Anyone with the tiniest bit of humanity would have found a better way to mass deportations, if they even felt compelled to do it all. Under Trump, the extra layers of cruelty are an essential part of the package — something that piles the deliberate infliction of misery on top of the thick crust of bigotry that serves as the GOP’s platform.
No one in the administration cares about what they’re doing to the people they’re dehumanizing, much less what damage they’re doing to the reputation of the United States. True, this nation has never been perfect, but it has at least occasionally striven to subdue the worst impulses of its leaders and their constituents.
Now, we’re just another shitty nation with a deliberately broken moral compass. Trump could have made an effort to return deported people to their home countries or countries willing to take them if it was truly too dangerous for them to return to their homelands. Instead, it deliberately chose some of the worst places on earth to send people, backing this mass ejection with the perhaps too on-the-nose citation of the Alien Enemies Act and paying authoritarians handsomely for subjecting hundreds of deportees to torture.
Trump — the self-proclaimed artist of the deal — is selling the nation’s soul and demanding nothing in return but sadism-by-proxy. As Venezuelans falsely portrayed as Tren de Aragua gang members are finally being returned to their actual home countries, if not back to the United States to finally avail themselves of the due process rights they’ve always had, they’re letting everyone know the backdrop for DHS sadist-in-chief Kristi Noem’s photo ops is every bit as horrible as even our own State Department has been saying for years.
Another victim of this administration’s deliberate cruelty and dehumanization has spoken out following his release from El Salvador’s torture prison, CECOT. Reyes Barrios — like so many others — was labeled a gang member by DHS/ICE simply because he had a couple of tattoos. (And despite intel from actual law enforcement experts who have repeatedly made it clear in guidance ICE is now deliberately ignoring that Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua doesn’t have the rich history of self-identification via tattoo that, say, El Salvadoran gang MS-13 does.)
While it would be dangerous enough to simply be housed with actual foreign gang members who have been arrested locally, the people who appear to be most interested in harming deportees aren’t foreign gang members. Well, at least not the ones in tattoos. Instead, the real threat is the gang that roams more freely through CECOT than even the most powerful MS-13 members.
“The only thing I can say is human rights don’t exist there,” Reyes Barrios told HuffPost on Tuesday. There were “beatings all the time,” he said. “If you didn’t eat, they would hit you. If you took a shower when it wasn’t time, they would beat you. If you spoke roughly to them, they would beat you.”
[…]
Reyes Barrios’ time in CECOT was marked by psychological abuse and “countless” beatings from guards, who hit, kicked, and used police batons on detainees while their hands were cuffed behind their backs, he said.
Once, after he showered at the incorrect time, guards punished Reyes Barrios by sending him to “the Island,” a 2-by-1-meter cell with a cement bed and a toilet, he said. He spent about four or five hours there, alone in the darkness.
Barrios was, unbelievably, more fortunate than others dumped into CECOT by a gloating Trump and the equally abhorrent leader of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, who refers to himself as the “world’s coolest dictator.” You can see why Trump admires Bukele. And you can see how both men truly enjoy the ongoing abuse of hundreds of people who made the apparent mistake of trying to escape the horrors of their homelands and/or scrape out a life worth living in a nation that has attempted to position itself as just such a beacon of hope. Making America great again apparently means destroying every worthwhile thing this nation has ever stood for. And because it’s happening to people too many people in power (and too many people who insist on voting for them) don’t consider to be actual human beings, the people who enact, aid, and abet this cruelty can’t be convinced they’re actually part of the problem.
Watch the tech oligarchs who lined up behind Donald Trump at his inauguration, and you’ll see the most important story of our time: the fascists are winning because they’ve built a direct pipeline from concentrated technological power to concentrated political power.
This isn’t about technology being inherently dangerous—it’s about how distorted Wall Street incentives drove us toward digital infrastructure that mirrors authoritarian power structures. Through bullying, threats, and coercion, Trump moved to turn the chokepoints of the centralized internet to his advantage. The MAGA world discovered that when digital platforms become centralized and authoritarian, democratic institutions will follow.
But here’s what the oligarchs don’t want you to understand: the same underlying technologies enabling this power concentration can be architected to resist it. The key isn’t begging for better billionaires or smarter regulations—it’s recognizing that decentralization isn’t a technical preference, it’s a democratic necessity.
The same authoritarian capture that took over centralized social media is already threatening AI systems as well. Just as we’ve watched Musk morph Twitter’s algorithms into X’s non-stop amplification of his personal political preferences, we’re seeing AI systems designed to reflect the biases and political agendas of their corporate owners. But this pattern isn’t inevitable. We need to understand that AI doesn’t have to be another tool of oppression. Designed correctly, it can be a weapon of liberation.
How Concentration Breeds Control
The concentration of digital power wasn’t an accident—it was the inevitable result of Wall Street incentives that rewarded greater centralized control over user empowerment.
Here’s how it happened: investor demands required tool builders to seek ever-greater returns, which meant transitioning from building user-empowering tools to controlling infrastructure. The most successful companies stopped building ever more useful services and started focusing on how to better extract rents from digital chokepoints—the equivalent of privatizing roads, then charging tolls.
These companies colonized the open internet, turning their services into necessary but proprietary infrastructure. They erected barriers to entry, barriers to exit, and tollbooths for everyone else, with your attention as the price of admission.
The result is what Cory Doctorow famously called the enshittification curve: platforms start by empowering users, evolve to capture them, and end by exploiting them. Wall Street’s demand that only investors matter as stakeholders strips away user agency with each step and hands it to corporate overlords.
And corporate overlords, it turns out, are natural allies for authoritarians. When you control the digital infrastructure that shapes how people communicate, learn, and organize, you become an attractive partner for anyone seeking political control. The promise of regulatory capture, government contracts, and protection from competition makes the bargain irresistible.
This convergence wasn’t inevitable—it was a choice made by people who confused convenience with empowerment, scale with value, and engagement with democracy.
The consequences are everywhere: platforms that enabled the Arab Spring and #MeToo are now coordinating genocides and undermining trust in elections. Tools that connected marginalized communities are promoting fascist agendas. And the tech oligarchs who built these systems are now literally standing behind authoritarians at inaugurations.
Digital Infrastructure Is Democratic Infrastructure
Most people still don’t understand the core insight: digital infrastructure and democratic infrastructure are the same thing.
