American Doom

You’ll read lots of pieces today about last night’s election results but this is the only publication where you’ll learn about the following. To support our work, you can subscribe for $6 a month or throw a few dollars in our Coffee Fund.Georgia’s election denial network of public officials, unhinged online personalities and average citizens spent yesterday ricocheting between joy and despair — and it had nothing to do with the results that began to roll in last night.Led by Trump allies on the State Election Board (SEB) and a handful of far-right state lawmakers and political candidates, election denial forces here have spent weeks fear mongering and successfully placing clips in right-wing media over the Secretary of State’s election night operation center that the election deniers have deemed a “secret bunker.”In fact, the “Election Night Reporting Center,” as the Secretary of State’s Office calls it, is not, and never has been, a secret. Nor are any votes actually counted there, as SEB members and a pair of Republican candidates who filed a lawsuit to gain access to the “bunker” have alluded. Votes are counted at county offices of elections, which then send those totals to the Secretary of State. There, the totals are put online for the public to see.But Georgia’s election denial wing of the Republican party does not trust Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger as part of their demands that all elections be administered and all votes be counted by those who pass a litmus test that includes abject support for Donald Trump and a fervent belief in lies and conspiracies about widespread election fraud. That wing includes the MAGA majority on the SEB and figures like Greg Dolezal, a state senator, and Christopher Mora, a candidate for one of Georgia’s U.S. House seats.Dolezal and Mora filed a lawsuit this week demanding that the SEB and Republican poll watchers be granted access to the reporting center at the Secretary of State’s Office. On Tuesday, a judge briefly ordered that that access should be granted before rescinding the order on a technicality, thus prompting the back-and-forth emotions on display by Georgia’s vast network of election denial officials and activists.While much of the coverage of these developments has covered the lawsuit, opposing judicial orders and the reporting center under the both sides framework, key context has been absent: the SEB (and its MAGA “pitbulls,” as Trump has called them), Dolezal and Mora have had months — years, really — to make their claim that poll watchers and other observers should be legally allowed to oversee election night proceedings at the Secretary of State’s reporting center. The simple and obvious reason that they did not file their lawsuit until this week is that it would not have benefitted them from a political and media-savvy standpoint to do so.By filing the lawsuit this week, Georgia’s election deniers took advantage of public interest in Tuesday’s primaries to gin up further distrust in elections. Raffensperger has a secret bunker where he could manipulate votes! He’s running in the very election that his office is charged with overseeing! He won’t let us into the bunker to ensure he isn’t stealing the election for himself and other people who are bad!In the last 48 hours, these have been the stupefyingly insincere arguments that Dolezal, Mora, the SEB and others have made. Maybe many of them actually believe their own nonsense, but just as many understand that the best way to secure elections for MAGA candidates is to sow as much doubt as possible in all elections. By doing so, election deniers think they can convince the public that they, and only they, should be allowed to administer elections, make rules about voting and polling locations, and effectively control all levers of government in order to ensure that real Americans are in charge.You see this mindset reflected in statements from Trump administration officials and Republican members of Congress every single day when they say things like how they want to pass the SAVE Act to ensure that “the right people” are voting. It’s part of a playbook that includes the aggressive redistricting of the South to dilute Black — and in turn mostly Democratic — voting power. From this week’s nonsense over the “secret bunker,” to efforts across the country to purge voters based on false and misleading claims about undocumented immigrants voting in elections — every policy and talking point about voting and elections pushed by the vast majority of Republicans is aimed at a singular goal: using the levers of power to ensure that they maintain their grip on it, regardless of what American voters say at the ballot box.Other election night takeaways:Massie vs. whoeverRep. Thomas Massie lost to a man whose name most voters probably did not even know until they arrived at their polling locations in Kentucky yesterday. That’s because the majority of those voters were simply doing what Trump told them to do — get Massie out of office by voting for the other guy. Why was Trump so adamant that Massie had to go? Because Massie had the gall to be one of the only elected Republicans in the country to ask serious questions about the president’s ties to Jeffery Epstein. Just a few years ago, nailing politicians and powerful figures with Epstein ties was a huge deal for Republican voters! But what they actually meant was that they wanted to imprison people like Bill Clinton, not Donald Trump. It’s sort of like all the MAGA folks you see with the Gadsden flag. They don’t really mean Don’t tread on me; what they really mean is Tread on them. But don’t believe the hype Massie’s loss — it was a primary in a very Trumpy state. Considering Trump’s dismal approval ratings, this is like winning a preseason football game. Jones (Trump) vs. Jackson (cash)Lt. Gov. Burt Jones will head to a runoff with billionaire Rick Jackson to become the state’s next governor. If you’re not in Georgia, this race may not seem important but here’s why it matters: Jones has been instrumental in not just spreading Trump’s lies about election fraud but propagating rules and systems that have allowed the MAGA wing of his party more control over elections here. Considering Georgia’s role as something close to a swing state, Jones becoming governor stands to have an important effect on how elections and voting are run here — and how those rules will help and hurt Republicans and Democrats.Jones was responsible for appointing Salleigh Grubbs to the SEB, where she has quickly become the most forceful and unhinged voice of Georgia’s election denial movement who has any position of power (albeit very little). You might remember Grubbs as the woman who chased a garbage truck in 2020 because she thought it contained shredded ballots. As this week’s madness over the “secret bunker” played out, Grubbs was out front on the issue, appearing on Mike Lindell’s “news” channel.Jones is also one of Trump’s fake electors who was never fully punished for, you know, fraudulently trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Rick Jackson is just another loaded guy who thinks his billions entitles him to run things. Not great choices! One of the two will face former Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms in the general.Who will lose to Jon Ossoff?A pair of MAGA backbenchers — Rep. Mike Collins and Derek Dooley — are headed to a runoff for the honor of probably losing to Sen. Jon Ossoff. Collins is most famous for his work on the Laken Riley Act, a classically regressive piece of legislation built, more than anything, to give him an “I hate immigrants more than most” talking point on the campaign trail. Dooley was once the head football coach for the University of Tennessee, so is therefore obviously qualified to join the United States Senate.No paywalls here, but that means we need your paid support. Subscribe and spread the word.***Doom social:* Bluesky - @americandoom.bsky.social* TikTok - @americandoom_* YouTube - @americandoom_* Instagram - @americandoom_* Facebook This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.american-doom.com/subscribe

