The Best of the Rest of the News and Opinion. — Trump stuns 5,000 exhausted Sailors: nine months at sea isn’t “nearly long enough.” — Trump‘S DOJ is building a shield against Democratic investigations before the midterms. — AI crosses a terrifying line, and researchers are debating hitting the brakes. — Trump’s team targets nursing home voters with chilling new election rules. — Big Pharma hits jackpot as record 59% of Americans struggle to afford prescriptions. — Putin tests NATO again, as Trump burns through America’s weapons. — Geeky Science Alert! Scientists make a stunning discovery about how birth order may affect your health. — Trump guts America’s firefighting capabilities as historic heat and hurricane threats explode.

Once government can place one group beyond the protection of law, the boundary can always expand to the rest of us… “People are disappearing into this no man’s land. They have no connection to their new country, and they also apparently have no legal rights.” —Immigration rights attorney Alma David, quoted in The New York Times “Terrible things are happening outside... poor helpless people are being dragged out of their homes. Families are torn apart; men, women and children are separated. Children come home from school to find that their parents have disappeared.” — Anne Frank diary entry January 13, 1943 Authoritarianism doesn’t just begin when a government embraces brutality. It steps in on cats’ feet when brutality becomes politically useful, legally routinized, and morally acceptable because a government has first declared its victims undeserving of our empathy. When average people in the bureaucracy just “do their jobs” inflicting horrors on other humans simply because they’ve been declared “the other.” Outside of military coups like Pinochet’s Chile, countries don’t generally slide from republican democracies into totalitarianism and fascism in a single step. There’s a process, and it always begins by the government deciding that some people simply don’t deserve the basic human rights that have been foundational to western civilization for centuries.

From Teddy Roosevelt to Navalny and Zelenskyy, history shows that exposing corrupt elites can mobilize voters and topple entrenched power. With all but 2 Republican senators voting to make Todd Blanche our Attorney General, Donald Trump just walked away from a $100 million fine for tax fraud that the IRS has been trying to collect from him for over a decade. This was the centerpiece of the “settlement“ that Blanche wrote up that says that Trump, Uday and Qusay, Jared and Ivanka, Tiffany and Boulos, and even Barron will never again have to worry about paying taxes or ever being audited. It may well even extend to their business partners. Meanwhile, last week Capital One bank submitted sworn testimony to a court that back in 2021 they shut down and closed 385 Trump-owned businesses because their fraud department — and its leader, a man with “extensive financial fraud law enforcement experience” — believed Trump’s businesses were engaging in illegal money laundering and the bank wanted nothing to do with it. Even more astonishing, neither of these revelations from the past two weeks made more than the tiniest stir in our corporate media, which is increasingly afraid of crossing Trump or his neofascist billionaire buddies

How They Pinned the Crime on Scapegoats Recently, an aficionado of Fox “News” called into my radio program to say that he was “sick and tired of being ripped off by these Somali [Black] welfare cheats.” I asked him if he realized that from an average taxpayer’s point of view, the amount of federal tax dollars that goes to everyday safety-net programs like SNAP or basic welfare “is about $324 per taxpayer, but direct subsidies and special tax breaks that favor big businesses and industries cost each taxpayer thousands of dollars per year.” He grunted, as if he didn’t believe me, and hung up the phone. These guys are truly well indoctrinated, which raises the question: how and why did that happen? Reagan and the oligarchs who funded him were faced with a problem of growing discontent among “the rabble.”