? Please send me the stories of people and organizing efforts I should know about and that readers should know about. Especially the stories of people working outside the system. I plan to highlight your stories, as well as the ones I’ve been collecting, in future editions.

And if you are a doer, if yours is the story I should know more about, don’t be shy. Drop a line and let me know what you’re up to and why it matters. I don’t care if you’ve been organizing for decades or a few weeks. I’m excited to learn more!

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ICYMI

From Flock to ICE, Here’s a Breakdown of How You’re Being Watched (404media) A fascinating AMA about how we’re being surveilled in this “dystopian surveillance hellscape” from two reporters and experts on the topic.

Whistleblower Claims Ex-DOGE Member Says He Took Social Security Data to New Job ​​(Washington Post) This was always going to happen. It’s as infuriating as it is predictable.

We Have Obtained More Footage Of Kash Patel Falling Down While Playing Hockey (Defector) Because you deserve a little treat.

Elon Musk Wants a Do-Over on Twitter Trial After Jury Pool Couldn’t Hide Its Disdain (Gizmodo) You also deserve this as a treat.

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Thanks so much to everyone who supports CARD as a reader, a subscriber, or a sharer. You are the reason I keep going, and as long as you’re engaged I will be too. I’m grateful for your patronage.

That’s all for now. We’ll talk again next week. In honor of St. Patrick’s Day, please enjoy my favorite scene from Derry Girls.

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The Trump Regime’s attacks on Iran might just be the most staggering reminder yet of how little Donald Trump cares about the lives of Americans, even his own MAGA base. Six service members were killed, and at least 18 others were injured. Hundreds of thousands of Americans are currently stranded in the Middle East. The State Department gave them no warning to evacuate before the strikes and has told them to leave, while also offering no extraction plan or assistance and knowing the strikes mean that Americans are more likely to be targeted for retaliation. Trump has gotten America into a Middle East proxy war that endangers all of us, and has no clear plan for what to do next.

Or as Trump himself said, “I guess,” about the possibility of retaliation on American soil when asked. He added, “like I said, some people will die.”

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The MAGA Right, already in disarray because of Trump’s handling of Epstein, has spent the week fighting amongst themselves over Trump’s new war. It’s been interesting to observe. It’s one of those weeks where I’m so grateful to everyone at Media Matters for tracking MAGA media and how the various personalities are fighting with one another, starting with this detailed research explainer of who comes down on what side and what they’re saying. Per Media Matters, a “wide variety of streamers and podcasters have broken with the administration.”

Media Matters has also clipped these gems:

• Laura Loomer lashing out at Megyn Kelly as not MAGA (with some sexist language)

• Kelly calling her former Fox News Colleague Sean Hannity a “supplicant to Donald Trump” who exists to “puff” Trump up

• Ben Shapiro calling Kelly an “unbelievable coward”

• And (completely unrelated to Megyn Kelly), Groyper Nick Fuentes calling Donald Trump “demonic” and “diabolical.”

It’s objectively good when MAGA fights amongst themselves. It weakens their movement and their hold on the base. It’s energy they’re spending on one another rather than harming the rest of us.

MAGA is a coalition with differing ideologies brought together under Trump’s umbrella. The Epstein files already weakened them, and Iran has the potential to do so even further. Especially as Donald Trump is a lame duck president, and given what Americans can see of his declining physical health, it seems unlikely that Trump would be able to hang on for a third term even if that’s what he very much wants to do.

For his part, Trump is banking that the most extreme parts of his coalition will ultimately come home because who else would have them? How else could they hold power? Since we’re talking about Megyn Kelly so much, I think Trump’s remarks on her are especially telling. In an interview with Rachel Bade, he said, “Megyn was opposed to me for years when I ran the first time, and nothing stopped me. And so, you know, some people are against — and they always come back. She came all the way back.” He was similarly dismissive of Tucker Carlson.

Trump has a point. His Regime is the path for MAGA’s more extreme influencers to have actual power, and those like Kelly who screwed up their chance for a more mainstream audience and now rely on MAGA to make a living. A fractured MAGA coalition shrinks MAGA’s political capital and the available profit from the grift instantly. These folks might all be upset at Trump over Epstein and/or Iran and hate one another, but you can argue that they still need him and one another to have influence.