Quick reminder that Doom was the only publication to nail the DOJ on its efforts to mess with elections here in Georgia. That work takes a lot of time and resources. If you want to support our hard-nosed, adversarial journalism, the best way to do so is through a paid subscription or dropping a few dollars in our Coffee Fund. Now, on to the news…In just the last few days, Republican threats to democracy have exploded.Using legal, quasi-legal and legislative means, Republicans from Washington D.C. on down to state legislatures have enacted widespread measures to secure what they hope will be a permanent majority of American power, voters be damned. That’s because the goal of the election denial movement — which forms a major part of the Republican base of voters — has never been to “secure elections.” It’s always been about ensuring that only Republicans can win elections, as I explained on the Signal Fire podcast today. You can watch our conversation here.With Republicans asking the Supreme Court to purge voters very close to the November midterms under the guise that scores of undocumented immigrants populate voter rolls (they do not), this plan to not just sow distrust in an election Republicans are set to lose, but to ensure that the rules prohibit anyone else from winning it, has become more clear. Not satisfied with these efforts — and helpfully backed by a Supreme Court decision two weeks ago — Republicans throughout the South have begun to legislate Black lawmakers out of their elected positions.Quite literally, Republicans are using the tools of democracy to undo it. Already, several elections have been outright cancelled as Republicans draw new maps that will solidify their political power. Again, not satisfied with this historic power grab, Republicans in Tennessee have gone a step further, stripping Black lawmakers of legislative roles that allow them a say in how their state is run.Helping Republican politicians along are their foot soldiers in the election denial movement, who continue to file voter roll challenges and harass election offices with lawsuits, demands for public records based on their conspiracies about election fraud and, in the case of someone here in the South this week, threaten election officials who refuse to tow President Donald Trump’s line on non-existent widespread election fraud.Someone mailed a four-page manifesto threatening Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to a sheriff’s office in Mississippi, bizarrely. The letter preceded a bomb scare at a campaign event in Georgia on Monday, where Raffensperger was speaking to voters about his bid to become the state’s next governor. Raffensperger famously refused to help Trump overturn the 2020 election in Georgia, and as a result has been the target of constant harassment from his fellow Republicans.If you appreciate the clarity of this rundown in addition to our exclusive reporting here, please throw us a few bucks. Your support directly funds the adversarial journalism we hope holds power to account in these troubling times.dMeanwhile, Trump is again floating the idea of sending the military to voting locations in November, just as he did in 2020 when he considered having the National Guard seize voting machines. (In December, Trump said he regretted not doing that.) Trump saying something random to a reporter is one thing, but there’s more than that: multiple federal agencies are involved with efforts to “secure” the midterms.You might remember the inexplicable presence of Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard at the FBI raid of a Fulton County elections warehouse in January. Recent reporting makes clear that her presence there was part of an administration-wide effort to stay on top of false election fraud claims in order to exploit them for maximum benefit in November.Department of Homeland Security officials have been reaching out to state- and county-level election officials throughout the country. The DHS officials have demanded, among other things, voter history and registration information from these officials, Reuters reported.Keep in mind that counties are the frontlines of U.S. elections. It’s there that results are initially certified before being approved by state officials, which is why, as I reported on significantly back in 2024, Republicans tried to use their power at the county level to refuse to certify election results that showed Democrats winning.To my knowledge, no state has reformed its certification rules in the wake of those attempts, and there is no indication that efforts by election denial officials in counties across the country aren’t just as robust as they were two years ago.Meanwhile, those same county and state officials have fewer resources from the federal government to help them manage election threats and chaos this time around. That’s because the Trump administration has gutted agencies that provide help to state and local officials battling online threats, hacking attempts and other scenarios that states and counties might not have the tools to fight.“Nearly every program and capability to stop bad actors and support election administrators has been dismantled,” a former Biden administration official at the National Security Council who worked on threats to elections told ProPublica last month.Whatever agencies and programs haven’t been purposefully destroyed by the Trump administration have had their missions completely perverted with the hiring of election conspiracy theorists to lead them. Already, this has (partly) resulted in things like the seizure of voting machines in Puerto Rico and, of course, the FBI elections raid here in Georgia.Seven months out from the midterms, the threats to Americans’ ability to actually elect who they prefer continues to rise. You hear a lot of hyperbole these days — and around the time of any election, really — but I don’t think it’s too alarmist to say that if Republicans succeed in their efforts to effectively gerrymander and rule-make their way into legislative majorities both in the states and the U.S. Congress, that’s power they’re never going to give up.Trump has said as much, urging states to gerrymander their way into power and chastising them when they don’t. He’s doing this because he’s terrified of being impeached when Democrats take the House and, possibly, the Senate after November. Even in his current state of severe cognitive decline, even Trump knows that Republican chances in the midterms are bad. He’s certainly not helping by driving up costs with a clueless war in Iran, spending tons of money we don’t have on vanity construction projects and a missile defense system we don’t need, and just generally not giving a shit what everyday Americans are going through as daily life becomes more and more expensive.There have always been two paths to power. The democratic one has always been more difficult. The authoritarian one is easier, if sometimes bloodier.***Follow Doom on social:* Bluesky - @americandoom.bsky.social* TikTok - @americandoom_* YouTube - @americandoom_* Instagram - @americandoom_* Facebook This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.american-doom.com/subscribe

