Police have now confirmed that Patrick White is the man who killed a police officer while going on a shooting rampage targeting the CDC campus in Atlanta, Georgia. Police have also confirmed that the motive for the attempted mass shooting was White’s complaints about COVID-19 vaccines and the CDC’s response to the pandemic overall.
Documents found in a search of the home where White had lived with his parents “expressed the shooter’s discontent with the COVID-19 vaccinations,” GBI Director Chris Hosey said.
White, 30, had written about wanting to make “the public aware of his discontent with the vaccine,” Hosey added.
While RFK Jr. took his sweet time, nearly a full day, to even publicly comment on the shooting at all, and only did so after posting pictures to his private ExTwitter account to show off some fish he caught in Alaska, CDC Director Susan Monarez was fielding questions from CDC staff specifically about whether Kennedy and CDC and HHS leadership understood the role that misinformation played into the shooting.
“Do you expect Secretary Kennedy to make a statement about this, and are you able to speak to the misinformation—the disinformation—that caused this issue, and what your plan forward is to ensure this doesn’t happen again?” the employee asked.
Monarez did not directly answer the question, saying only that she had been in touch with Kennedy’s office. “It’s a good question. We’ve been in constant communication with the Office of the Secretary, and more will be coming,” Monarez said.
More did come. Monarez held an all hands meeting in Atlanta to address her staff’s concerns. And her message to CDC staff was quite good.
“We know that misinformation can be dangerous. Not only to health, but to those that trust us and those we want to trust,” Dr. Susan Monarez told CDC employees in an “all-hands” meeting Tuesday, her first since the attack capped her first full week on campus as CDC director.
“We need to rebuild the trust together,” Monarez said, according to a transcript obtained by The Associated Press. “The trust is what binds us. In moments like this, we must meet the challenges with rational, evidence-based discourse spoken with compassion and understanding. That is how we will lead.”
You have to imagine that message was met with anguish and confusion, however. Only a day earlier, RFK Jr. did an interview with Scripps, in which he first cast doubt on the obvious and now confirmed motives of the shooter that intended to kill as many of these same staffers as he could, only to pivot to repeat the same god damned rhetoric that made those staffers a target in the first place.
“We don’t know enough about what the motive was of this individual, but people can ask questions without being penalized,” Kennedy said.
“One of the things that we saw during COVID is that the government was overreaching and in its efforts to persuade the public to get vaccinated, and they were saying things that were not always true, and public health agencies should never do that,” Kennedy said.
I’m shaking with anger as I write this. Kennedy’s comments, in the wake of the shooting, align with the claims made by the shooter. Folks: he’s parroting the fucking shooter mere days after he shot up the CDC, an agency for which Kennedy is responsible. That isn’t just unhinged, it’s downright evil.
I hope to whatever god might be out there that there is not the further targeting of CDC personnel, or violence done against any other public healthcare servant. But if there is, RFK Jr. will be culpable for it, full stop. As will those that allow him to remain in his position.
The Trump administration has halted litigation aimed at stopping civil rights abuses of prisoners in Louisiana and mentally ill people living in South Carolina group homes.
The Biden administration filed lawsuits against the two states in December after Department of Justice investigations concluded that they had failed to fix violations despite years of warnings.
Louisiana’s prison system has kept thousands of incarcerated people behind bars for weeks, months or sometimes more than a year after they were supposed to be released, records show. And the DOJ accused South Carolina of institutionalizing thousands of people diagnosed with serious mental illnesses — sometimes for decades — rather than provide services that would allow them to live in less restricted settings, as is their right under federal law.
Federal judges temporarily suspended the lawsuits in February at the request of the states and with the support of the DOJ.
Civil rights lawyers who have monitored the cases said the move is another sign of the Trump administration’s retreat from the department’s mission of protecting the rights of vulnerable groups. Since January, President Donald Trump’s DOJ has dropped racial discrimination lawsuits, abandoned investigations of police misconduct and canceled oversight of troubled law enforcement agencies.
“This administration has been very aggressive in rolling back any kind of civil rights reforms or advancements,” said Anya Bidwell, senior attorney at the public-interest law firm Institute for Justice. “It’s unquestionably disappointing.”