But Trump is also weak, and his coalition won’t hold forever. As I mentioned earlier, we can all see his declining health in plain sight. He’s historically unpopular, and the Iran war will only further decrease his approval ratings. And that’s without even getting into all things Epstein, which I don’t think he’ll ever fully recover from. Some in the MAGA movement, say Marjorie Taylor Greene and Thomas Massie, have seen the writing on the wall and have made an early exit. Some, like JD Vance and Marco Rubio, are vying to be Trump’s natural successor. Still others, like Nick Fuentes, are going scorched-earth, calling on his followers not to vote in the midterms, or to vote Democratic (!) if they do.

I wish I could laugh about this. Because MAGA’s internal fights are generally pretty entertaining, and all of us who have to follow them deserve a treat now and then. But given the war in Iran and the potential ramifications, it doesn’t feel right, even at MAGA’s expense. We’re living in dangerous times, and Trump clearly doesn’t care about any of our lives. Plus, we’ve seen what Trump is like when he’s cornered, and it’s not a pretty picture.

But a fractured MAGA coalition also gives me hope. Especially as the opposition to Trump’s Regime expands. There are more of us than them, and our resistance grows as MAGA starts to unravel. I’ve given up on trying to predict America’s future, but I’m steadfast in my belief that the only way forward is to remove Trump from office. The current conditions make that outcome more likely with each passing day. Our job right now is to keep up the pressure on every front.

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ICYMI

A Blueprint for Resistance: How Residents and Local Governments Are Shutting Down ICE Detention in Warehouses (The Vera Institute) How to fight ICE in your own backyard, starting with your local elected officials at the municipal and state level.

Media Capture: Who Controls the Story Controls the Future (MediaJustice) “MediaJustice is excited to launch Media Capture: Who Controls the Story Controls the Future, our new report that maps how Tech Oligarchs have captured the media system through ownership, financial influence and platform control. This report is for organizers, activists, and communities of color who are fighting Big Tech across many fronts, from data centers, surveillance, AI and labor.”

America After Trump: How Democracies Fall — and How They Can Come Back. (Vox) An important series of articles from Vox and Protect Democracy. Some are behind a paywall, but all are worth reading.

A Warning About Media Consolidation as We Face Another Senseless War (Free Press) No not that Free Press, the good one. From co-president Jessica J. González.

The Quintessential Epstein Files Email (The American Prospect) The Epstein files touch so many aspects of our government and culture that I’m not sure there is one data point that encapsulates everything, but David Dayen makes a good case for this particular email.

At Least Europe Cares About the Epstein Files (Jezebel) If you’re curious about what other countries are doing about Epstein and the cabal that enabled him, Jezebel has a rundown for you.

Kash Patel Gutted FBI Counterintelligence Team Tasked With Tracking Iranian Threats Days Before US Strikes, Sources Say (CNN) Because of course he did.

Polymarket Pulls Bet on Nuclear Detonation in 2026 (404 Media) “Pulling a bet like this is unusual and the company did not respond to 404 Media’s request for an explanation as to why. Word of the nuke bet drew wide attention online from critics already upset about Polymarket for its place in the depravity economy.”

She Got Fired for Reposting Charlie Kirk Criticism. Months Later, She’s Still Suffering (Vanity Fair) I’m glad to learn that she’s taking legal action. And I’m glad that she’s telling her story.

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To celebrate the end of Kristi Noem’s tenure as DHS Secretary, please enjoy this video of John Oliver dissecting her career. Talk to you again next Sunday!

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The Quintessential Epstein Files Email (The American Prospect) The Epstein files touch so many aspects of our government and culture that I’m not sure there is one data point that encapsulates eve…

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I’m not sure who came up with the phrase The Epstein Class but it’s perfect for this moment. Few things bring out my inner class warrior quite like The Epstein Class does. We all know instinctively that the more wealthy and powerful you are, the more easily you can act with impunity. Especially if you’re white and male. But the brazenness of what we see in the Epstein files really lays it all out bare. It’s staggering how comfortable Epstein and his correspondents were in their email exchanges. The things they’d say and express, the actions they’d create a written record of. You only behave like that when you’re not worried about facing consequences of any kind.