You might have seen that American Doom beat the Justice Department in federal court last week. Trump’s DOJ will now have to officially reveal the names of some of the witnesses in an affidavit that led to an FBI raid on an Atlanta elections office. Doom was the only publication in the country to motion the court to release the names. To support our work, please choose a paid subscription or drop a few dollars into our Coffee Fund.I do not think this summer will be as hot as the last one, but what do I know? I’ve been wrong before. For whatever reason, it seems that many Americans have come to accept the daily drumbeat of chaos and corruption that emanates from Washington, as well as the more recent authoritarian machinations being heaped upon us by Trumpian legislatures throughout the country. Well, maybe accept isn’t the right word. Maybe people are just exhausted.And when I say us, I guess not all of us. Because lots of people are very happy about the abject power grab that has occurred in recent days following the Supreme Court’s decision to allow Republican-led states to effectively rig the map so that only Republicans can win.Last summer saw fairly widespread protests over the Trump administration’s mass deportation regime as masked agents stormed American streets. The song of the summer this year seems to be a slightly less obvious one of rising authoritarianism: the quiet, plodding work of Republicans who are using the tools of democracy to undo it. There are many ways to create an authoritarian state. One of those ways includes the masked police that sparked outrage and protests last year. Another involves what we’re seeing now: duly-elected officials ensuring that no one else can come to power by using the very levers of government and elections that are supposed to ensure equal representation under the law.Simultaneously, Republicans are working to, once again, convince millions of Americans that any election that doesn’t result in a Republican victory is fraudulent. (This is the thesis statement of the election denial movement, whether they explicitly state it or not.) All of this — the war in Iran, Trump administration corruption coupled with a complete disregard for the economic concerns of Americans, attacks on voting rights, sowing distrust in elections — feels like the inevitable, if not openly-violent, end state of decades-long period of turmoil that I’ve reported on in one form or another my entire career.Today at Luke O’Neil’s Hell World, you can read about some of that chaos in an excerpt from my forthcoming book, If I Am Coming to Your Town, Something Terrible Has Happened – The Life and Times of a Domestic War Correspondent. The book will be published in June by the University of Georgia Press and you can pre-order it here. (Use the code 08TERRIBLE to receive 30 percent off.)Some folks have been asking me why I wrote this book, which also deals with my descent into and recovery from alcoholism, and the short answer is: I had to. Not only did I have to get all this shit off my chest, but I felt I had to put these events down so that other people who were watching the chaos and violence of American life — and who were wondering if it all was really as bad as it can sometimes seem — were not alone. First, you are not alone. Secondly, it certainly all has been very bad. Third, it’s going to get better. The pendulum never stops at the top, as my dad would say.If you appreciate this post, please consider sharing it with friends. We could also use your support with a subscription for a few bucks a month.All of this pressure and pain will go away if Americans stick to the principles of light, love, justice and progress. It can be hard in dark days to remember that those principles can win, but by remembering that they can defeat darkness we get closer to willing the darkness away.***Please follow AD on our social media for a little more doom to scroll. That’s what we all need, right?* Bluesky - @americandoom.bsky.social* TikTok - @americandoom_* YouTube - @americandoom_* Instagram - @americandoom_* Facebook This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.american-doom.com/subscribe

Big news out of federal court in Atlanta this week. American Doom was the only publication in the country that pushed the DOJ to release the names of the public officials who refused to have their identities unsealed in an affidavit that led to a historic FBI raid election raid in January. To support our work, please choose a paid subscription or throw us a few dollars at our Coffee Fund. A federal judge in Georgia has sided with American Doom and ordered the Justice Department to officially reveal the identities of three witnesses whose allegations led to the FBI raid of a Fulton County elections warehouse in January.I say “officially,” because the identities of the witnesses were more or less known immediately thanks to information provided in the affidavit about their positions as public officials — two are appointed members of the State Election Board (SEB) and the third is an elected member of the Fulton County Board of Commissioners.But the officials — Dr. Janice Johnston and Janelle King of the SEB and Fulton County Commissioner Bridget Thorne — objected to American Doom’s motions to have their names un-redacted from the affidavit. Johnston, King and Thorne did not respond to a request for comment.What’s never been clear is why the three officials objected to the public release of their names. All three are clearly identified in the affidavit by their positions on the SEB and Fulton County commission, and all three are outspoken election skeptics who, for years, have amplified falsehoods and questionable claims about widespread voter fraud.For her part, Johnston was so enamored with the FBI raid in January that she made an appearance on Steve Bannon’s podcast from her SUV in the parking lot where, nearby, FBI agents were still pulling materials from the elections warehouse. Since at least late last year, King has publicly bragged about her solicitation of help from President Donald Trump’s Justice Department to investigate specious claims of election fraud in Fulton County during the 2020 election, as I reported for the Guardian in November. Thorne has openly discussed her inclusion in the affidavit with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.On Monday, U.S. District Judge J.P. Boulee ordered the Justice Department to provide an un-redacted version of the FBI affidavit that led to the January raid. That document will now officially name Johnston, King and Thorne as witnesses.Quite literally, no one else has done the work that American Doom has done here. But that can’t happen without your support. Boulee explained his order:“In balancing the right of access versus Respondent’s interest in keeping the names of the witnesses confidential, the Court notes that many of the above factors weigh in favor of the right of access. For instance, it does not appear that Glawe is seeking the records for an illegitimate purpose or to promote public scandal. Moreover, it is undeniable that the 2020 election and the seizure of the election records are historically significant matters and that granting full access to the affidavits is likely to promote public understanding of these events,” Boulee wrote in his order. “The Court also cannot ignore that the redacted information concerns both public officials and a matter of public concern. Indeed, each of the witnesses currently holds a public office related to elections in Georgia and the underlying search at issue in this case involves a Georgia election.”The Justice Department had argued that the identifies of Johnston, King and Thorne must remain