Democracy is the ultimate decentralized technology. It distributes power away from kings and aristocrats to the people—imperfectly, through struggle, but fundamentally. The early internet promised to do the same for information, communication, and commerce. Anyone could publish, reach audiences, and break down barriers between producers and consumers, experts and amateurs, the powerful and powerless.
But Wall Street’s demand for exponential returns required fencing off the digital commons. The billionaires rebuilt the old gatekeeping systems in digital form, turning tools of value creation into mechanisms of value extraction. They offered convenience in exchange for control, scale in exchange for agency, connection in exchange for confinement within their walled gardens.
As Taiwan’s former digital minister, Audrey Tang, explained, democracy and digital freedom aren’t separate concepts—they’re the same thing. When digital platforms become centralized and authoritarian, democratic institutions follow the same pattern. When we surrender control over our digital lives, we surrender control over our political lives.
The concentration of digital infrastructure inevitably leads to the concentration of political power. That’s why the battle for decentralization is fundamentally a battle for democracy itself.
Platforms concentrate power; protocols distribute it. Platforms extract value from users; protocols enable users to create value for themselves. Most importantly: platforms can be captured by bad actors, but protocols resist capture by design.
This resistance isn’t theoretical. We’re seeing it emerge across multiple projects—from the AT Protocol to ActivityPub to nostr. The key insight is architectural: when you separate identity, data storage, and algorithmic curation into different services, no single entity can control the whole system. Users can choose their own moderation services rather than trusting corporate decisions. They can customize their information diet rather than accepting engagement-maximizing feeds. They can control their own data and move between services without losing their social connections.
They have choice. They have transparency. They have their own intentions controlling things, rather than some unseen entity driven by unaligned incentives.
The same architectural principles apply to AI—perhaps the most critical battleground for digital power today. Centralized AI services don’t just mine your data for corporate benefit; they can shape your thinking, limit your capabilities, and make you dependent on their infrastructure. But it doesn’t need to be that way.
We’re already seeing the emergence of open source models, opportunities to control your own system prompts (as DuckDuckGo recently introduced), and smaller distilled models that work in decentralized environments. Projects are emerging to give people more power over their own data, letting you decide how AI can interact with your information, rather than the AI system slurping up everything it can about you.
This isn’t about technical preferences—it’s about the difference between renting someone else’s vision of how you should think and work versus building your own.
The Technological Poison Pill
The beauty of truly decentralized systems is that they’re extremely resistant to capture.
This is what I call the technological poison pill: systems architected so that growth makes them harder to capture, not easier. Traditional centralized platforms become more valuable targets for authoritarians as they scale. Properly designed protocols become more resilient against capture as adoption increases.
Protocol-based systems demonstrate this principle by distributing different functions across services that no single entity controls. Even if one implementation gets captured by bad actors, users can retain their data, connections, and digital identity while moving to alternative services. The architecture makes takeover attempts self-defeating—the very structure that creates value also prevents consolidation of control.
The same principle applies to AI infrastructure. When you control your own models, data, and computational resources, no corporation can unilaterally change terms of service or start mining your conversations. The more people control their own AI infrastructure, the less valuable centralized AI services become as tools of control.
Breaking the Helplessness Loop
The concentration of digital power has trained us to beg for scraps from our digital overlords—and that learned helplessness may be more dangerous than the concentration itself.
Every week brings demands that tech giants “do better” or that governments “crack down” on platforms. But this approach assumes we need permission from powerful entities to fix the internet. It transforms what should be user empowerment into a performance of powerlessness.
This helplessness isn’t accidental—it serves the interests of concentrated power. The more we believe we need tech giants to solve our problems, the more indispensable they become. The more we focus on regulating existing platforms instead of building alternatives, the more we entrench their dominance. The more we beg politicians to save us, the more attractive these companies become as partners for authoritarians seeking control.
The tech oligarchs standing behind Trump at his inauguration represent the logical endpoint of this dynamic: when digital infrastructure owners become kingmakers, democracy becomes a performance staged on their platforms.
But this endpoint isn’t inevitable—it’s the result of choices we can still change.
The Choice Before Us
The underlying infrastructure that enabled our current digital dystopia can enable something radically different: a genuinely democratic digital ecosystem where users control their own experiences, data, and tools.
But this future requires active choice. It means learning new tools, supporting new protocols, and building new habits. It means moving beyond the comfortable convenience of corporate platforms and taking responsibility for digital sovereignty.
The alternative is continued concentration of power in the hands of billionaires who literally stand behind authoritarians at inaugurations, viewing democracy as an obstacle to their vision of control.
Yes, decentralization creates challenges—technical complexity, potential for abuse, fragmentation. But these aren’t arguments against decentralization; they’re arguments for designing it thoughtfully. Democratic institutions have always grappled with similar tensions between distributed power and effective governance. The solution isn’t to abandon democratic principles but to architect systems that embody them while addressing their practical challenges.
The same principle applies to digital infrastructure. Tradeoffs exist, but they don’t justify accepting concentrated control any more than political tradeoffs justify accepting authoritarianism. We can build decentralized systems that address concerns about complexity and abuse without centralizing power in the hands of corporate oligarchs.
Digital Democracy or Concentrated Control?
The choice before us is stark: do we build democratic digital infrastructure, or do we accept permanent concentrated control?
Digital democracy means building systems that embody democratic values—transparency over opacity, user agency over corporate control, distributed power over centralized authority. It means using AI as a tool of personal liberation rather than corporate surveillance. It means supporting protocols that resist capture rather than platforms that court it.
Most importantly, it means rejecting the learned helplessness that treats concentrated tech power as inevitable rather than recognizing it as a temporary arrangement we can change.
The tools exist. Open protocols are maturing. AI models are being democratized. Decentralized infrastructure is becoming viable. The question isn’t technical capability—it’s political will.
Will we choose the difficult work of building democratic digital infrastructure? Or will we continue asking permission from oligarchs and authoritarians?
The battle for the open internet and the battle for democracy aren’t separate fights—they’re the same fight. The future of our digital lives is the future of democracy itself.
We can accept concentrated control over our digital lives, or we can build democratic infrastructure of our own. The choice is ours, but the window for making it won’t stay open forever.
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The Trump administration wants you to know they’re very, very tough. So tough, in fact, that they’re launching a comprehensive purge of the Naval Academy to eliminate “corrosive DEI programs” and restore what they call the “warrior ethos.” Because nothing says “fearless military leadership” like being absolutely terrified of books about civil rights and the radical concept that people of different backgrounds might have something to contribute.
