This Week in Tyranny: ICE Buries Body Cam Videos, Trump Robs Natl Parks, Judge Demands Epstein Files

Welcome back to This Week in Tyranny. Yes I know it's Monday. There's been a lot going on. While you were watching Trump explain that voters are absolutely furious at Republicans but somehow not at him personally, ICE announced it’s putting a camera on every agent in America and reserving the right to decide whether you ever see the footage, internal Park Service records showed Trump drained the national parks to pay for his lawn, Todd Blanche got sworn in as attorney general and immediately got ordered into court over the Epstein files, and the National Guard hit its one year anniversary in Washington with orders now running through 2029. Plus 221 people killed in boat strikes that accomplished nothing, a salmonella recall, a measles record, an executive order splitting a shot that only comes in one bottle, and a child’s crayon drawing stamped “EVIDENCE.”LET’S START WITH THE CAMERASActing ICE Director David Venturella announced that every agent in the field will be wearing a body camera by the end of this month, and he’d like you to know this is about transparency. Then Ryan Foley at the Associated Press went and read the actual policy, which is always the rudest thing a reporter can do. When an ICE agent kills somebody or puts them in the hospital, the footage gets fast tracked for release only when ICE decides that releasing it is, quote, “in the best interests of the agency.” So it’s a highlight reel with a legal department. They’re going to film every single thing they do and then hand you the one where they help a lost dog.Venturella’s response was to call the AP story “misleading and sensationalized” and accuse them of a “fundamental mischaracterization,” which is a lot of syllables to spend not denying the sentence. He never says the words aren’t in the policy. He can’t. They’re in the policy. David, my dude, the AP asked you about that exact line before they published, and you answered every question except that one, which is its own kind of answer.Then in the same statement he says ICE is “committed to transparency and accountability.” Sir. You are, at this moment, defending your right to hide the video.NOW, NATIONAL PARKSScott MacFarlane got internal Park Service records, and here are two numbers back to back. This year the administration made 323 million dollars available for projects on the White House grounds. Last year that number was seven and a half million. A five thousand percent increase. For a lawn.Another hundred million went to the National Mall. Put those together and the White House and the Mall pulled down 423 million dollars, which is more than Yellowstone, Yosemite, the Grand Canyon, Grand Teton, Golden Gate, the Statue of Liberty, Mammoth Cave, Zion and Joshua Tree received this year combined. Nine parks. All of them. Beaten by one guy’s yard.Yellowstone got cut. Yosemite got cut. The Grand Canyon got cut. Meanwhile the delayed list includes tree care at the Flight 93 Memorial in Shanksville. They are letting the trees die at a memorial to the people who died stopping a plane from hitting the Capitol, so the man currently working in that building can have a nicer patio. Also delayed, an emergency wastewater repair at Death Valley. The word “emergency” was already in the file name.The Park Service has lost nearly two thousand employees in a year against a thirty billion dollar maintenance backlog. And the money is coming partly from rerouted recreation fees, which is the twenty bucks you handed a ranger at the gate at Zion. You paid for the helipad. Speaking of the helipad, that five million dollars is being covered by Lockheed Martin, which also owns the company that builds the helicopters. The helicopter company bought the President a place to park his helicopter. Nothing untoward. Just two friends and a landing zone.Tim Whitehouse at Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility says Interior Secretary Doug Burgum is running the Park Service as “a personal trust or a personal valet service of the President.” And Interior’s spokesperson did not dispute a single number in that story. Their entire rebuttal was to bring up Barack Obama, who has not been president in nearly a decade.TODD BLANCHE SWORN INTodd Blanche was sworn in as attorney general today, and he is already under a federal judge’s order to appear in open court and explain his redactions in the Epstein files. That case was brought under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, the law Congress passed specifically so the public could see this material. So the man in charge of releasing