under seal due to “concerns over privacy, retaliation, and/or harassment associated with official confirmation of their providing evidence in a criminal investigation.” Boulee noted that the identities of the three are already widely known, and that “maintaining the seal in this case does little to protect the privacy of these witnesses.”Keep in mind that the information provided by Johnston, King and Thorne was already widely known as well. Their claims of “election fraud” are based on technical errors that occurred during the 2020 election — errors that have been the subject of much scrutiny and hand-wringing by the election denial movement in the ensuing six years.The case against Fulton County is largely viewed as specious by election experts, former judges and reputable lawyers, but that hasn’t stopped the Justice Department from pursuing criminal charges against the county for the technical errors that occurred in 2020 — and had no effect on the outcome of the election. Trump lost; Biden won. It’s as simple as that. But with the Justice Department acting as Trump’s personal law firm, election denialists within the agency have been aggressively pursuing debunked claims of widespread election fraud for two reasons: to curry favor with Trump, who simply cannot accept that he lost the 2020 election, and to lay the groundwork for forthcoming claims that the November mid-terms were beset with widespread fraud.Trump and Republicans need to create this narrative going into November because they’re likely to lose in significant fashion. The FBI raid in Atlanta, the subpoenaing of election records in Arizona and the personal information of election workers in Fulton County, the seizure of voting machines in Puerto Rico, and a recent demand that the Supreme Court allow Republicans to purge voters in Arizona under dubious claims that many undocumented immigrants are registered to vote — all of it is part of the narrative-building that Republicans and the Trump administration are performing in order to claim that an election they are set to lose was somehow stolen from them.Millions of Americans are being primed to believe this, and they’re being led by people like Johnston, King and Thorne, who now must officially take credit for their role in the affidavit — and their positions as leaders of a movement in Georgia aimed at convincing voters of fraud that simply doesn’t exist.***Follow Doom on social:* Bluesky - @americandoom.bsky.social* TikTok - @americandoom_* YouTube - @americandoom_* Instagram - @americandoom_* X - @americandoom_* Facebook This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.american-doom.com/subscribe

This article is the result of months of digging into ICE deaths. The previous article in this series is viewable here. This reporting has taken much time and resources — and hundreds of dollars in fees to obtain autopsy reports. To support this work, please choose a paid subscription to American Doom or contribute to our Coffee Fund. Two coroners in Missouri who have publicly expressed anti-immigrant sentiment have overseen the autopsy of an ICE detainee who died in a local jail, American Doom has found. Now, under a questionable interpretation of Missouri law, the two coroners are refusing to release the autopsy report for Brayan Garzon-Rayo, a 27-year-old Colombian man who allegedly took his own life while being held on an ICE detainer in the Phelps County Jail just a little more than a year ago, on April 8.The refusal of the two coroners — Darren Dake and Ernie Coverdell — to release Garzon-Rayo’s autopsy report highlights transparency issues regarding the record number of deaths in U.S. immigration custody under the Trump administration. At least 44 people have died in the custody of ICE, other immigration agencies, or in local jails as a result of the Trump administration’s historic crackdown on undocumented immigrants. That’s the highest number of deaths in a 14-month period since the government began publishing detainee death data in 2018 — and possibly since the Department of Homeland Security and ICE were formed in the wake of 9/11.With about 70,000 immigrants in immigration custody each day, and plans to convert warehouses across the country into detention centers to hold even more, immigrant advocates worry that the number of deaths will continue to rise. As more immigrants are held in facilities that are already at or over capacity, conditions within the facilities will worsen, advocates have warned, leading to delayed responses to medical emergencies and routine ailments.“These recent tragedies underscore what we’ve known to be true for many years, which is that nobody is safe for any period of time inside ICE detention,” said Laura Hernández, executive director of Freedom for Immigrants, a nonprofit organization devoted to ending immigration detention. “The detention system is infamous for its long-standing record of brutal medical abuse, violence, and premature deaths.”While poor conditions inside ICE facilities have been well-documented, less known are the exact circumstances that have led to the record number of immigrant deaths during the Trump administration. But records collected by American Doom show that delayed or insufficient staff responses to medical issues played a role in some of those deaths.In September, a Chinese man experiencing seizures and heart issues was left unattended by medical staff at a facility in California, according to an autopsy report provided to American Doom by authorities. Huabing Xie later died of a heart attack after being left alone for 36 minutes during a crucial window of time, the autopsy showed.Another autopsy report showed that a Mexican man held at another California facility complained of severe rectal pain for weeks and was given only Tylenol. By the time the man was finally taken to the hospital, staff there recommended emergency surgery. The man, Ismael Ayala-Uribe, died of a heart attack before the surgery could take place. At the time of his death, Ayala-Uribe rated his pain at a level of 10 out of 10.In Missouri, two men have allegedly taken their own lives while being held in local jails on ICE detainers. They are among at least seven people who have died of what ICE and local authorities have said are suicide. In the case of Garzon-Rayo, he denied having a history of depression or suicidal thoughts, according to a detainee death report released by ICE. Several days later, after testing positive for COVID and tuberculosis, Garzon-Rayo allegedly committed suicide.But authorities have yet to release key records that could shed light on the exact circumstances of Garzon-Rayo’s death, which his family has questioned. Those records include Garzon-Rayo’s autopsy report, which Dake and Coverdell have refused to release. The two coroners have claimed an exemption in Missouri state law that prevents them from publicly releasing the report, but civil rights attorneys and public records experts who spoke to American Doom say the law is not prohibitive, and that it’s up to individual coroners in Missouri to release autopsy reports.This fact is backed up by the cooperation of another coroner in Missouri, who has agreed to release the autopsy report for Luis Cruz-Silva, who allegedly took his own life while in custody at the Ste. Genevieve County Jail.Dake and Coverdell have offered various explanations for their refusal to release Garzon-Rayo’s autopsy report. Initially, Coverdell told American Doom he couldn’t release the report because “it’s an ICE report,” without providing further information. Later, he joined Dake in citing state law regarding autopsy reports that the two men say prevent them from releasing