According to a draft memoobtained by Fox News, the Navy is establishing a “Naval Higher Education Review Board” tasked with removing any materials “deemed inappropriate for today’s warfighter progression.” The board will focus particularly on—brace yourself—the Humanities and Social Sciences, including History and English.
The memo is worth quoting directly, because the language reveals how thoroughly this administration misunderstands both education and military effectiveness. It talks about the necessity of “remov[ing] materials and practices deemed inappropriate for today’s warfighter” and says:
A particular emphasis will be applied on the Humanities and Social Sciences, including History and English. Faculty recruitment and selection processes will be reviewed to ensure merit-based selection that leads to preparing our future officers for leading in Peace Through Strength and then success in combat when the Nation calls.
Notice what’s missing here: any explanation of how studying history or literature could possibly undermine military readiness. The assumption seems to be that learning about the complexities of human society somehow weakens future officers, rather than preparing them for the complex operational environments they’ll actually face.
But here’s the thing about this supposed “warrior ethos”: when you actually look at what the Trump administration considers tough-guy behavior, it’s basically a master class in being scared of literally everything.
A Warrior’s Guide to Being Terrified
Let’s examine what the “warrior ethos” looks like in practice under this administration:
Warrior Move #1: Be So Scared of CBS News That You Extort Them for $16 Million Nothing says “fearless leader” like forcing a news organization to pay what amounts to a protection racket fee because they edited an interview with your opponent—who you beat in the election—in ways you didn’t like. Trump’s demand that CBS pay as part of a settlement shows the true warrior spirit: if you can’t handle a free press, just threaten people until they pay you to go away.
Warrior Move #2: Transportation Secretary Too Frightened of NYC Subways to Ride Them Sean Duffy, Trump’s Transportation Secretary, apparently finds the New York City subway system so terrifying that can’t stop talking about how terrifying and scary it is. This is the same subway system used daily by millions of ordinary New Yorkers, including children going to school. But hey, nothing embodies the warrior ethos like being more scared of public transit than a 12-year-old with a MetroCard.
Warrior Move #3: Be So Intimidated by TikTok That You… Wait, Actually, Never Mind That One The administration’s flip-flopping on TikTok—from “existential threat that must be banned immediately” to “actually it’s fine now“—perfectly captures the strategic brilliance of the modern warrior ethos: be inconsistent enough that nobody knows what you actually stand for.
Warrior Move #4: Cower in Fear of Trans People Using Bathrooms Nothing demonstrates battlefield courage quite like being absolutely terrified that someone might use a bathroom that aligns with their gender identity. The administration has made restricting transgender rights a top priority because apparently, the greatest threat to American military readiness is the possibility that a trans person might pee in peace. Real warriors, as we all know, spend most of their time obsessing over other people’s bathroom choices and genitals.
Think about the operational absurdity here: these are the same people who claim they want military officers, based on “meritocracy,” prepared for complex global conflicts, but they’re prioritizing policies that actively drive qualified personnel out of the service over… bathroom anxiety.
Warrior Move #5: Be So Scared of Accurate Data That You Fire People Who Collect It The administration’s pattern of removing officials who produce economic data they don’t like—like firing the Bureau of Labor Statistics chief—shows true warrior spirit: if reality doesn’t match your narrative, just eliminate the people whose job it is to document reality. Because nothing says “strong leadership” like being threatened by… math.
Warrior Move #6: Tremble at the Thought of Foreign Students Learning Things The warrior ethos apparently includes being so intimidated by international students that you want to kick them out of American universities. Because clearly, the best way to maintain American dominance is to prevent talented people from other countries from getting educated here, potentially staying here, and contributing to American innovation. Strategic brilliance.
Warrior Move #7: Be Defeated by Windmills (Literally) Trump’s ongoing war against wind energy—claiming windmills cause cancer, kill birds, and are generally terrifying—perfectly encapsulates the warrior mindset. Don Quixote fought windmills as a delusion; Trump fights them as policy. At least Don Quixote had the excuse of being fictional.
Warrior Move #8: Run Away from Public Media The warrior ethos includes being so threatened by NPR and PBS that you need to defund them entirely. Because apparently, nothing strikes fear into the hearts of tough guys quite like… thoughtful journalism and educational programming. Clearly, “Sesame Street” and “All Things Considered” represent an existential threat to American military readiness.
Warrior Move #9: Eliminate Books Because Words Are Scary The Naval Academy previously purged nearly 400 books from its library, covering topics like civil rights, the Holocaust, LGBTQ+ issues, and feminism. Because apparently, learning about American history and understanding different perspectives is too dangerous for future military officers. Nothing says “prepared for combat” like being unable to handle a book about the Civil Rights Movement.
Warrior Move #10: Replace Diversity with “Merit” (But Only Our Definition of Merit) The memo calls for “merit-based selection” while simultaneously demanding that military academics be restructured to eliminate civilian influence and focus solely on what they define as appropriate warrior content. Merit, in this context, apparently means “thinks exactly like us and is scared of the same books we are.”
The Real “Corrosive” Problem
Here’s what’s actually happening: the Trump administration is so threatened by the idea that America’s military might benefit from officers who understand the full complexity of American history, society, and the world they’ll be operating in, that they’re willing to gut educational institutions to prevent it.
The memo talks about addressing “imbalances in civilian-dominated governance that weaken the Academy’s military mission”—but civilian oversight of the military is literally a foundational principle of American democracy. The idea that civilian input into military education is somehow corrupting reveals (not for the first time) a pretty fundamental misunderstanding of how democratic institutions are supposed to work.
And let’s be clear about what “DEI programs” actually were at the Naval Academy: they were efforts to ensure that the military could draw from the full talent pool of American citizens, rather than limiting themselves to a narrow demographic slice. The idea that this somehow undermines military effectiveness is contradicted by, well, reality. Diverse teams consistently outperform homogeneous ones in complex scenarios—exactly the kind of challenges military leaders face.
The Irony of “Warrior Ethos”
The most ridiculous part of all this is that the people claiming to champion a “warrior ethos” are displaying the exact opposite of what that might actually mean. Real “warriors” aren’t afraid of books. They don’t need to silence critics or eliminate diverse perspectives to feel secure. They don’t demand protection money from news organizations or avoid public transportation out of fear.
Real strength comes from being able to engage with challenging ideas, to learn from different perspectives, and to adapt to complex situations. The Trump administration’s version of strength looks more like fragility dressed up in insecure tough-guy language.