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Two Epstein-related news stories this week reinforce the role of wealth and power here. First is that we now have confirmation that the DOJ withheld files related to Trump, including multiple interviews with a woman who credibly accused Trump of sexually assaulting her when she was a minor. Journalist Roger Sollenberger first broke the story, which has since been confirmed by NPR, COURIER, and other news outlets.

Second, the Miami Herald, a news outlet that covered Epstein doggedly before anyone else even cared, is also out with an investigation and analysis detailing how Jeffrey Epstein sought to influence and infiltrate America’s justice system in his favor, a strategy that clearly worked for him for decades. As The Herald points out, “Epstein’s efforts to corrupt the justice system is important because, had some of these figures rigorously investigated and monitored Epstein, he may not have been able to continue to sexually abuse women and girls for another decade.”

There’s one set of rules for The Epstein Class and another for the rest of us. This is true when it comes to committing crimes, exploiting women and girls, even getting your kids into college. We all know this instinctively, but it’s still kind of a shock to the system just how openly The Epstein Class operated.

And then there’s the conspiracy theory angle of this, which continues to break my brain. Writer Hunter Lazzaro summarized how batshit this all is on his blog, Uncharted Blue:

“...we believed that the conservative peddlers of batshit theories must have of course realized none of it made any sense because we lived in social circles that just took for granted that our national and business leaders wouldn’t traffic cocaine or secretly murder accomplices or be important associates inside international sex trafficking rings.

What we failed to realize, at the time, is that in the social circles of the aforementioned conservative pundits, influencers, megadonors, and especially actual Republican elected officials making such claims, being enmeshed in international crime and elite sex clubs was, apparently, just your average Tuesday.”

I was thinking a lot about this last week when I was home in Kentucky, staying with family in Thomas Massie’s district (and seeing him talk Epstein all over the local news). One of the reasons I’m so familiar with right-wing conspiracy theories and disinformation is that I grew up around people who consumed vast amounts of right-wing talk radio, and developed some wild beliefs about the world and how it functioned because of that consumption. Only now it doesn’t seem so far-fetched. (Nor do Former Congressman Madison Cawthorn’s 2022 claims about being invited to cocaine-fueled orgies in DC.)

Congressman Massie, who likes to point out that he votes with the Trump Regime 91% of the time, is facing a Trump-backed primary opponent in his deep red district. He’s getting a lot of press attention and drawing crowds in his district, but it remains to be seen whether he can survive a primary challenge. The primary is in May and Massie’s win or loss will be an interesting data point on whether Trump’s continual stonewalling and cover-up on all things Epstein has hurt him with his MAGA base. I’m genuinely curious to see how the race goes.

Donald Trump is the perfect president for The Epstein Class, of which he is a proud member. Trump has made it clear that under his leadership, every aspect of America is for sale. You can purchase a pardon, grease the legislative and policy wheels in your favor, and donate to the Trump Presidential Library as a bribe. If you’re wealthy and powerful, Donald Trump believes that you should be able to act with impunity – so long as you’re willing to pay him the right price.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world is clearly fed up with The Epstein Class and the power these folks hold over us. The release of the files has had consequences for royal families, public officials, business leaders, and academics worldwide. Over the long term, the release of these files will have an outsized impact on who governs and leads humanity, an objectively good development that I hope my own government here in the US will eventually replicate.

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ICYMI

How to Stop a Dictator (Vox)

“I’ve spent the past six months researching how to fight democratic backsliding as part of a fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perry World House. What I’ve learned is that the conventional wisdom is wrong. Democracy is in fact a powerful motivating factor: When people are convinced that there’s a threat to their political freedoms, they can be motivated to go to extraordinary lengths to defend them.”

Nicki Minaj’s Social Media Propped Up by Thousands of Bots, Analysis Finds (Politico)

“The report, compiled by the disinformation detection company Cyabra, identifies a coordinated network of bots — more than 18,000 of them — that drove algorithms to spread Minaj’s posts on X.”

‘Andor’ Creator Tony Gilroy Gives the Interview He Couldn’t During Its Release (The Hollywood Reporter)

“So you get out your Fascism for Dummies book for the 15 things you do, and we tried to include as many of them as we could in the most artful way possible. How were we supposed to know that this clown car in Washington was going to basically use the same book that we used? So I don’t think it’s prescience so much as the sad familiarity of fascism and the karaoke menu of things that you go through to do it. You could list them from the show, or you could list them from the newspaper.”