the document publicly. But that’s simply not the case.To support the in-depth reporting that holds the Trump administration accountable for its role in immigrant deaths, please consider a paid subscription to American Doom.The Missouri Attorney General as well as local prosecutors did not respond to requests for clarification on whether Dake and Coverdell were allowed by law to release Garzon-Rayo’s autopsy report, but the public records experts who spoke to American Doom confirmed that the law is not prohibitive — both men could release the report if they wished. Additionally, the Missouri State Highway Patrol, which investigated the deaths of Garzon-Rayo and Cruz-Silva, have not yet provided records related to the two men’s deaths as requested under the state’s public records law by American Doom.The lack of transparency over Garzon-Rayo’s death is a reflection of the byzantine network of immigration detention facilities, multiple federal agencies, local law enforcement, and medical examiners and coroners across the country that must be navigated in order to understand exactly how the 44 people who have died in ICE custody under Trump met their deaths.In many cases, local authorities like medical examiners and coroners have helpfully released key records like autopsy reports. In others, local authorities and ICE have put up roadblocks to obtaining information about deaths in custody, or have provided incomplete and sometimes misleading information about those cases.For Garzon-Rayo, the situation is clear: Dake and Coverdell could release his autopsy report, but have refused to do so. Coverdell has said he has viewed video from inside the Phelps County Jail that confirmed Garzon-Rayo took his own life, but declined to answer questions about exactly what that footage showed. The Missouri State Highway Patrol investigated the deaths of Garzon-Rayo and Cruz-Silva, but would only say that no charges are forthcoming.***After Garzon-Rayo died, Coverdell took custody of his body. Unable to conduct the autopsy himself — Coverdell is an elected coroner but not a licensed medical pathologist — Coverdell paid Dake, the coroner in nearby Crawford County, $2,600 to conduct the autopsy, he told American Doom.Coverdell and Dake have a history of making public comments in support of Trump’s immigration policies, among other disparaging remarks about Democrats, liberals and Americans who don’t support Donald Trump, according to an American Doom review of their Facebook posts going back to 2018.“CLOSE THE BORDER,” read a post shared in 2023 by Coverdell.In 2018, Coverdell shared a photo of a migrant caravan with a caption that read, in part, “wake up before we are truly overun (sic) you liberal fools.” Coverdell has shared posts that said “toilet dwelling” Democrats propagate a “culture of hate.”Among his many posts on his personal Facebook page, which has no privacy restrictions, Coverdell has also shared an AI-generated photo that showed an encampment of tents in a trash-strewn field under the banner, “Kamala’s America;” another AI-generated photo that showed the Statue of Liberty constructing a wall at the U.S. southern border; and a Dec. 23, 2023 post that encouraged his Facebook audience: “Everyone post: CLOSE THE BORDER!”Dake has shared posts that support Trump’s “remain in Mexico” asylum policy and decried “leftists” who “hate border walls and gun rights,” among other pro-Trump posts.Dake said he found nothing wrong with his posts, adding that he was “looking forward to the publicity.”“Every time you left-leaning ‘journalists’ write a spin piece about me my support and popularity increases,” Dake told American Doom.Dake did not answer specific questions about Garzon-Rayo’s autopsy, pointing to Coverdell in Phelps County. Coverdell told American Doom that he had seen video from inside Garzon-Rayo’s cell, but did not elaborate.“It doesn’t matter what race, religion, ethnic background,” someone is, Coverdell told the American Doom, “if it’s a person that feels it’s better to die than face life for one reason or another.”Coverdell said he did not intend to “disparage immigrants,” and said that he “in no way believes it is good when someone dies, especially by suicide.”In August, Phelps County Sheriff Michael Kirn, whose agency oversees the jail, addressed members of the county commission about the county’s agreement with ICE to hold detainees like Garzon-Rayo.Kirn told commissioners that “having the ICE inmates has incurred costs in food, medical, staffing and transport” that the county was having difficulty affording, according to meeting minutes reviewed by American Doom, adding that there was “not enough revenue coming in to offset” those costs. Under an agreement with ICE, the county had been receiving funding from the agency to hold detainees like Garzon-Rayo. Kirn did not respond to questions from American Doom.At the August commission meeting, Phelps County’s elected officials agreed that the agreement with ICE was no longer worth the county’s resources. Phelps County stopped housing ICE detainees on September 1.***Follow American Doom on social:* Bluesky - @americandoom.bsky.social* TikTok - @americandoom_* YouTube - @americandoom_* Instagram - @americandoom_* X - @americandoom_* Facebook This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.american-doom.com/subscribe

Today’s edition of American Doom has information about the fight over 2020 ballots in Georgia that you won’t find anywhere else. Please choose a paid subscription or contribute to our Coffee Fund to help fuel more of the fact-based, adversarial journalism you see below. As Fulton County and the Justice Department continue to argue in court filings over the thousands of 2020 ballots and other material seized during an FBI raid in January, witnesses who Trump’s DOJ has relied upon for its supposed evidence of fraud in that year’s election have officially — and strangely — attempted to distance themselves from the case.Of the 11 witnesses named in the FBI affidavit that led to the raid, all but four have agreed with American Doom’s motion to have their identities un-redacted. This means they’ve agreed to have their identities officially made public. Of the four who have asked that the court continue to withhold their identities, three are public officials. Two are current members of the Georgia State Election Board.“Wit. 2 is the Republican-appointed member of the Georgia State Election Board,” the affidavit states, abbreviating “witness.” Any ambiguity about which “Republican-appointed member” this witness is — there are four Republican-appointed members on the SEB — is obliterated by the next sentence. “Wit. 2 was an obstetrician prior to serving on the State Election Board.”For anyone with a passing knowledge of Georgia election matters, this is quite obviously SEB member Dr. Janice Johnston, who frequently discusses her time in private practice as an OBGYN, including at SEB meetings.“Wit. 3, the current House-appointed State Election Board member, confirmed there were missing ballot images,” the affidavit goes on, referencing an oft-referenced claim about missing ballot images in Fulton County in 2020 that reflects the election denial movement’s misunderstanding of the rules and mechanisms for storing such records. This is Janelle King, who is the only Republican member of the SEB who has been appointed by the Georgia House of Representatives. The remaining Republican SEB members — John Fervier and Salleigh Grubbs — were appointed by Gov. Brian Kemp and Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, respectively.