The Naval Academy has produced military leaders who successfully fought fascism, integrated the military, and protected democratic values around the world. They did this not despite understanding the full complexity of American society and history, but because of it.
Now we’re supposed to believe that future officers will be stronger if they’re shielded from learning about civil rights, protected from diverse perspectives, and trained to see civilian oversight as a threat rather than a feature of democratic governance.
That’s not a warrior ethos. That’s authoritarian fragility with a military costume on.
What This Actually Accomplishes
The real goal here isn’t to create better military leaders—it’s to use military institutions as political weapons. By purging educational content and restructuring governance, the Trump administration hopes to ensure that military institutions reflect their political priorities rather than serving the broader American public.
This undermines both military effectiveness and democratic norms. When you politicize military education, you create officers who are loyal to a particular political faction rather than to the Constitution and the American people. When you eliminate diverse perspectives from military leadership development, you create blind spots that enemies can exploit.
This approach makes America less safe, not more. Military leaders who don’t understand the full complexity of the societies they serve and the world they operate in are less effective, not more.
But then again, none of this is actually about military effectiveness. It’s about using the language of “warrior ethos” to justify political purges and authoritarian control.
And if that’s what passes for “strength” in the Trump administration, it explains a lot about why they’re so terrified of everything else—from windmills to bathroom choices to the basic concept of civilian expertise. Real strength doesn’t require purging books or eliminating perspectives. But real authoritarianism absolutely does.
Section 706 of the Telecom Act requires the FCC to determine whether broadband is being deployed “on a reasonable and timely basis” to everyone. If the answer is no, the law says the FCC must “take immediate action to accelerate deployment of such capability by removing barriers to infrastructure investment and by promoting competition in the telecommunications market.”
For decades, the FCC has tap-danced around this mandate. Corruption and regulatory capture has resulted in a U.S. telecom sector that’s barely competitive, highly consolidated, and dominated by a handful of regional telecom monopolies. Those monopolies don’t have to try very hard to expand access, lower prices, or improve speeds. The FCC has been historically feckless about doing anything about it.
Every so often the FCC tries to do the absolute bare minimum to improve on this dynamic. Like during the Biden administration, when the Biden FCC last year boosted the definition of broadband to a still pathetic 100 Mbps downstream, 10 Mbps upstream, pledged to hold gigabit access as a future goal, and made a thin pledge to maybe take a closer look at why U.S. broadband is so expensive.
In a flimsy explanation, Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr claims that having meaningful standards and ensuring that broadband is affordable are “extraneous” matters. To further prop up his agency’s apathy, he points to the recent Loper Bright Supreme Court ruling that curtail the FCC’s authority to do anything that might upset a big U.S. corporation:
“The Carr FCC’s proposal points to a Supreme Court ruling that limited the ability of federal agencies to interpret ambiguous laws. Given that ruling, “we believe it is most prudent to strictly adhere to the statutory text,” the proposal said.”
The problem is, only one side can “win” this standoff, and it’s corporate power. Carr can saber rattle and threaten all he likes, but the primary agenda of Trump 2.0 (outside of the racism) is delivering the final killing blow to federal consumer protection, regulatory autonomy, and corporate oversight.
If you’re an amoral billionaire or corporation with zero interest in a habitable planet, any sort of equality, or functioning democracy, the project is going very well. If you’re an actual resident of the United States, interested in things like labor rights, clean drinking water, or evenly available and affordable broadband access, you are in very, very serious trouble.
Companies like Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon want a federal government that just mindlessly rubber stamps their harmful mergers, then turns a blind eye to all of the harms of consolidation and market failure. And while U.S. regulators were already terrible at taking meaningful action to stop this, Trump 2.0 is making all of our regulatory capture and corruption problems immeasurably worse.
Even under an ideal situation where Trump authoritarianism is conquered and some sort of sensible alternative takes office, restoring oversight of companies like Comcast and AT&T — both bone-grafted to our domestic surveillance networks — is never going to be a priority in a Congress that’s now too corrupt to function, under a broken court system that treats corporate power as an unimpeachable deity.
If the FCC was a serious agency, there’s plenty it could do to improve broadband access. It could take aim at monopoly power. It could encourage municipal broadband and local cooperatives. It could impose real penalties for service quality and privacy violations. It could implement and enforce consistent standards demanding better of our regional monopoly giants.
With only the occasional short-lived exceptions, at every opportunity the U.S. does the exact opposite, in blind service to telecom monopoly power.
Trump — perhaps more than other presidents — often feels compelled to present his religious bona fides. Of course, he naturally has none. But as often as evangelical figureheads proclaim him to be (their) God’s personal pick for POTUS, even Donald Trump occasionally feels obligated to give something back to a community that has given him so much and asked for literally nothing in return.
The evangelical crowd cheers Trump on as he sides with Israel’s genocide, something that becomes a bit more conflicted when entities like “Jews for Jesus” mix white evangelical traits with a far older religion that generally tends to reject the supposed existence of Jesus Christ.
While evangelicals do like to throw themselves on the cross on a regular basis, it’s not self-sacrifice. It’s self-service. Christians in America do love to portray themselves as persecuted, as though the mere existence threat of death metal human equality or a swear word within hearing distance is the exact equivalent of being thrown to the lions like they were back in the good old days. (They mostly weren’t, not even then.)
Trump is one of them, at least in terms of converting self-pity to an idiot’s interpretation of selflessness. And he definitely wants those votes. Conveniently, most evangelical Christians absolutely adore periodic ceremonial events, including those overseen by the same government they swear to Gawd might be persecuting them every time their preferred candidate loses an election and/or some minority scores a free lunch at school.
All in all, Christians have it pretty good in the United States. Most people treat them as mildly annoying at worst. And most Americans (despite plenty of evidence to the contrary) consider self-proclaimed Christians to be good neighbors, non-molesters of children, and potential sources of unsolicited marital advice.
And, because no one needed this more than Trump — a Christian hero despite his long history of sexual harassment, sexual assault, multiple marriages, sexualization of his own children, cheater at golf, and the proverbial rich man who, as the Bible says, would find it exceedingly difficult to enter the Kingdom of Heaven — Trump has delivered. We’re getting more religious “freedom” added to our alleged “separation of church and state”, whether we wanted it or not.
The Trump administration released guidance on Monday reminding federal agencies that religious expression in the workplace is protected by the Constitution and the Civil Rights Act — guidance that protects employees and supervisors seeking to recruit fellow federal workers to their religion.