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“We’re excited. Everything is so political. We’re athletes. We’re so proud to represent the US, and when you get the chance to go to White House and meet the president. We’re proud to be Americans and that’s so patriotic. No matter what your views are, we’re super excited to go to the White House tomorrow and be a part of that.” -Jack Hughes, player for the U.S. men’s hockey team.

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Well, I guess I published my newsletter about sports and the Olympics too soon because thanks to Donald Trump, Kash Patel, and the U.S. men’s hockey team, we have to talk about it again.

This week, the men’s hockey team visited the White House as special guests of President Trump and accompanied him to the State of the Union Address as well. Trump issued the invitation immediately after their gold medal victory, while on the phone with the team. Via FBI Director Kash Patel, who was there celebrating in the locker room for some reason. Also on the phone call, Trump commented that he’d have to invite the women’s team, who had won their gold medal a day prior, too, and that he’d be impeached if he weren’t. A so-called joke that got a big laugh from the men in the locker room.

Shockingly, the women’s hockey team didn’t find Trump’s comments funny, nor did they appreciate being asked to respond to Trump’s remark. Unlike the men’s team, the women politely declined Trump’s half-hearted invitation. They had no interest in being used as propaganda tools by the Trump Regime, not that the Regime seemed to want them there anyway. And let’s be clear, the men were props for the Regime, and Trump, who knows the value of a TV visual better than anyone. Trump’s State of the Union address was pro-fascist political theater, and most of the men’s team (five players opted to skip) were more than happy to show up and play a role in it.

In the short term, I can understand why young male athletes, who will rely on endorsement deals and social media engagement for income moving forward, would be happy for the association. Trump’s entire communications apparatus is built on rage bait, viral content, and appealing to young men in particular. There’s no denying that the exposure these players received expanded their audience and extended their moment of viral victory.

Long term, I suspect it’s a choice that they’ll come to regret and ultimately cost these players endorsement money. Especially as Trump’s poll and approval numbers remain low. Ultimately, MAGA is a toxic brand, and there’s a limit to how much mass appeal MAGA-aligned influencers can have. There’s an online graveyard of MAGAlebrities who tried to go mainstream and failed (Megyn Kelly and Oliver Anthony to name a few), and for a disgraced public figure (such as Jonathn Majors or disgraced Bachelor host Chris Harrison), MAGA-influencer is the option of last resort.

One member of the team, Brady Tkachuk, learned this lesson immediately. The White House’s official Twitter account shared an AI-generated video that made it seem like Tkachuk was insulting the Canadian team using insults and crude language. Tkachuk, who opted to visit the White House, also plays for a Canadian team and currently lives in Canada. He denounced the video, saying “that’s not who I am,” but my guess is that fans of his team in Ottawa won’t be happy with him and his choices.

Some of the players on the men’s team must realize this, which is why they’re starting to offer tepid apologies for laughing at Trump’s comments. They’re also assuring the public that they’re obviously supportive of the women’s team, and that we just don’t see how close everyone is. (A sentiment I haven’t seen any player on the women’s team share or confirm.)

It’s depressing to me how, instead of celebrating our hockey teams and every athlete who competed for America this year, we’re engaging in culture-war reruns. Nothing new is being said here. We’re back at locker room talk and MAGA reminding us once again that they don’t actually care about women’s sports or women athletes unless those women can be used as a wedge to strip Trans folks of their rights and dignity. Even the fact that the men’s hockey team has the privilege of pretending sports isn’t political, something their colleagues on the women’s team can’t do.

I choose to celebrate the women of Team USA and their accomplishments. I can’t throw them a party in Las Vegas like Flavor Flav, but I can point out that women won 8 of 12 gold medals that American athletes brought home. Women’s sports have never been more popular around the world, and everyone who isn’t part of the weird MAGA cult is cheering women athletes, teams, and leagues on. I’m excited about the big endorsement deals the women’s hockey team and athletes like Alysa Liu and Chloe Kim will land, and about how their popularity will further increase interest in women’s sports. I don’t know if women will ever get to have the privilege of their participation in sports not being political. That they’ll no longer be called on to explain someone else’s misogyny. But I have to hope that day will come.