the files now has to stand in front of a judge and justify what he blacked out of them. Allison Gill has been all over it. Week one on the job, and the calendar item is explain to a judge why you won’t show us the files.He got the job at four o’clock Saturday morning, fifty to forty nine, and then the Senate left town for five weeks. Two weeks ago these same Republicans were holding him up over Trump’s one point eight billion dollar payout fund. Cornyn and Tillis caved the second Blanche told them the fund was dead. Cassidy dragged it out until Friday morning and folded too. Lisa Murkowski went on the record saying Blanche had accelerated the politicization of the Justice Department and handed Trump sweeping immunity protections, and then watched forty nine of her colleagues confirm him in the dark and drive straight to the airport. They didn’t even have the confidence to do it during business hours. They snuck their own nominee through like a raccoon going into a garbage can.NATIONAL GUARD IN DC UNTIL 2029It has now been one full year since Trump declared a crime emergency in Washington and sent in the National Guard, and the mission that was sold as temporary has been extended through January of 2029. Three and a half years of soldiers standing on residential corners, because somebody said the word “emergency” once in 2025 and nobody in this administration has ever voluntarily given a power back in their lives.RAPID FIRESenator Tim Kaine says the United States has now killed 221 people in strikes on 67 boats, that the DEA’s own assessment is that it did nothing measurable to drug flow, and that some of the dead were not involved in narcotrafficking at all. The phrase he used was “murder victims.” That’s a sitting senator, with the classified targeting material in front of him, calling it murder, right before a five week recess where nobody will be asked about it.Taylor Farms is recalling jalapeños and avocados over salmonella at the exact moment federal food inspection has been gutted, so enjoy the guacamole.And today Trump signed an executive order cutting the list of shots routinely recommended for kids from eighteen diseases down to eleven, and ordering the measles, mumps and rubella shot split into three separate ones given at three separate visits. Small problem. The standalone versions don’t exist. He signed an order requiring doctors to administer three shots that are not manufactured. He also said one-year-olds should be spread across five separate appointments, which is less a medical schedule than a punch card. He kept linking all of it to autism while he signed, even though the word autism does not appear anywhere in the order. And he did this in the same month measles hit its highest level in thirty years, a disease we had beaten before the invention of the microwave. Robert F. Kennedy Junior stood there and watched, which is fair, since he already fired all seventeen members of the vaccine advisory committee and told the CDC to drop its position that shots don’t cause autism, without producing any new evidence at all.Brendan Carr’s FCC just knocked down one of the last barriers stopping Trump’s media allies from swallowing more local TV stations, so your evening news is about to get a personality transplant. Greenland issued a strong warning as a Trump linked oil firm gets ready to drill, because of course this administration found the one island that told us no and started drilling. And ICE seized a child’s crayon drawings and stamped one of them “EVIDENCE,” which we only know because Allison Gill FOIA’d it and they released nine pages out of ninety one. Somewhere a federal agent looked at a kid’s drawing and reached for a stamp.That’s your week in tyranny. Welcome to the golden age.Sourceshttps://thehill.com/homenews/administration/6018782-ice-chief-david-venturella-ap-bodycam/ https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/national-guard-deployment-to-washington-through-2029-will-cost-roughly-1-4-billion-estimate-shows https://bluevirginia.us/2026/08/sen-tim-kaine-sends-letter-to-trump-says-the-united-states-has-killed-individuals-in-the-caribbean-pacific-who-are-not-involved-in-narcotrafficking-they-are-murder-victims/ https://www.fda.gov/safety/recalls-market-withdrawals-safety-alerts/taylor-fresh-foods-recalls-products-made-jalapeno-peppers-because-possible-health-risk https://www.contemporarypediatrics.com/view/trump-signs-executive-order-overhauling-childhood-vaccine-recommendations https://rollcall.com/2026/08/06/fcc-opens-door-to-larger-local-broadcast-ownership-groups/ Get full access to The Rogue Voice aka Linsay Rousseau at linsayrousseau.substack.com/subscribe