The cases against Louisiana and South Carolina were brought by a unit of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division tasked with enforcing laws that guarantee religious freedom, access to reproductive health services, constitutional policing, and the rights of people in state and local institutions, including jails, prisons and health care facilities for people with disabilities.
The unit, the Special Litigation Section, has seen a dramatic reduction in lawyers since Trump took office in January. Court records show at least seven attorneys working on the lawsuits against Louisiana and South Carolina are no longer with the DOJ.
The section had more than 90 employees at the start of the year, including about 60 front-line attorneys. By June, it had about 25, including around 15 front-line lawyers, according to a source familiar with its operation. Sources said some were reassigned to other areas of the department while others quit in protest against the direction of the office under Trump, found new jobs or took early retirement.
The exodus will hamper its ability to carry out essential functions, such as battling sexual harassment in housing, discrimination against disabled people, and the improper use of restraints and seclusions against students in schools, said Omar Noureldin, a former senior attorney in the Civil Rights Division and President Joe Biden appointee who left in January.
“Regardless of your political leanings, I think most people would agree these are the kind of bad situations that should be addressed by the nation’s top civil rights enforcer,” Noureldin said.
A department spokesperson declined to comment in response to questions from ProPublica about the Louisiana and South Carolina cases. Sources familiar with the lawsuits said Trump appointees have told DOJ lawyers handling the cases that they want to resolve matters out of court.
The federal government has used settlement talks in the past to hammer out consent decrees, agreements that set a list of requirements to fix civil rights violations and are overseen by an outside monitor and federal judge to ensure compliance. But Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon, Trump’s appointee to run the DOJ’s civil rights division, has made no secret of her distaste for such measures.
In May, Dhillon announced she was moving to dismiss efforts to impose consent decrees on the Louisville, Kentucky, and Minneapolis police departments. She complained that consent decrees turn local control of policing over to “unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats.”
A DOJ investigation in the wake of the 2020 murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer accused the department of excessive force, unjustified shootings, and discrimination against Black and Native American people. The agency issued similar findings against the Louisville Metro Police Department after the high-profile killing of Breonna Taylor, who was shot in 2020 when officers forced their way into her home to execute a search warrant.
Noureldin, now a senior vice president at the government watchdog group Common Cause, said consent decrees provide an important level of oversight by an independent judge. By contrast, out-of-court settlements can be subject to the political whims of a new administration, which can decide to drop a case or end an agreement despite evidence of continuing constitutional violations.
“When you have a consent decree or a court-enforced settlement, the Justice Department can’t unilaterally just withdraw from the agreement,” Noureldin said. “A federal judge would have to agree that the public interest is served by terminating that settlement.”
“I Lost Everything”
In the case of Louisiana, the Justice Department issued a scathing report in January 2023 about the state confining prisoners beyond their sentences. The problems dated back more than a decade and remained widespread, the report said. Between January and April 2022 alone, more than a quarter of everyone released from prison custody was held past their release dates. Of those, 24% spent an additional 90 days or more behind bars, the DOJ found.
Among those held longer than they should have been was Robert Parker, a disc jockey known as “DJ Rob” in New Orleans, where he played R&B and hip-hop music at weddings and private parties. Parker, 55, was arrested in late 2016 after violating a restraining order brought by a former girlfriend.
He was supposed to be released in October 2017, but a prison staffer mistakenly classified him as a sex offender. That meant he was required to provide prison authorities with two addresses where he could stay that complied with sex offender registry rules.
Prison documents show Parker repeatedly told authorities that he wasn’t a sex offender and pleaded to speak to the warden to clear up the mistake. But nobody acted until a deputy public defender contacted state officials months later to complain. By the time he walked out, Parker had spent 337 extra days behind bars. During that period, he said, his car was repossessed, his mother died and his reputation was ruined.
“I lost everything,” he told ProPublica in an interview from a nursing home, where he was recovering from a stroke. “I’m ready to get away from Louisiana.”