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If you’d like to learn more about women’s hockey in the US, and the creation of the National Women’s Hockey League I highly recommend watching Take The Ice a documentary film directed and produced by my friend Rachel Koteen. It includes the stories of women athletes from our gold-medal winning U.S. team.

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Major sporting events always expose MAGA’s true feelings about America. They hate it. Rooting against American teams and athletes, inciting harassment and violence against athletes while they’re still at a competition, has become a MAGA tradition. Just this week, President Trump went after a freestyle skier on Team USA who admitted he had mixed emotions about competing for the United States right now. In response, Trump said the athlete was “very hard to root for” and added that “he shouldn’t have tried out for the Team, and it’s too bad he’s on it.”

Vice President Vance, who was roundly booed by a global audience at the Opening Ceremonies, warned athletes in an interview that they shouldn’t “pop off about politics” or “attack the president.” Left unsaid is what happens when you do. Trump and the MAGA trolls come for you. But Vance didn’t need to spell it out. We already know.

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I’m angry that athletes, on Team USA or otherwise, have to deal with this during the most exciting and also most stressful times of their lives. They don’t deserve it, and it distracts from their accomplishments and the story of their Olympic Games. Targeted harassment from trolls, potentially including the President of the United States, shouldn’t be something athletes have to prepare for. But that’s the reality of competing on a global stage now.

And then there’s the Super Bowl, which Donald Trump opted not to attend because he and his staff knew that he would likely also be roundly booed. Instead of harassing athletes on either team, Trump and MAGA decided to have a complete (and still ongoing) meltdown over the Halftime headline performer, Bad Bunny.

Bad Bunny is an American citizen, a global superstar at the top of his game, someone Americans can and should take pride in. He’s won six Grammys, including Album of the Year. He’s been the most-streamed artist on Spotify four out of the last six years. Bad Bunny is a household name in the US and around the world. It’s Bad Bunny’s global appeal and star power that the NFL wanted to help it expand into new markets and create a global fanbase. But according to Trump and MAGA, he’s divisive and doesn’t represent American values. Also, he performs in Spanish, which makes MAGA big mad. (Megyn Kelly had a meltdown so epic over this fact that even Piers Morgan thought she’d lost it.) MAGA is even mad at Elmo (yes, a literal puppet) for praising Bad Bunny.

MAGA loves to represent itself as real America and the rest of us as not belonging, but the truth is, it’s them who are out of touch. Trump is historically unpopular and tanking on every issue in polls. Most Americans are rooting for Team USA, not against them. Most Americans preferred Bad Bunny’s halftime show, which averaged 128.2 million viewers on television and more than 70 million views on YouTube, over the MAGA TPUSA alternative, which only generated 21 million YouTube views. Given that MAGA trolls have a history of juicing stats, who knows if that’s actually an accurate representation of how many people genuinely wanted to watch? Even Trump and the crowd at Mar-A-Lago opted to watch Bad Bunny.

The moment that crystallizes just how insane all of this is for me is YouTuber-turned-boxer Jake Paul, who resides in Puerto Rico, going online to call Bad Bunny a “fake citizen.” Both men’s American citizenship entitles them to reside in Puerto Rico, but it’s Bad Bunny’s homeland. Paul is a recent arrival. Suggesting someone else is a fake citizen while you’re living in their home is peak Colonialist. It’s a prime example of MAGA’s entitlement. Everything is meant for them and the rest of us are just in their way. It’s their world to exploit as they see fit, and no one else matters.

But again, this is the minority view. MAGA hates America and the diverse array of people that make us a great nation and our culture so appreciated around the world. The rest of us are sick of their weird and hateful obsessions. Bad Bunny let his electrifying performance speak for itself, a political and cultural statement of what America is and who belongs here. Several Olympic athletes continue to defend their teammates and speak out against ICE and the harm the Trump Regime causes daily. I was particularly moved by Rich Ruohonen, a member of the US Curling Team, the oldest member of Team USA competing, and a Minnesotan, who used his platform to speak out and speak up for his home state. I’m giving him the final word this week, and I encourage you to watch his remarks.