Such expressions are protected as long as they do not cross into harassment, the guidance says. Wearing religious symbols and staging them in office cubicles is also protected, the guidance says, as are hosting prayer groups in empty offices and posting about religious events on office bulletin boards.
An agnostic (in the political and religious sense of the word) reaffirmation of religious rights is to be commended. This ain’t that, though. While it might be taken to mean that every other employee can throw down on a rug up to five times a day while facing Mecca without interference from their federal employers, I can absolutely guarantee you this only means anyone mildly criticizing someone for hassling their fellow employees daily about their weekly Bible study will be protected by this new guidance.
The guidance doesn’t seem to add much to what already exists in terms of protection of religious expression in the workplace. But what it does adddefinitely crosses the line. Listed as examples of protected expression by federal employees are these (and only these) examples:
A park ranger leading a tour through a national park may join her tour group in prayer.
A doctor at a Veterans Affairs (VA) hospital may pray over his patient for her recovery.
While it does seem weird that a park ranger wouldn’t just hang back a bit and wait for the tour to finish praying (rather than joining them and giving them an implicit governmental blessing of their religious expression), it’s goddamn frightening that this “affirmation” of religious protections gives medical professionals (perhaps due for a scare quote…) permission to pray to their preferred god in hopes of securing a patient’s recovery. Hopefully, this is something a VA doctor might do in addition to providing actual, science-based treatment, rather than in lieu of anything stronger than some empty words hurled in the general direction of a power whose innate “higherness” has yet to be scientifically demonstrated.
That’s the bad news. The good news anyone of any religion can do a bunch of religious stuff at work without violating this guidance. Sure, there’s some vague stuff said about crossing the line into harassment, but the government bears the burden of proving this. And the fact that it’s the government loosening the reins on religious restrictions, that battle is more uphill than it ever was.
So… you know what to do, government drones? Pick literally any religion (if you don’t already have a preference) and litter cubicles, break rooms, and coworkers’ minds with its attendant detritus. I foresee a huge uptake in non-mainstream religions by government workers, who are now free to ask fellow workers if they’ve heard the good news about Satan or perhaps drape a holocaust cloak across their cubicle wall to inform others they’re not only adherents to the power of fire, but possibly willing to bodily wield it if need be.
Maybe you can just ask the names and sexes of fellow coworkers’ firstborn children because, according to your religion, Paimon will always need a willing (or even unwilling) male host. Those of you uncomfortable with small talk may just want to practice Santeria during allotted break times and/or spread salt around the entirety of the agency campus to help limit demon summoning-related chaos. If nothing else, a pithy ode to the greater of all evils is perhaps all that’s needed to brighten up a dull office:
Let’s just hope this Godsucker-pleasing performance results in a melting pot of every religion Trump has never considered real, much less realized actually exists. Christianity is — at best — running neck-and-neck with Islam. Only a white guy with a shit tan would have pushed this thing through without thinking it through. But that’s Trump for you: a guy who shoots first and fires people who ask questions later.
Well, well, well. The “age assurance” part of the UK’s Online Safety Act has finally gone into effect, with its age checking requirements kicking in a week and a half ago. And what do you know? It’s turned out to be exactly the privacy-invading, freedom-crushing, technically unworkable disaster that everyone with half a brain predicted it would be.
Let’s start with the most obvious sign that this law is working exactly as poorly as critics warned: VPN usage in the UK has absolutely exploded. Proton VPN reported an 1,800% spike in UK sign-ups. Five of the top ten free apps on Apple’s App Store in the UK are VPNs. When your “child safety” law’s primary achievement is teaching kids how to use VPNs to circumvent it, maybe you’ve missed the mark just a tad.
But the real kicker is what content is now being gatekept behind invasive age verification systems. Users in the UK now need to submit a selfie or government ID to access:
Yes, you read that right. A law supposedly designed to protect children now requires victims of sexual assault to submit government IDs to access support communities. People struggling with addiction must undergo facial recognition scans to find help quitting drinking or smoking. The UK government has somehow concluded that access to basic health information and peer support networks poses such a grave threat to minors that it justifies creating a comprehensive surveillance infrastructure around it.
The Wikipedia situation is particularly telling. When an educational encyclopedia that hosts over seven million articles and sees five edits per second calls your law unworkable, maybe it’s time to reconsider?
And this is all after a bunch of other smaller websites and forums shut down earlier this year when other parts of the law went into effect.
This is exactly what happens when you regulate the internet as if it’s all just Facebook and Google. The tech giants can absorb the compliance costs, but everyone else gets crushed.
The only websites with the financial capacity to work around the government’s new regulations are the ones causing the problems in the first place. And now Meta, which already has a monopoly on a number of near-essential online activities (from local sales to university group chats), is reaping the benefits. Thousands of hamster enthusiasts are likely flooding onto Instagram as we speak, ready to be redirected into black holes of miscellaneous “content” they never asked for in the first place. The exact nature of this content is of no corporate concern. The only service rendered is to advertisers, whose pleas are helpfully interspersed between posts and videos. The people running the platform do not care what you logged on for and whether you got it.
Compare this to the beleaguered Hamster Forum. No venture capital is involved – the website was run by passionate hobbyists. They clubbed together with the express purpose of disseminating rodent intel to the people who searched for it. If its users really do move over to Instagram, they’ll find their photos and advice trapped behind a login wall, where they will only benefit other net contributors to Zuckerberg’s growing empire. Their pets will make Meta richer – cute videos are an asset if you’re trying to suck consumers into an infinite behavioural loop that only benefits you. Perhaps most unfairly, the forum’s hamster owners will have to live on the terms of people who are totally indifferent to the value of their time and knowledge.
The age verification process itself is a privacy nightmare wrapped in security theater. Users are being asked to upload selfies that get run through facial recognition algorithms, or hand over copies of their government-issued IDs to third-party companies. The facial recognition systems are so poorly implemented that people are easily fooling them with screenshots from video games—literally using images from the video game Death Stranding. This isn’t just embarrassing, it reveals the fundamental security flaw at the heart of the entire system. If these verification methods can’t distinguish between a real person and a video game character, what confidence should we have in their ability to protect the sensitive biometric data they’re collecting?
But here’s the thing: even when these systems “work,” they’re creating massive honeypots of personal data. As we’ve seen repeatedly, companies collecting biometric data and ID verification inevitably get breached, and suddenly intimate details about people’s online activity become public. Just ask the users of Tea, a women’s dating safety app that recently exposed thousands of users’ verification selfies after requiring facial recognition for “safety.”