Louisiana’s detention system is complex. Unlike other jurisdictions, where the convicted are housed in state facilities, inmates in Louisiana can be held in local jails overseen by sheriffs. A major contributor to the so-called over-detentions was poor communication among Louisiana’s court clerks, sheriff’s offices and the state department of corrections, according to interviews with attorneys, depositions of state officials, and reports from state and federal reviews of the prison system.
Until recently, the agencies shared prisoner sentencing information by shuttling stacks of paperwork by van or truck from the court to the sheriff’s office for the parish holding the prisoner, then to corrections officials. The document transfers, which often crisscrossed the state, typically happened only once a week. When the records finally arrived, it could take staff a month or longer to enter the data into computers, creating more delays. In addition, staff made data errors when calculating release dates.
Two years ago, The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Parker could pursue a lawsuit against the former head of the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections, James LeBlanc. That lawsuit is ongoing, said Parker’s attorney, Jonathan Rhodes. LeBlanc, who resigned last year, could not be reached for comment, and his attorneys did not respond to requests for comment.
In a statement, Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill acknowledged that the state’s process to determine release dates was unreliable but said the issue had been overblown by the Justice Department’s investigation, which she called “factually incorrect.”
“There were simply parts of it that are outside state control, such as clerks & courts,” Murrill stated.
Murrill said correction officials have been working with local officials to ensure prisoner releases are computed in a “timely and correct fashion.” Louisiana officials point to a new website that allows electronic sharing of information among the various agencies.
“The system has been overhauled. That has dramatically diminished, if not completely eliminated this problem,” Murrill stated. She did not address questions from ProPublica asking if prisoners were being held longer than their release dates this year.
Local attorneys who are handling lawsuits against the state expressed skepticism about Murrill’s claims.
William Most, an attorney who filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of incarcerated people who had been detained past their release dates, noted that as late as May 2024, 141 people who were released that month had been kept longer than they should have been, 120 of them for more than 30 days.
“I have seen no evidence suggesting the problem in Louisiana is fixed,” Most said. “And it seems unwise to dismiss any cases while that’s the situation.”
Trapped in Group Homes
South Carolina’s mentally ill population is grappling with similar challenges.
After years of lawsuits and complaints, a DOJ investigation determined that officials illegally denied community-based services — required by the Americans with Disabilities Act and a 1999 Supreme Court decision — to over 1,000 people diagnosed as seriously mentally ill. Instead, the state placed them in group homes that failed to provide adequate care and were overly restrictive, the department alleged.
The DOJ report didn’t address why the state relied so heavily on group homes. It noted that South Carolina’s own goals and plans called for increasing community-based services to help more people live independently. But the investigation concluded that the availability of community-based services varied widely across the state, leaving people in some areas with no access. And the DOJ said the state’s rules for deciding when someone could leave were too stringent.
South Carolina funds and oversees more than 400 facilities that serve people with serious mental illness, according to a state affidavit.
Kimberly Tissot, president of the disability rights group Able South Carolina, said it was common for disabled adults who were living successfully on their own to be involuntarily committed to an adult group home simply because they visited a hospital to pick up medicine.
Tissot, who has inspected hundreds of the adult facilities, said they often are roach-infested, soaked in urine, lacking in adequate medicine and staffed by untrained employees. Her description mirrors the findings of several state and independent investigations. In some group homes, patients weren’t allowed to leave or freely move around. Subsequently, their mental health would deteriorate, Tissot said.
“We have had people die in these facilities because of the conditions,” said Tissot, who worked closely with the DOJ investigators. Scores of sexual abuse incidents, assaults and deaths in such group homes have been reported to the state, according to a 2022 federal report that faulted South Carolina’s oversight.
South Carolina has been on notice about the difficulties since 2016 but didn’t make sufficient progress, the DOJ alleged in its lawsuit filed in December.
After two years of failed attempts, state lawmakers passed a law in April that consolidated services for disabled people into a new agency responsible for expanding access to home and community-based treatments and for ensuring compliance with federal laws.
South Carolina’s attorney general, Alan Wilson, has argued in the DOJ’s lawsuit that the state has been providing necessary services and has not been violating people’s constitutional rights. In January, his office asked the court for a delay in the case to give the Trump administration enough time to determine how to proceed.