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ICYMI

‘No Reason He Should Have Died’: Alex Pretti’s Parents Open Up (NYT, gift link)

How ICE Will Spy On Protesters, And How You Can Protect Your Privacy (Tech Policy Press)

Pro-Trump Town Stunned After ICE Raids Leave It “Nearly Destroyed” (The New Republic)

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No newsletter next week as I’m taking it off to spend some time with the family. Publication will resume on March 1. See you in two weeks!

Join us for the State of the Swamp

Join DEFIANCE.org and COURIER at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. on February 24th for the State of the Swamp, a rebuttal to Trump’s State of the Union.

Opposition figures, current and former elected officials, celebrities, and other leaders will gather to tell the truth and to counter Donald Trump’s lies. Speakers include Robert DeNiro, Jim Acosta, Mehdi Hasan, and Senator Ron Wyden.

Use discount code COURIER15 for 15% off tickets

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The COURIER team is growing and we need you!

These new hires will have the opportunity to shape how we launch in new regions and build trust from the ground up. You can see the full job descriptions on our Careers Page here.

If you know of anyone who might be a strong fit—or could help spread the word—let us know! Email info@couriernewsroom.com.

Please welcome back, guest contributor, Evan Sutton.

This post is brought to you by paid subscribers, whose contributions allow me to create and edit more content for readers and keep it free for everyone.

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One year ago, I asked you to help make Tesla toxic. Now, I want to help you end a toxic relationship. (And if you already ended this toxic relationship, I hope this helps you help others do the same.)

Let’s try a thought experiment. I’d ask you to close your eyes and visualize this, but you probably need them to keep reading.

Imagine there’s a physical place you love. A coffee shop. A bookstore. You name it. You see friends there. You meet interesting people. Sometimes a celebrity comes in.

Then a new owner takes over. He creeps some of your friends out, but you decide to just ignore him.

One day, a guy runs up to your group whispering that Jews are bringing immigrants into America to “replace the white race.” The owner comes over… and hands him a microphone.

More of your friends leave, but others stay. Lots of important people stay, so it can’t be that big a deal, right? There are weirdos everywhere.

Soon, the owner starts screaming conspiracy theories about vaccines, hurricanes, voting...

More people leave. But a lot of important people are still there, so it can’t be that bad, can it? If they’re not worried, why should you be?

One day, the owner locks the doors while the place is full. He hands cameras out to some creepy dudes. He says, “These are X-ray vision cameras. They can see through anyone’s clothes.”

They take a picture of you, and when it prints, you’re naked. There’s nothing you can do to stop them. They do it over and over and over.

The cameras can add things to the pictures, too. The guys tell the camera, “Cover her in white fluid.” They make a naked picture of a 12-year-old and say, “tie her up.” The camera does, and the owner tapes the pictures in the window.

People get really mad. The owner says, “OK, I’m taking away the magic camera. Now you can only use it if you buy a subscription.”

When he finally unlocks the door, would you stay?

Obviously, this is about Elon Musk and X. But don’t think of X as an app. Think about it as a physical place. Would you ever go back to a bar or a bookstore where this happened?

Elon Musk turned X into a digital island where he gives creeps the tools that can turn a photo of any person into an explicit image of sexual abuse...for a small fee. And he did it while the world was learning that he emailed Jeffrey Epstein asking when he could visit the island for “the wildest party.”

Deepfakes aren’t the same as trafficking human bodies, but experts say they’re a form of sexual harassment and assault, abuse that’s caused deep trauma and even pushed people to suicide.

And it was probably all planned. The Washington Post covered Elon’s long quest to hook users on explicit content (just before Bezos threw the newsroom in a wood chipper). Elon started with “adult” chatbot conversations, then X-rated Waifu “companions.” He egged on the deepfake crisis. And when he put it behind a paywall, Grok’s subscription numbers exploded.

If you ever post a photograph on X, it can easily and quickly be turned into a deepfake. And thanks to the new terms of service, holding him accountable is nearly impossible.

I spent the last year deeply involved in #TeslaTakedown because I believe Elon Musk is a unique threat to democracy. He will flood every election with money and flood our society with lies unless we do what we can to stop him.

A grassroots movement led by everyday people put the world’s greediest man on defense. It created stress between Trump and Musk. That stress led to a big fight, and Elon tweeting that Trump is covering up the Epstein files because he’s in them.