“The Government has no plans to repeal the Online Safety Act, and is working closely with Ofcom to implement the Act as quickly and effectively as possible to enable UK users to benefit from its protections.”
But then, Tech Secretary Peter Kyle deployed the classic authoritarian playbook: dismissing all criticism as support for child predators. This isn’t just intellectually dishonest—it’s a deliberate attempt to shut down legitimate policy debate by smearing critics as complicit in child abuse. It’s particularly galling given that the law Kyle is defending will do absolutely nothing to stop actual predators, who will simply migrate to unregulated platforms or use the same VPNs that law-abiding citizens are now flocking to.
Let’s be crystal clear about what this law actually accomplishes: It makes it harder for adults to access perfectly legal (and often helpful) information and services. It forces people to create detailed trails of their online activity linked to their real identities. It drives users toward less secure platforms and services. It destroys small online communities that can’t afford compliance costs. And it teaches an entire generation that bypassing government surveillance is a basic life skill.
Meanwhile, the actual harms it purports to address? Those remain entirely unaddressed. Predators will simply move to unregulated platforms, encrypted messaging, or services that don’t comply. Or they’ll just use VPNs. The law creates the illusion of safety while actually making everyone less secure.
This is what happens when politicians decide to regulate technology they don’t understand, targeting problems they can’t define, with solutions that don’t work. The UK has managed to create a law so poorly designed that it simultaneously violates privacy, restricts freedom, harms small businesses, and completely fails at its stated goal of protecting children.
And all of this was predictable. Hell, it was predicted. Civil society groups, activists, legal experts, all warned of these results and were dismissed by the likes of Peter Kyle as supporting child predators.
Yet every criticism, every warning, every prediction about this law’s failures has come to pass within days of implementation. The only question now is how long it will take for the UK government to admit what everyone else already knows: the Online Safety Act is an unmitigated disaster that makes the internet less safe for everyone.
A petition set up on the UK government’s website demanding a repeal of the entire OSA received many hundreds of thousands of signatures within days. The government has already brushed it off with more nonsense, promising that the enforcer of the law, Ofcom, “will take a sensible approach to enforcement with smaller services that present low risk to UK users, only taking action where it is proportionate and appropriate, and will focus on cases where the risk and impact of harm is highest.”
But that’s a bunch of vague nonsense that doesn’t take into account that no platform wants to be on the receiving end of such an investigation, and thus will take these overly aggressive steps to avoid scrutiny.
The whole thing is a mess and yet another embarrassment for the UK. And they were all warned about it, while insisting these concerns were exaggerations.
But this isn’t just about the UK—it’s a cautionary tale for every democracy grappling with how to regulate the internet. The OSA proves that when politicians prioritize looking tough over actually solving problems, the result is legislation that harms everyone it claims to protect while empowering the very forces it claims to constrain.
What makes this particularly tragic is that there were genuine alternatives. Real child safety measures—better funding for mental health support, improved education programs, stronger privacy protections that don’t require mass surveillance—were all on the table. Instead, the UK chose the path that maximizes government control while minimizing actual safety.
This story was originally published by ProPublica, along with The Texas Tribune, Alianza Rebelde Investiga, and Cazadores de Fake News.Republished under ProPublica’s CC BY-NC-ND 3.0license.
Now that he’s free, Leonardo José Colmenares Solórzano, a 31-year-old Venezuelan, wants the world to know that he was tortured over four months in a Salvadoran prison. He said guards stomped on his hands, poured filthy water into his ears and threatened to beat him if he didn’t kneel alongside other inmates and lick their backs.
Now that he’s free, Juan José Ramos Ramos, 39, insists he’s not who President Donald Trump says he is. He’s not a member of a gang or an international terrorist, just a man with tattoos whom immigration agents spotted riding in a car with a Venezuela sticker on the back.
Now that he’s free, Andry Omar Blanco Bonilla, 40, said he wondered every day of his time in prison whether he’d ever hold his mother in his arms again. He’s relieved to be back home in Venezuela but struggles to make sense of why he and the other men were put through that ordeal in the first place.
“We are a group of people who I consider had the bad luck of ending up on this black list,” he said.
These are the accounts being shared by some of the more than 230 Venezuelan men the Trump administration deported on March 15 to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador known as CECOT. Throughout the men’s incarceration, the administration used blanket statements and exaggerations that obscured the truth about who they are and why they were targeted. The president has both hailed the men’s removal as a signature achievement of his first 100 days in office and touted it as a demonstration of the lengths his administration was willing to go to carry out his mass deportation campaign. He assured the public that he was fulfilling his promise to rid the country of immigrants who’d committed violent crimes, and that the men sent to El Salvador were “monsters,” “savages” and “the worst of the worst.”
Few cases have gotten as much attention as the Venezuelans sent to CECOT. They were deported against the instructions of a federal judge, frog-marched off American planes and forced to kneel before cameras and have their heads shaved. The administration rebuffed requests to confirm the men’s names or provide information about the allegations it had made against them. Meanwhile, the deportees were held without access to lawyers or the ability to speak to their families. Then, 12 days ago, they were returned to Venezuela in a prisoner swap.
Now that they’re home, they’ve begun to talk. We interviewed nine men for this story. They are bewildered, frightened, angry. Some said their feelings about what happened were still so raw they had trouble finding words to describe them. All of the men said they were abused physically and mentally during their imprisonment. Their relatives say they, too, went through hell wondering whether their loved ones were alive or dead, or if they would ever see them again. All the men said they were relieved to be free, though some said their release was proof the U.S. had no reason to send them to prison to begin with.
Blanco, for example, has no criminal record in the U.S., according to the government’s own data. His only violation was having entered the country illegally. He’d come because he wasn’t earning enough to help his parents and support his seven children, ages 2 to 19, after his family’s wholesale dairy and deli supply business failed. He arrived in December 2023 and turned himself in to immigration authorities in Eagle Pass, Texas, to request asylum. Then he was released to continue his immigration process.
Afterward, Blanco moved to Dallas and found work delivering food. In February 2024, he accompanied his cousin to a routine appointment with Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials. While he was there, he decided to notify the agency that he’d changed his address. On his way out of the building, an immigration agent stopped him and asked about his tattoos. He has several of them, including a blue rose, a father hugging his son behind railroad tracks and a clock showing the time his mother was born.
He said the tattoos signified his affection for his family, not evidence of affiliation with a gang. Records show the officials didn’t believe him and detained him. While in custody, a judge ordered his deportation. However, because Washington and Caracas don’t have diplomatic relations, the Venezuelan government was refusing to accept most deportees from the United States at the time. Immigration officials released Blanco back into the U.S. until they could send him home.