His office and a spokesperson for the South Carolina Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Disabilities declined to comment, citing the ongoing DOJ lawsuit.
Tissot credits the federal attention with creating a sense of urgency among state lawmakers to make improvements. While she said she is pleased with the latest progress, she warned that if the DOJ dropped the case, it would undermine the enforcement of disabled people’s civil rights and allow state abuses to continue.
“It would signal that systemic discrimination will go unchecked and embolden institutional providers to resist change,” Tissot said. “Most importantly, it abandons the people directly impacted.”
Maybe this won’t actually mean anything when all is said and done. Maybe what we’re seeing here is the last dying breaths of a democracy as its current owners sell it off for parts and consolidate their power. But maybe it’s the other thing: the checks and balances putting down as much damaging stuff on the permanent record that it may head off the collapse of the republic and provide plenty of warning for those who follow in their footsteps.
Even if it seems a bit useless in the face of the authoritarian endgame the Trump administration is actively pursuing, it’s still worth saying. And it’s still worth reading.
The sort of thing detailed below is novel. It’s something that has been directly — and deliberately — provoked by the Trump administration’s statements and actions. For the most part, courts have shown the government a great deal of deference, doing things like referring to outright lies as “misrepresentations” or “inconsistencies in testimony.” And the government has likewise shown deference to the courts, responding to losses by stating they respectfully disagree with these decisions.
None of that remains now. The Trump administration has sued the federal courts of an entire state and responded to losses by making personal attacks against judges, when not actually trying to get judges removed from their positions permanently.
Having witnessed this incredibly speedy erosion of respect for not just courts, but the rule of law and the Constitution that governs everything in between, judges are firing back in court, making it exceedingly clear they no longer trust Trump or the federal government he controls to engage honestly with the rest of the system of checks and balances.
Some absolutely scathing quotes from judges are included in this report by Alan Feuer for the New York Times, which also contains more concerning statements about the ongoing disintegration of the norms that have helped govern this nation since its inception.
But let’s get to the good, righteously furious stuff, because that’s what we all need to hear once in a while when everything else seems so aggressively shitty that we’re starting to explore dual-citizenship options.
In June, for instance, an order was unsealed in Federal District Court in Washington showing Magistrate Judge Zia M. Faruqui ripping into prosecutors after they tried to convince him that he needed to be “highly deferential” to their request to keep sealed a search warrant in an ordinary criminal case.
“Blind deference to the government?” Judge Faruqui wrote. “That is no longer a thing. Trust that has been earned over generations has been lost in weeks.”
That’s how trust works. Several administrations and their DOJs have gone up and down the trust scale, but not until now has an administration seemingly made a deliberate effort to set fire to the decades of trust established by the government not being actively evil or shamelessly lying to judges. And that’s not even including multiple whistleblowers reporting that DOJ lawyers had been told to say “fuck you” to the courts if they delivered decisions or injunctions Trump’s administration didn’t feel like following.
The government no longer has the benefit of a doubt when defending itself against lawsuits.
In a similar fashion, a federal judge on Long Island refused last month to take the department’s word after prosecutors asked her to dismiss an indictment against Vladimir Arévalo Chávez, a leader of the violent street gang MS-13, in preparation for sending him back to El Salvador.
Instead of simply accepting the government’s assertion that the case against Mr. Arévalo Chávez needed to be tossed out because of “national security” concerns, the judge, Joan M. Azrack, ordered the government to tell her more about the politics behind the case. By that, she was referring to a deal reached between the Trump administration and President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador to hold immigrants deported from the United States in a Salvadoran prison in exchange for the return of MS-13 leaders in U.S. custody.
It’s only going to get worse for this administration, at least in terms of what judges are willing to say in published opinions. But it will be worse at every level up to that point, which is something this administration seems unable to recognize. It will no longer be given the “presumption of regularity,” a concept that assumes both the court and the executive branch are acting in good faith.