“Current Fulton County Commissioner, Wit. 11, was a poll worker during the 2020 election,” the affidavit says of Bridget Thorne, who is one of only two Republicans on the commission, and the only Republican who has been outspoken in her belief about election fraud.The SEB’s Johnston and King are fighting American Doom’s motion to have the court make their identities public. Joining them is Thorne, a Fulton County commissioner who has spread lies and conspiracies about election fraud. American Doom is not naming the fourth individual who has asked that their identity remain redacted in court documents because they’re a target of what is broadly considered to be a politically-motivated prosecution by Trump’s Justice Department that is primarily based on “evidence” presented by biased, pro-Trump election skeptics like Johnston, King and Thorne.The evidence cited in the affidavit — which led to a magistrate judge issuing a search warrant that the FBI executed during its Jan. 28 raid of the Fulton County elections warehouse — is mostly recycled claims of technical errors and mistakes like double-counted ballots. That evidence is widely viewed to be not a predicate for criminal charges, which is what DOJ lawyers have argued is the basis for the raid, but for the Trump administration’s efforts to sow doubt in November’s election results.Combined with similar seizures of 2020-related election materials in Arizona, California and Michigan, the Fulton County raid appears to be part of a coordinated effort to resurface fraud claims ahead of an election that Republicans across the country are slated to lose — and lose big — as the president carries out an unpopular war in Iran, gas prices spike, and inflation continues to make life less affordable for most Americans. The Fulton County case is going nowhere but deep into the obscure lore of MAGA election denial conspiracy. Any criminal charges that result from the affidavit that Johnston, King and Thorne are now weakly distancing themselves from will likely be tossed by reputable judges. Perhaps this is the reason for their quiet recusal from being officially named as a result of American Doom’s motion. Read more below, and to support American Doom — the only publication this deep in election interference matters in Georgia and elsewhere — please choose a paid subscription.***Johnston, King and Thorne’s attempts to keep their identities weakly sealed in the affidavit are at odds with much of their public behavior. As we reported in November, King and others have openly bragged about their coordination with the DOJ on election fraud claims in Georgia for months. If there were any remaining questions about the MAGA-dominated SEB’s role in the Fulton County raid, Johnston herself put them to rest at the last meeting of the board.“A request was made to the DOJ” by the SEB, Johnston said at the board’s Feb. 19 meeting, “and took notice (sic) to the Fulton County election irregularities that have been alleged, but had never been investigated.” So, why are Johnston and King asking the court to allow their names to continue to be redacted? That’s a good question, and one that I put to Johnston, King and Thorne. As of this writing, none have responded.One would think that, after years of claiming that the 2020 election was beset with widespread fraud by Democrats and poll workers in Fulton County, this trio of hardcore election skeptics would want to shout from the mountaintops that their “evidence” is the backbone of what Trump’s lawyers at the DOJ are now claiming is a criminal investigation. (No one has been charged yet.) Instead, Johnston, King and Thorne are quietly arguing behind-the-scenes to have their identities remain redacted in the affidavit — a laughable objection, considering how obvious the affidavit makes their identities to be.If nothing else, having their identities so obviously obtainable in the affidavit itself begs the question of why Johnston, King and Thorne are now fighting their official release. Maybe they’re fighting just because they feel like it, who knows, or to stick it to the “fake news,” as they like to say. It doesn’t really matter because everyone knows who they are.What does matter is that Fulton County is pressing the DOJ hard on the “evidence” that Johnston, King and Thorne presented to the FBI that led to the raid. That evidence is questionable at best. At worst, it’s the result of “research” from the same small but vocal network of election deniers who have tried to have their way with Georgia elections since 2020. This network has used their influence to pressure state lawmakers to institute changes to election administration and voting — like the ban on QR codes that are used to count votes in a more reliable way than the hand counts that election deniers would like to impose — on millions of Georgia voters.The election denial movement’s success in Georgia has caused a fracturing within the state Republican party. That divide is at the heart of the races for governor, lieutenant governor, secretary of state and attorney general, all of which will be up for grabs in November.If the MAGA, election denial wing of the Georgia GOP wins out, you can expect to see the state implement even more anti-democratic measures aimed at cracking down on voting rights and fair elections. Because none of this is actually about election fraud; it’s always been about ensuring that Republicans win, no matter what.***Please follow AD on our social media for a little more doom to scroll. That’s what we all need, right?* Bluesky - @americandoom.bsky.social* TikTok - @americandoom_* YouTube - @americandoom_* Instagram - @americandoom_* X - @americandoom_* Facebook This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.american-doom.com/subscribe

Ten years ago, in the summer of 2015, a police officer in Cincinnati stopped a man named Samuel DuBose. It was night on a narrow road among winding back streets of a hilly neighborhood. Words were exchanged, and DuBose tried to drive away.Officer Ray Tensing claimed his arms were caught in the window and he was in danger of being dragged, so he shot DuBose point-blank in the head, killing him. I arrived the next day to see if protests would turn to flames. They did not. Tensing, who is white, was indicted for killing DuBose, who was Black. Eventually, Tensing was acquitted for DuBose’s killing. At trial, the prosecution was not allowed to present evidence showing that Tensing was wearing a shirt with the confederate battle flag underneath his uniform.The issue of police claiming that their lives were under threat by someone in a vehicle is not new. What’s new about the killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis yesterday is that her death came at the hands of a federal immigration agent who should have never even been in the city. The primary reason the agent — who has not been named — was even in Minneapolis is that a right-wing political influencer made highly questionable claims about fraud committed by Somali immigrants there, prompting Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to surge her teams to the city.Good was more or less an innocent bystander. Now she’s dead because Noem wanted to continue her campaign of looking tough on immigrants, egged on by a 23-year-old kid pretending to be a journalist by filming Somali immigrants who ran childcare centers, piggybacking off actual reporting by local press who had exposed some fraud tied to the businesses.Good is dead for this reason. She is also dead because American fascism continues to grow and spread in very troubling ways. Take a scan of social media and you’ll see plenty of your fellow Americans justifying Good’s killing. I’ll get to why that’s intellectually dishonest on its face in a moment but for now, consider the ironic phenomenon of conservative Americans lining up in support of masked federal troops occupying American cities and killing U.S. citizens with impunity under the direction of the president himself.This is nearly the exact scenario under which our nation was founded, with all those self-identified patriotic Americans you’ll see in the coming days and weeks praising the agent who killed Good identifying with the colonists and revolutionaries who battled tyrannical overreach and a foreign military on their own streets 250 years ago. Now, the people like Good are the revolutionaries, but the patriots aren’t on their side anymore.