For the next seven months, Blanco continued on in Dallas and picked up additional work as a mechanic. Then, shortly after Trump was inaugurated, ICE officers asked Blanco to come in for another appointment and detained him. A month later, despite Venezuela agreeing to take back some deportees, Blanco was on one of three planes bound for El Salvador.
“From the moment I realized I was in El Salvador and that I would be detained, it was anguish,” he said. “I was shaken. It hit me hard. Hard, hard, hard.”
To deport the Venezuelans, Trump invoked an obscure law from the 1700s known as the Alien Enemies Act. He declared that the men were all part of a Venezuelan prison gang called Tren de Aragua that was invading the United States. Within days, CBS News published a list of the men’s names, and there were anecdotal reports indicating that not all of the deportees were hardened criminals, much less “savages.” By early April, several news organizations had reported that the majority of the men did not appear to have criminal records.
Administration officials dismissed the reports, saying that many of the deportees were known human rights abusers, gang members and criminals outside of the U.S. The fact they hadn’t committed crimes in the United States, they said, didn’t mean they weren’t a threat to public safety.
When asked for comment for this story, Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, called ProPublica a “liberal rag hellbent on defending violent criminal illegal aliens who never belonged in the United States.” She added, “America is safer with them out of our country.”
A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson echoed the White House’s claim. “Once again, the media is falling all over themselves to defend criminal illegal gang members,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “We hear far too much about gang members and criminals’ false sob stories and not enough about their victims.”
The fact that border encounters have plummeted to record lows after reaching record highs during the Biden presidency suggests that the administration’s efforts are having the effect that Trump intended. After what happened to him, Colmenares said he didn’t think migrating to the U.S. was safe anymore.
He’d been a youth soccer coach in Venezuela before setting off for the U.S. He followed the rules and got an appointment to approach the U.S.-Mexico border last October, as had more than 50 of the men. At the appointment, Colmenares said an agent pulled him aside to take pictures of his many tattoos — then detained him. He never set foot in the U.S. as a free man.
“The country with the Statue of Liberty deprived us of our liberty without any kind of evidence,” he said in an interview two days after he was returned to his family. “Who is going to go to the border now, knowing that they will grab you and put you in a prison where they will kill you?”
The men we interviewed said the terror they felt in El Salvador began almost immediately upon arrival.
Salvadoran police boarded the planes and began forcing the shackled men off — shoving them, throwing them to the ground, hitting them with their batons. Five said they saw flight attendants crying at the sight.
“This will teach you not to enter our country illegally,” Colmenares said one ICE official told him in Spanish. He wanted to explain that wasn’t true in his case but could tell there was no point. He got off the plane and was loaded onto a bus to prison.
Once inside, guards stripped them down to white boxers and sandals. Those who tried to refuse to have their heads shaved were beaten. Blanco said he heard their screams and didn’t dare resist. Humiliated and enraged, he did as he was told: head down, body limp.
They were loaded up again on the buses and taken to another part of the compound. Blanco said the shackles were so tight that he couldn’t walk as fast as the guards wanted, so they beat him until he passed out and dragged him the rest of the way. Inside, they dropped him so hard that his head banged on the floor. As he opened his eyes and saw the guards, bright lights and polished concrete floor, he asked: “God, why am I here? Why?”
The men said beatings by the guards were random, severe and constant. Guards lashed out at them with their fists and batons. They kicked them while wearing heavy work boots and shot them at close range with rubber pellets. One man we spoke to said he suspects he will have a lasting injury from a hard kick to the groin.
Colmenares recalled seeing one man defecate all over himself after a particularly severe beating. Guards laughed at him and left him there for a day, saying that the Venezuelans weren’t “real men.”
Just as vicious, the men said, was the psychological abuse. They lost track of the days because they were never allowed outdoors. Blanco said that whenever he asked a guard for the time, they’d mock him: “Why do you want to know what time it is? Have somewhere to be? Is someone waiting for you?”
Over and over, the men said, the guards called them criminals and terrorists and sons of bitches who deserved to be locked up. They said the guards told them so often that they were nobodies and that no one, not even their families, cared about them that some started to believe it.
The men said they waged at least two dayslong hunger strikes, skipping the beans, rice and tortillas they were fed most days, to demand an end to the abuses and an explanation for why they were in prison. “They told us nothing about how the process was going, what was going to happen to us, when we were going to see a judge, when we were going to see an attorney,” Ramos said.
Several of those interviewed said suicide crossed their minds. Ramos said he thought: “I’d rather die or kill myself than to keep living through this experience. Being woken up every day at 4 a.m. to be insulted and beaten. For wanting to shower, for asking for something so basic. … Hearing your brothers getting beaten, crying for help.”
Four talked about a man who started cutting himself and writing messages on the walls and sheets with his blood: “Stop hitting us.” “We are fathers.” “We are brothers.” “We are innocent people.”
Some of them became friends. They made playing cards out of juice boxes and soaked tortillas in water and shaped the cornmeal into dice. They talked about their families and wondered if anyone knew where they were. They prayed.
About three and a half months into their detention, the men said they noticed a change in the guards and in the conditions in the facility. They were beaten less frequently and less severely. They were given ibuprofen, antibiotics and toothbrushes. They were told to shave and shower. And a psychologist came in to evaluate them.
Then, sometime after midnight on July 18, guards began banging their batons on the bars of the men’s cells. “Everyone take a shower,” they yelled.
This time, when Blanco asked for the time, a guard gave it to him. It was 1:40 a.m.
Photographers and reporters were allowed into the facility. Blanco wondered whether he was about to be a part of a publicity stunt. He told himself he wouldn’t give them what they wanted. No smiles for the camera.
Then, a top Salvadoran official walked in. “You are leaving.”
In a brief phone interview, Félix Ulloa, El Salvador’s vice president, denied any mistreatment and pointed to videos of the men looking unscathed as they left the prison as proof they were in good shape. He declined to comment on what role, if any, the U.S. had played in what happened to the men while they were in El Salvador. However, according to court records, the Salvadoran government previously told the United Nations that while it was physically holding the men, they remained under U.S. jurisdiction.
The Trump administration pledged millions of dollars to El Salvador to hold the deportees in CECOT.