This administration never acts in good faith. Judges — including Trump appointees — already recognize this. Now they’re going further, pointing it out in public hearings and in public documents, presumably in hope of making sure Americans — even those who support Trump — know exactly how eagerly this particular government is willing to lie, cheat, and otherwise destroy the system that has made the United States the leader of the Free World for nearly 250 years. This isn’t judicial activism, no matter how often Trump claims otherwise. (That’s what the Supreme Court is for.) This is nothing more than the government getting every bit of disrespect it has earned over the past six months.
The core issue is whether or not Wikipedia would be considered a “Category 1” service, which, while size-gated like the DSA’s “Very Large Online Platform” (VLOP) concept, comes with a different bundle of duties (e.g., “user empowerment” filters and ad-fraud prevention obligations) and a different theory of risk. Category 1 services are required to do a whole bunch of things, many of which would be at odds with Wikipedia’s promises to be a worldwide information source, without compromising user safety or privacy (for example, it would likely require Wikipedia to verify the identity of many of its contributors).
So Wikipedia sued to challenge not the OSA as a whole, but just the categorization rules, which it feared would have it declared a Category 1 service by Ofcom.
In a detailed ruling, the High Court rejected Wikimedia’s core, up-front bid to torpedo the threshold regulations, basically arguing that because Ofcom has yet to declare Wikipedia as a Category 1 service, then it is not yet a “victim” of the law. The judge notes that it is not clear that Wikipedia will qualify as a Category 1 service at all:
In particular, I do not accept that it is “likely” that Wikipedia is a Category 1 service. The furthest that Ofcom has gone is to say that it might be. The Secretary of State’s officials considered only that it was a “possibility” (whereas other services were “likely” to qualify).
The judge also said that even if it were found to be a Category 1 service, it might not violate the European Convention on Human Rights to force Wikipedia to verify identities… because the judge believes that there is some convoluted scheme to have Wikipedia contributors verify themselves that wouldn’t be problematic (that’s… just wrong).
I do not, however, consider that it is inevitable that the application of Category 1 status to Wikipedia would necessarily result in a breach of Convention rights. That may depend on how the Code of Practice (compliance with which is deemed to achieve compliance with the statutory duties) operates. One of Wikipedia’s primary concerns is the requirement to enable users to choose only to encounter content from users whose identity has been verified. I accept that this runs completely counter to Wikipedia’s operating model (which has, on the evidence, been shown to be effective in promoting freedom of expression whilst promoting a high quality of content). There may, however, be ways to accommodate the requirement without causing undue damage to Wikipedia’s operations. It may, for example, be possible to ensure that users who make the requisite choice are only able to access pages where every editor who has contributed to the live content on the page has verified their identity. It is not obvious that this would be unduly difficult to achieve. It would mean that such users would only be able to access a small subset of Wikipedia’s content, but that would be their free, autonomous choice. It may well be that only very few people would make that choice, and that might then raise a question as to the proportionality of the entire exercise.
He also noted the plodding process: Ofcom has only just sent information notices (Wikimedia got one on March 27 and responded May 16), the register of Category 1 services comes first, and the relevant Codes of Practice won’t be in force “before 2027.” In other words: years of uncertainty by design.
But here’s the part many folks will miss: the judge also went out of his way to say Wikipedia “provides significant value for freedom of speech and expression,” that this ruling is “not… a green light” to impede Wikipedia’s operations, and that if Ofcom later jams Wikipedia into Category 1 in a way that breaks Article 10, Wikimedia can challenge Ofcom—and the Secretary of State may be obliged to amend or carve out the regs.
I stress that this does not give Ofcom and the Secretary of State a green light to implement a regime that would significantly impede Wikipedia’s operations. If they were to do so, that would have to be justified as proportionate if it were not to amount to a breach of the right to freedom of expression under article 10 of the Convention (and, potentially, a breach also of articles 8 and 11). It is, however, premature to rule on that now. Neither party has sought a ruling as to whether Wikipedia is a Category 1 service. Both parties say that decision must, for the moment, be left to Ofcom. If Ofcom decides that Wikipedia is not a Category 1 service, then no further issue will arise.
Doors remain open. Lawyer time remains billable.