***Watch the video of Good’s killing and you’ll see a disorganized and unprofessional law enforcement operation. First, Good waves through an ICE vehicle that passes her by without incident.After this, other agents approach Good’s SUV, appearing to offer contradictory commands, motioning for her to drive away before demanding she exit the vehicle and grabbing the door handle. The agent who killed Good appears to position himself in front of the vehicle — which any cop worth his or her salt will tell you is a bad idea. Good puts the SUV in reverse as an agent wrenches on her door handle. She then shifts into drive and the SUV lurches forward.A video from another angle shows the agent who killed Good sliding from the hood to the front quarter panel of the car. As CNN’s chief law enforcement analyst, John Miller, noted on Wednesday night, it’s only after the agent is out of harm’s way from the front of the SUV that he begins firing. Prior to shooting Good, the agent had his phone out and appeared to be recording her.All of this — the lackadaisical yet contradictory commands and actions of multiple agents on scene, the firing agent’s stupid and pointless maneuvering in front of Good’s vehicle and his filming of her — do not add up to what Noem and president Donald Trump are now trying to sell: that the agent was so in fear for his life had no choice but to fire on Good.If all that weren’t obvious enough, Trump of course had to double down. Hours after the shooting, he claimed that the agent was “viciously” run over by Good. Video shows he was not. In fact, the agent was never even knocked to the ground. After shooting Good and after her car rammed harmlessly into a parked vehicle nearby as she lay dead or dying behind the wheel, the agent can be seen walking just fine under his own power.***Fatal police shootings are always fertile ground for culture war battles between the left and right. Over the last 11 years as I’ve covered them, both sides have gone to extremes. Many on the left think there’s never any reason for an officer to use fatal force. Many more on the right believe that law enforcement should be able to kill just about anyone, for just about any reason.The reality of police uses of force and the events that precede them are much more complex than these two opposing viewpoints allow. But what used to not be up for as much of a debate was whether an officer had a legitimate fear for his life when killing someone. How anyone can watch the videos of Good’s killing and conclude that the agent was legitimately in fear for his life by a slow-rolling SUV that he was just filming with his phone defies common sense.But we are far past that. The American right — taking their cues from Trump or vice versa; it’s hard to tell anymore — will suspend reason in order to be on what it perceives to be the correct side of this police killing-turned culture war flashpoint. They’ll either lie and say they actually believe the agent faced his own mortality and had to make an impossible choice, or they’ll convince themselves that’s the case. There’s a cost to the soul for that. Maybe it’s not one they’ll pay here but they’ll pay it eventually.If Minneapolis burns tonight, or tomorrow, or in the coming weeks or months as Trump’s masked immigration agents focus their harassment campaign on it, there’ll be at least some level of justification. Trump and his people will feel equally justified in responding with their own violence. They’ll invoke the Insurrection Act or send in National Guard troops from Republican-led states. Hell, they’ve been wanting to do that since protests erupted in Minneapolis and across the country following the killing of George Floyd.DuBose’s killing happened in the middle of a two-year stretch of high-profile police killings across the country. A mass protest movement spawned from that, leading to a backlash from white voters who clung to then-candidate Trump’s message of “law and order.”That protest movement then mostly faded from view as the first Trump administration inflicted its daily chaos and corruption on the nation. It came roaring back with Floyd’s killing, further enraging the American right who watched from their small towns as big cities burned. That’s part of the reason why the attempted insurrection on January 6 was so easily dismissed by Trump and his supporters.If Floyd protesters could burn American cities over his killing, why shouldn’t self-described patriots be able to try to overturn an election they (wrongly) believed was illegitimate?Then, as now, we have a president who is unable or unwilling to calm tensions, instead choosing to inflame them as he sees every violent, unnecessary and tragic incident as an opportunity to score points in a nihilistic game that is hastening our national decline. In 2020, the cooler heads in the first Trump administration stopped our would-be dictator from outright shooting Floyd protesters outside the White House. This time, protesters might not be so lucky. In fact, Trump’s troops are already killing Americans like Good.At the time of DuBose’s killing, a question hung over the nation that was difficult to answer, and mostly persists today: Why does this keep happening? With cops all over the country interacting with Americans in innumerable tense and strange circumstances, fatal police shootings are probably always going to happen.But when it comes to Good, the answer is obvious: This happened because of Donald Trump. He caused it. He supports it. He enjoys it. Trump and Republicans don’t see Americans who disagree with them as their fellow countrymen. They see them as the enemy. Or, as Noem described Good today, people who are engaged in “domestic terrorism.”You tell me who you think is causing the terror: people like Good, or the people who killed her.Please follow AD on our social media for a little more doom to your scroll. That’s what we all need, right?* Bluesky - @americandoom.bsky.social* TikTok - @americandoom_* YouTube - @americandoom_* Instagram - @americandoom_* X - @americandoom_* Facebook This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.american-doom.com/subscribe