Natalia Molano, a spokesperson for the U.S. State Department, said the U.S. is not responsible for the conditions of the men’s detention in El Salvador. If there are complaints now that the men have returned to Venezuela, she said, “the United States is not involved in the conversation.”
During his months in CECOT, Ramos said he found solace in the Bible, the only book available. He said he felt particularly drawn to the Book of Job, a wealthy man whom God tested with loss and pain. Despite his losses, Ramos said, Job “never denied God.” He said Job “had a lot of faith.”
That’s how Ramos, a former telephone technician, saw his time in El Salvador: a divine test that he’d overcome with faith. The seven long months it had taken him to migrate from Venezuela to the United States — which involved walking through the treacherous Darién jungle — seemed easy by comparison.
As soon as his family and neighbors got word that he was on his way home to Guatire, just outside Caracas, they cobbled together $20 to help his mother, Lina Ramos, decorate the house and make a meal of chicken and rice with plantains.
Knowing that his mother had marched and fought for his release, that no one had forgotten him and the other men who’d been detained with him, he said, “was the best gift we could have gotten.”
But the effects of what he went through still linger. Now, when he tries to read the Bible, he said, he notices his sight is failing in his left eye. He thinks it was caused by a particular beating, one of many, where guards repeatedly hit him on his ears and head after he tried to bathe outside of the designated time. He said he has no money at the moment to see a doctor. He arrived home with nothing but the clothes he was wearing.
He is sure he’ll work something out, though. He has faith.
We’re becoming everything we (perhaps naively) assumed most Americans didn’t want America to be: a backwater burg on the world map, overseen by a corrupt sheriff and known mostly for our routine rights violations and unwillingness to treat facts as facts. Bigotry is again the national sport and people bringing inconvenient facts are just fodder for firing squads.
You’re getting the government you deserve, even if you claim you didn’t vote specifically for whatever new insanity might be hurting you personally at this moment in time. You wanted a demagogue and you got one — a man so incapable of handling the slightest bit of bad news, he feels compelled to go full Stalin the moment a factoid puts a slight dent in his self-perception as the Greatest Human Being Who Has Ever Walked The Face Of The Earth.
His party — and his enablers — spent years screaming into the faces of anyone questioning their mere humanity that “facts” were more important than “feelings.” But that was never true. Only facts that allowed them to be inhumane towards their fellow human beings mattered. All other facts should be ignored, buried, or misrepresented. And their top dude – King Shit himself — feels the same way. When the facts aren’t the facts he likes, they become subservient to his feelings.
So, when Department of Labor employment stats reflected the reality of six months of absolute financial psychopathy from President Trump, Trump decided the best response was to shoot the messenger. We can only take solace in the fact that he didn’t do this literally.
President Donald Trump on Friday fired the Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner, hours after the agency reported that job growth in the U.S. had slowed to a near-halt.
In a Truth Social post that also directed even more fire at Fed Chair Jerome Powell, Trump accused BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer of being a political appointee who was manipulating jobs data.
This reporting downplays the pure un-hingedness that is Trump’s actual social media post. The obvious outcome of massive tariffs (some threatened, some deployed) and the ejection of thousands of tax-paying, hardworking employees of US companies whose jobs will never be filled by the same white people claiming these jobs were “stolen” from them resulted in an outcome that would have been obvious to anyone who’s ever spent more than 5 minutes paying attention in an Economics class.
Job growth slowed because US manufacturers are finding that everything that isn’t uncertain is now certainly more expensive. And the ejection of more than 100,000 people from the work force via mass deportation efforts has left more holes than natural-born Americans willing to fill them.
Of course, Trump will never take the blame for anything that’s directly his fault. So he went to his own social media service to perform a public execution of the person bearing the inevitable bad news.
I’m going to quote it in full because I’m absolutely daring the Trump supporters who read this site to wade into the comment section with their defense of whatever the fuck this is:
I was just informed that our Country’s “Jobs Numbers” are being produced by a Biden Appointee, Dr. Erika McEntarfer, the Commissioner of Labor Statistics, who faked the Jobs Numbers before the Election to try and boost Kamala’s chances of Victory. This is the same Bureau of Labor Statistics that overstated the Jobs Growth in March 2024 by approximately 818,000 and, then again, right before the 2024 Presidential Election, in August and September, by 112,000. These were Records — No one can be that wrong? We need accurate Jobs Numbers. I have directed my Team to fire this Biden Political Appointee, IMMEDIATELY. She will be replaced with someone much more competent and qualified. Important numbers like this must be fair and accurate, they can’t be manipulated for political purposes. McEntarfer said there were only 73,000 Jobs added (a shock!) but, more importantly, that a major mistake was made by them, 258,000 Jobs downward, in the prior two months. Similar things happened in the first part of the year, always to the negative. The Economy is BOOMING under “TRUMP” despite a Fed that also plays games, this time with Interest Rates, where they lowered them twice, and substantially, just before the Presidential Election, I assume in the hopes of getting “Kamala” elected – How did that work out? Jerome “Too Late” Powell should also be put “out to pasture.” Thank you for your attention to this matter!
This absolute coward and loser thinks job numbers are a political operation meant to make him look bad. But the numbers are what they are. While presidents have always been willing to apply spin to job numbers, no one until Trump has been willing to fire a Labor official simply for reporting facts.
Most GOP members are abject cowards. But at least a couple of them stepped up to criticize (however mildly) this transparently authoritarian action by Donald “My Feelings Don’t Care About Your Facts” Trump:
“If the president is firing the statistician because he doesn’t like the numbers but they are accurate, then that’s a problem,” said Wyoming Republican senator Cynthia Lummis. “It’s not the statistician’s fault if the numbers are accurate and that they’re not what the president had hoped for.”
Lummis added that if the numbers are unreliable, the public should be told – but firing McEntarfer was “kind of impetuous”.
North Carolina senator Thom Tillis, a Republican, said: “If she was just fired because the president or whoever decided to fire the director just … because they didn’t like the numbers, they ought to grow up.”
The biggest problem isn’t that Trump did this, although it is actually a serious problem. The biggest problem is that Trump did this despite it being immediately apparent this was done solely to punish someone for daring to publish facts that undermined the administration’s narrative on tariffs, mass deportation, and the alleged benefits of shitting the international bed on a regular basis.
But all the firings in the world won’t change the facts: the Trump administration is eviscerating everything that makes America great. And while it works towards the goal of creating a perpetual fascist state for Trump and his acolytes, it will steadily destroy everything that makes America operable. Trump will break this country and then declare his love for its corpse while fondling an American flag.
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