Which is exactly the problem. The OSA was drafted so vaguely and bluntly that a non‑profit, collaboratively edited encyclopedia now has to spend all this time, money, and effort playing administrative Calvinball just to preserve the thing almost everyone agrees is good.
The court’s summary reads like a warning label lawmakers refused to print:
Ofcom’s advice was deliberately generic and “service-agnostic” because recommender systems are opaque and constantly changing. Translation: we don’t actually know how any of this works in practice across wildly different services, but we’re regulating as if we can fit them all into simple buckets anyway.
To be Category 1, you need big UK user numbers plus features Ofcom says correlate with virality in its “content recommender system.” However, the definition of a “content recommender system” is so broad it might swallow moderation tools like Wikipedia’s New Pages Feed—tools used by a tiny subset of volunteer editors to catch low‑quality edits quickly, not to turbocharge “going viral.”
The judge basically says, look, this is a bright-line policy choice in a complex area; it will be over‑ and under‑inclusive by design. If Wikipedia gets caught, your remedy is: fight Ofcom, then maybe get the government to tweak the rule later.
Be real. For Meta or Google, this is Tuesday. For Wikipedia—the site that runs on donations and volunteer labor—this is an expensive, chilling time sink. And for the rest of the internet, it’s a preview of how the OSA turns governance into “prove you shouldn’t be crushed.”
As I wrote just recently about the OSA’s rollout, the law is already delivering exactly the harms critics predicted: invasive “age assurance” checkpoints, mass migration to VPNs, and collateral damage to health, safety, and news content—while small communities shut down or get fenced off behind ID walls. The only players that can comfortably absorb this are the largest commercial platforms, which… somehow always seems to be the point.
This ruling doesn’t fix any of that. It entrenches the architecture:
Legislators set category thresholds using mushy, one‑size‑fits‑all tech abstractions (recommenders! shares!) and massive user counts.
Ofcom does “indicative” assessments that (by its own admission) can’t discern how those features actually work across sectors.
Nonprofits and smaller communities get told: if you’re swept up, litigate later; maybe government officials will bail you out if the damage is obvious enough.
And, remember, the government official in charge of a potential “fix” recently said anyone criticizing the OSA was on the side of child predators.
Meanwhile, the most fraught duty looming for Category 1—adult “user empowerment” filters that let people block all content from non‑verified users (OSA’s Section 15)—is fundamentally incompatible with Wikipedia’s collaborative model. The judge’s “subset of pages where every editor has verified” workaround would balkanize articles, shatter the integrity of collaborative editing, and create a perverse incentive to link real‑world identity to speech—exactly what Wikipedia’s governance model (and basic safety) try to avoid.
The OSA keeps forcing square pegs through round compliance holes, then tells courts to mop up the mess with proportionality after the fact.
A couple clarifications worth nailing down, because sloppy narratives help bad law:
“Wikipedia lost.” Procedurally, yes: Wikimedia didn’t blow up the thresholds. But the court explicitly invited future challenges if Ofcom’s classification or the downstream duties impede Wikipedia’s operations or chill speech. Both things can be true.
“Wikipedia can challenge later.” Yes—and that’s… bad? It means the standard posture is “comply first, sue later,” which advantages giant incumbents and punishes public‑interest infrastructure. It also leaves a ton of uncertainty on the backs of a non-profit who has better things to focus on.
If lawmakers genuinely wanted to avoid this farce, they had tools: narrowly tailor the definitions so that this wasn’t such a guessing game. Maybe scope certain features, like “forward/share” to end‑user distribution features, not moderator utilities; build a clear exemption path for sites with demonstrably low risk profiles. Or maybe just have Ofcom do the hard, service‑specific work before writing the rule, not after.
Or maybe just stop falling for the exaggerated moral panic that we can magically make the internet perfectly safe for kids by putting more and more rules on internet services, instead of better teaching kids how to use the internet appropriately.
Instead, we got “we’ll fix it in post.” The court just confirmed that the only safety valve is more process, more guidance, more codes of practice, and maybe—maybe—a future amendment if the damage becomes undeniable.