Tesla is limping along. Elon’s all but given up on cars because he can’t sell them anymore. We’re going to keep putting pressure on Tesla. Musk’s empire is a house of cards, but we need more people to help blow it down.

X is a critical part of his empire. It gives him legitimacy, and it gives him a platform to feed lies into millions of brains—lies that reach more people and seem more credible because credible people still use his platform.

Using X is not harmless. Just by logging in, you pad Elon’s metrics. He gets paid every time you scroll past an ad. And you normalize him just by staying. Because if what he’s done isn’t a dealbreaker for you, why should it be for anyone else?

The best time to leave was the moment he made his intentions clear. The next best time is now.

Millions of people have chosen to leave. The Onion (10.6 million followers) quit. So did The Guardian (10.3m). Rachel Maddow (9.2m), Bruce Springsteen (1.2m), Spain’s Yolanda Diaz (625k), Jamelle Bouie (389k), AFT and President Randi Weingarten (190k combined), and millions more. Some made an announcement. Others ghosted. But they all chose to leave their toxic X.

We need more leaders to take this step. More leaders to draw a line and say “I won’t be part of that.” Sometimes we all need a push to end a toxic relationship, so we created an easy way for you to help them. Please take a minute to email your elected representatives and ask them to make a clean break from Elon’s abuse and disinformation vortex.

My wish for everyone this Valentine’s Day is simple: choose love. Love for a world that desperately needs leadership. Love for people who are still using X because leaders are still there. Love for your own sanity, which is being poisoned by the firehose of propaganda he’s force-feeding users with a rigged algorithm.

If you’re still on X, you’re in a toxic relationship. But you can do something about it. Dump your toxic X.

P.S., if you want to share a video version of this, you can find it on Instagram, Bluesky, and TikTok.

Evan Sutton is a campaigns and communications specialist who focuses on helping working people find solidarity through unions, and fighting technofascist billionaires who are trying to destroy democracy and build a techno-feudal society.

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So it turns out the QAnon and #Pizzagate folks had a point. There was a global child trafficking cabal committing crimes and exploiting girls and young women across the globe. They also got almost all the details wrong.

Epstein and the powerful men he catered to had no need to use code words like “pizza” or be coy in any way about what was happening. When you look through the troves of files, emails, and photos, it’s striking how comfortable these folks were documenting their activities and communicating regularly with a convicted sex offender, on mediums that could easily be accessed via court order. And then there’s Donald Trump, cast as the hero of QAnon in particular, who, as it turns out, was just one of many creeps Jeffrey Epstein was doing heinous crimes with.

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There’s a lot to unpack in the released materials, and I suspect that’s why the news has been a slow drip. The reach of Epstein’s network is a story that touches every sector. It’s politics, academia, royalty, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood. Pick your flavor of elite person or institution, and Jeffrey Epstein probably had a connection. We knew many of the folks he was corresponding with already (and honestly, most of the new names aren’t a surprise when you think about it), but the scale is staggering.

As I’ve been wrapping my head around how to write about Epstein, Ryan Broderick’s Garbage Day newsletter this week was really helpful. Broderick, who covers a lot of the same topics we do here, with a laser focus on meme culture, points out how what we learned from the documents, particularly Epstein’s relationship to the founder of 4chan’s /pol/ forum, changes and expands the narrative many of us believed about the last decade.

Broderick:

I had a front row seat to the collapse of the global order. And I believed at the time that I understood what was going on. In the aftermath of the Great Recession, far-right extremists, aided and amplified by Russia’s Internet Research Agency and funded by Republican dark money, infiltrated fringe online spaces. They weaponized disaffected young men, and used sites like Reddit and 4chan to organize a flood of content that influenced the unthinking algorithms on larger platforms like Facebook and YouTube. But there were always holes in that explanation that I could never quite account for. A feeling — one that can be quite dangerous for a journalist trying not fall into the void of conspiracy theories — that there was something bigger going on. And while I can’t say that we have the complete story yet, it does increasingly feel like I was actually, without knowing it, following Jeffrey Epstein around the world the whole time.