As I said in my recent OSA article: this is regulation written as if the internet is only Facebook and Google; the giants glide, everyone else bleeds. This ruling doesn’t change that. It spotlights it.
The UK can keep pretending this will all shake out in proportionate, sensible ways once Ofcom finishes the paperwork. Or it can accept what’s already obvious: a law that makes Wikipedia litigate for the right to keep being Wikipedia is a law that’s broken at the premise.
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It’s no surprise that Donald Trump thinks El Salvador president Nayib Bukele is a fun hang. After all, Bukele has already referred to himself as the world’s “coolest dictator” — two descriptors Trump definitely aspires to. (Although he’ll take the latter in the lieu of the former…)
The party of El Salvador President Nayib Bukele approved constitutional changes in the country’s National Assembly on Thursday that will allow indefinite presidential reelection and extend presidential terms to six years.
Neat! How did this happen? Well… it looks a whole lot like what’s happening in the USA right now:
New Ideas and its allies in the National Assembly quickly approved the proposals with the supermajority they hold. The vote passed with 57 in favor and three opposed.
So, that’s the Congress part of it. Who else has been pitching in with the effort to consolidate all the nation’s power in the Executive Branch? Oh. Right.
Bukele overwhelmingly won reelection last year despite a constitutional ban, after Supreme Court justices selected by his party ruled in 2021 that it allowed reelection to a second five-year term.
Things like these once seemed like an impossibility in America. Now, they almost seem inevitable. And while it might be extremely difficult to make this happen as quickly as the world’s “coolest dictator” has in El Salvador, it’s probably neither as hard as we want to believe it is, nor would it take nearly as long as we might hope.
The groundwork for destroying the remnants of a democratic republic is already being laid by the Trump administration. If we’re hoping for an extension of our (mostly) representative democratic ideals, we’re going to need a whole lot more than the obviously faulty assumption our fellow Americans won’t be willing to get stomped in the face by a boot heel, just as long as people they don’t like get the boot heel first.
Jasleen Singh, writing for The Brennan Center, has an extremely detailed report on every effort being made by Trump and the GOP to ensure any future elections (if there are any) will be a.) limited as much as possible to people who support the GOP, and b.) so bereft of security and integrity the GOP can claim any election outcome they don’t like is fraudulent.
It all starts with Trump’s most brazen move — the pardoning of nearly every January 6th insurrectionist convicted of federal charges. This made it clear it didn’t really matter whether you were on the right side of history. It only mattered whether or not you were on Trump’s side. In doing so, he set precedent for anyone willing to follow in his footsteps, providing people engaging in criminal acts with a pretty much guaranteed get-out-of-jail-free card so long as their violence is on behalf of the GOP.
Singh’s report is as enlightening as it is horrifying, so I encourage you to read the whole thing. I’m not going to be able to do it justice with a few pull quotes because there’s just so much being done to undermine the entire election process.
It’s not just the voter suppression efforts, which have been a favorite tactic of Republicans ever since anyone other than white, male landowners were allowed to vote. Multiple aggressive redistricting efforts are underway to throw more votes to local Republicans, and in far too many cases, courts are failing to shut these efforts down.
On the other side of things, nearly anyone or any entity that provided evidence contradicting Trump’s claims about a “stolen” election has been kicked to the curb.
The president and his DOJ appointees have repeatedly threatened to prosecute the election officials who administered the 2020 election. In a March 14, 2025, speech, President Trump stated, “What a difference a rigged and crooked election had on our country. And the people who did this to us should go to jail. They should go to jail.” The president has also threatened to target nonprofit advocacy groups that play an important role in voter engagement, election monitoring, and litigation to protect the freedom to vote.
That same month, CISA paused all election security activities pending an internal review. The review was completed in March, but the Trump administration has refused to release the findings. It is unclear which CISA services have been restored, if any, despite repeatedrequests for information from members of Congress responsible for agency oversight. Reporting from April suggests that CISA is planning massive additional cuts.
The goal here is obvious, especially when combined with the deliberate culling of other forms of oversight and election integrity efforts previously provided by the federal government: make every election so insecure and bereft of external support that every election result can be questioned. Of course, results will only be questioned if they don’t go the way the GOP/Trump want them to, but that’s the entire point of this deliberate destruction of anything related to election integrity. Even those simply interested in ensuring the voting process is as secure as possible won’t actually be able to achieve these aims, perhaps leaving some of them to question the outcomes.
There’s so much more in this report. I highly encourage you to read the whole thing for yourself. But let’s dip back in for a second to witness yet another aspect of the Department of Justice the Trump administration has dismantled because it doesn’t serve the squad goals of a bunch of GOP members who were fortunate enough to be born in a country they seemingly want to turn into a country people will regret calling their home.
The DOJ has since dropped every voting case in which it had been a plaintiff at the start of this administration, and it has withdrawn its involvement in several other voting and redistricting suits. It also gutted the civil rights division of its career staff. By the end of May 2025, an estimated 250 attorneys making up approximately 70 percent of the division’s lawyers had left the department. The staff of the division’s voting section dwindled from approximately 30 lawyers down to about 6. But the division has begun hiring new attorneys. The voting section is now led by Maureen Riordan, a longtime DOJ lawyer who rejoined the department after a stint at the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF), a conservative organization that has for years sued election officials to try to force aggressive purges of the voter rolls.
At this point, even the most “glass is half-full” person will be forced to recognize the glass is at least two-thirds empty. There’s no “it will get worse before it gets better” going on here. It’s just going to keep getting worse unless there’s a sea change in leadership and an extremely focused effort to right this ship after Trump has deliberately run it aground for four straight years. Nostalgia is useless, as is pretending that playing by the rules will somehow return everything to normal. The other side is wiping its ass with every American ideal it can get a handle on. We’re regressing to the mean, which is never something the Leader of the Free World should be doing. If we stay on this path, we’ll be nothing more than a footnote on the wrong side of history.
The sort of executives who fail upward into positions of prominence at major media and streaming companies are all out of original ideas. So as the Wall Street pressure for impossible, perpetual quarterly growth mounts, they’ve increasingly resorted to the same tactics we’ve long seen at major shitty cable companies like Comcast.
“Several months of testing has enabled WBD to determine “who’s a legitimate user who may not be a legitimate user,” Perrette said. Once that is determined, he continued, the next step is to “turn on the more aggressive language around what needs to happen” in order to and make sure that “we are putting the net in the right place, so to speak.”
You might recall that early on, streaming executives loved password sharing. HBO and Netflix saw it as effectively a form of free advertising, which would encourage people to sign up for service. They actively encouraged it. But now that U.S. streaming growth has saturated in the U.S., they still need their improved quarterly returns. And you certainly can’t achieve that by spending more money on labor and content.
So the push is afoot to generally cut corners and goose profits, or enshittification. In streaming, that also includes harassing people who used a friend’s or parent’s password into signing for their own service. The executive assumption is that people will actually want to do that, as opposed to say, just cancelling service or pirating the content with a VPN and BitTorrent.
It’s understandable executives want people viewing their streaming content to pay for it. The problem is that with the other hand, these same executives, through harmful mergers, new restrictions, price cuts, layoffs, and general quality erosion, are ensuring that it’s less compelling than ever for consumers to actually sign up for their own account.
There’s really no escape from this doom loop, as traditional cable companies long demonstrated. The kind of stuff streaming consumers want (better customer support, lower prices, better features, higher quality content) hurt quarterly revenues. So the process switches to a form of product and brand cannibalization by the extraction class, which is where enshittification enters the frame.
Some of these efforts may temporarily goose earnings (the press tends to credulously parrot claims password sharing crackdowns are goosing earnings, even though streaming companies usually offer no hard data to confirm it), but ultimately the check comes due in the form of merger debt and customer defections. At that point, the executives responsible have likely already moved on to other companies to engage in the same sort of “savvy deal-making,” and the cycle begins again.
When piracy inevitably sees a resurgence, the media executives that remain will blame everything (generational entitlement! China! VPNs!) but themselves. And the cycle continues until piracy or new market disruption forces the companies in question to re-assess their choices. That last part, as the cable TV industry’s slow migration to streaming demonstrated, always takes much longer than it should.