What breaks my brain is how many of the people propagating false QAnon and #Pizzagate conspiracy theories, winking and nodding to them, and sending true believers into a frenzy on a regular basis were interacting with Epstein, a convicted sex offender whose behavior was well known, the entire time. As I’ve said before, with MAGA, it’s always projection, but this is a level of projection even I hadn’t anticipated. There’s just something so sinister about using the global child trafficking ring to rile up MAGA while also being connected to a global child trafficking ring, even tangentially.

It also makes me understand some of the very public MAGA breakups – Thomas Massie, Marjorie Taylor Greene, perhaps whatever is going on with Nancy Mace – in a different way. I think in particular of Taylor Greene saying that she no longer believed in QAnon and claiming that she was a victim of social media disinformation. It’s clear that at some point she started to realize that Donald Trump wasn’t the man she thought he was, and his Epstein stonewalling seems to have been the breaking point. At a certain point, the evidence became so big that they couldn’t ignore it anymore. And while I don’t see MAGA collapsing anytime soon, I suspect there are a lot more folks in that movement quietly realizing that their God Emperor Trump has been the predator all along.

There’s a lot more I could get into, such as Epstein probably selling kompromat to Russia and Israel, and the fact that Epstein’s lawyers indicated he was ready to give up names less than two weeks before he was found dead in his cell. Or whatever his connection to Ghislaine’s father, Robert Maxwell, was, and the various theories around that. Generally, I try to avoid conspiratorial thinking, but the more I read and absorb, the harder it is not to go down my own rabbit holes. At the same time, I’m not sure how much of it matters in the grand scheme of things.

The Epstein story has always been a story about corruption and how weak and corrupt institutions were easily exploited by him. I think a lot about the early days of conversations around disinformation and how every report and slide deck would have “decreased trust in institutions” as a reason people were susceptible to mis and disinformation. But I always thought that missed the point. Mis and disinformation weren’t causing people to trust institutions less. People no longer trusted institutions and were more susceptible to mis and disinformation because they already knew institutions had failed them. The corruption was obvious, and those at the top were rarely held accountable in meaningful ways. We could all see the corruption and lack of accountability in plain sight, so of course, some people started going down rabbit holes and coming up with the wildest possible theories to explain everything.

Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, and everyone in their orbit were able to operate openly as long as they did because elites and institutions were willing to play ball. They knew who Epstein was, but were more than happy to take his money and ask for his assistance when they needed it. Epstein is the most depraved example of corruption, but we all know it’s far from the only one. And the vast majority of us, who aren’t billionaires or billionaire-adjacent, feel the impact of how institutions are failing us every day.

The people currently running America, who aim to run the world, seek to destroy and dismantle it piece by piece. The same people with enough money and power involved in or adjacent to the global child trafficking ring, without fear of consequences, are trying to ensure they have even more power over us all and that any institutions they don’t destroy serve only them and their interests. True believers of QAnon and #pizzagate thought they were onto the grand conspiracy, but missed that they were merely pawns in the game, another group to be exploited all along.

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ICYMI

Ron Wyden Only Talks Like This When The Spies Do Something *Real* Bad (Forever Wars) If, like me, you’ve been curious about Senator Wyden’s public warning shot to the CIA, Spencer Ackerman has some helpful context about Wyden and the potential seriousness of this matter.

All About “Reactionary Centrism” (Volts) I really enjoyed this podcast interview of Michael Hobbes from David Roberts. I’m a fan of Hobbes and his take on reactionary centrism and intellectual elites generally, but this interview serves as a nice explainer of what it is and the harm it does to American political discourse.

The Power of Mocking Trump’s Pathetic Monsters (Mother Jones) Some examples of Alinsky’s 5th rule for radicals on the ground in Minneapolis.

Why Young State Lawmakers Are Weighing the Exit (Axios) I’m not especially surprised to learn that Millennial and Gen Z officeholders are considering whether it’s worth the trouble, but it’s concerning. Especially since if we have any hope of reviving electoral politics, we need more candidates with new ideas and energy from these generations.

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Coda

I hope everyone enjoys the Super Bowl (AKA Bad Bunny Bowl). I’m married to a lifelong Seahawks fan, so I’ll be rooting for the Hawks tonight. Thanks so much for reading and supporting the newsletter. I’ll see you again next week!

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