I’m out today at Public Notice with a look at the obvious lie about the bandages on Trump’s hands — a coverup of some unidentified health problem — and how it’s part of a pattern of Trump’s endless lies starting to catch up to him in the face of reality, economic and otherwise. Today’s post will be brief but I have something longer coming later this week that deals with the downward flow of corruption and viciousness, and how it’s affecting the efficacy of our democracy. That will be my last piece for the year. To thank all of my subscribers for their support throughout this very newsy year, I’m offering a discount of 20 percent off subscriptions to American Doom through the second week of January. Now, onto the news on Trump’s health below, as well as some links to stories you might have missed in a tumultuous 2025…Whatever happens during President Donald Trump’s address to the nation tonight, know that it will be partly an attempt to distort reality or distract from it — and that reality is that it has been a disastrous end to the first year of Trump’s second presidency.Epstein, the economy, extrajudicial killings — how’s that for just some of the scandals that are roiling the Trump administration as it limps out of 2025 and into 2026. Hanging over all of it is the president’s health.A few weeks back I began asking the White House why Trump wears bandages on the back of his right hand. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt responded last week — with an obvious lie.“President Trump is a man of the people and he meets more Americans and shakes their hands on a daily basis than any other President in history,” Leavitt said in a statement. “His commitment is unwavering and he proves that every single day.”Why is this so obviously a lie? Well, there’s common sense, for one: have you ever known a single person to injure their hand from handshaking? I haven’t. There’s a few other reasons why this lie is so obvious and ridiculous, not the least of which is the fact that Trump has had fewer public events this year than any other year as president. Now, he plans to get back out on the road next year to whip up support for Republicans in the mid-term elections, which they’re of course trying to rig in their favor.To prepare for the exhausting prospect of campaign-style Trump rallies, I’ll be taking as much time off as possible over the holidays. This year really has flown by. Like 2024, 2025 was incredibly newsy and we’ve grown quite a lot here at American Doom. Really, these two years have sort of melded together in my mind. There hasn’t been much of a break, so I’m looking forward to taking one.The only reason I’m able to do that is thanks to the support of my paid subscribers. To join those ranks, please consider a paid subscription to American Doom. Believe it or not, next year is going to be even crazier, and American Doom is one of the only publications keeping a close eye on state and local threats to elections. That’s where the rubber meets the road for our democracy, and you’ll want to pay attention to stay in-the-know about how Republicans are working hard to rig the mid-term elections in their favor.Before my last dispatch of the year later this week, take a look at some of the greatest hits from 2025. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.american-doom.com/subscribe

On Friday night, “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth took to X to address one of the growing scandals surrounding him — what increasingly looks like murder, war crimes, or both.“The Department of War will never back down,” Hegseth wrote. “America First. Peace Through Strength. Common Sense. For the warriors, always.”In addition to the gaping holes in Hegseth’s story about the killing of two survivors of a Sept. 2 airstrike on alleged drug smugglers — inconsistencies that will catch up to him at his inevitable congressional testimony — the entire months-long mission to take out supposed drug boats in international waters has required incredible suspensions of reason to square with reality.Of course, Hegseth and many others are clearly lying about much involving the strikes, which have killed 87 people since September. The Trump administration hasn’t presented a single piece of evidence that the targets of the attacks are drug smugglers, that the drugs are even headed to the United States, or that the strikes are any more necessary than the non-lethal drug interdiction operations that have been in effect for decades.Instead, we’ve gotten grainy videos shared bombastically on social media and questionable legal justification for a “war” on “narco-terrorists.”At Public Notice today, I’ve got a breakdown of how these airstrikes are evidence of an erratic and largely leaderless administration running purely on the instinct of morally depraved strivers like Hegseth trying desperately to impress Trump by looking tough. But I wanted to take a moment here to address Hegseth’s (apparent) claim that the strikes necessitate a “never back down” stance by the U.S. military.Let’s start with… America FirstThe administration has claimed the strikes are necessary to take out drug dealers whose drugs are killing Americans. One problem: the boats are coming from South America and carrying mostly cocaine.More than 70 percent of American drug deaths are from fentanyl, not cocaine. If the Trump administration wanted to save American lives, it would be better off doing something about the fentanyl flooding American streets, much of which comes from China.Peace through strengthNothing says strength like the most powerful military in history obliterating speed boats piloted by, in some cases, Venezuelan fishermen.If the disproportionate use of force weren’t enough, we’re also now in the business of killing helpless non-combatants.After a first strike killed nine men on Sept. 2 and separated their boat in half, two men clung to the craft’s wreckage.Democrats who viewed video of the strike said that the two survivors may have been waving their arms in surrender or begging for mercy. Showing strength, our military fired on these helpless souls.Common senseIs it “common sense” to spend untold millions (or billions) of dollars on military strikes to take out low-level drug smugglers? Does that same common sense apply to Trump’s pardon of former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, who was convicted by U.S. courts for smuggling 500 tons of cocaine into the country?For the warriors, alwaysMaybe there are some members of the military who are proud of their work raining hellfire upon speedboats in the Caribbean, I don’t know. What I do know is that this isn’t likely what they signed up for.It therefore must take a significant amount of energy to convince oneself that these strikes are necessary to protect Americans. Are these strikes “for the warriors” then?When Hegseth says, “for the warriors,” he means these strikes are for people like himself — men with little to no combat experience who have romanticized conflict well past its brutal realities. It’s a desperate attempt at self-actualization from a man with a mediocre-at-best resume — an unintentional admission of his own insecurities.***Please follow AD on our social media for a little more doom to scroll. That’s what we all need, right?* Bluesky - @americandoom.bsky.social* TikTok - @americandoom_* YouTube - @americandoom_* Instagram - @americandoom_* X - @americandoom_* Facebook This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.american-doom.com/subscribe

We begin today with news of sweeping pardons issued on Monday to 77 people who tried to overturn the 2020 election. Less important than the actual individuals who were pardoned — bizarrely, for many of them were not under threat of federal indictment, the only classification of crime that falls under the jurisdiction of a presidential pardon — is the message that these pardons send going forward: try to interfere with elections on behalf of Trump and Republicans, and Trump and Republicans will have your back.Among those pardoned were two small-time Trump operatives who share the ignoble distinction of being the only Americans to have infiltrated voting machines in their futile attempt to find non-existent evidence of voter fraud. The American right absolutely loves to warn about the insecurity of voting machines but almost always fails to mention that it was their people in Georgia who were the only ones in recent years to actually illegally access election equipment.Cathy Latham and Misty Hampton worked with Sidney Powell and members of the 2020 Trump campaign to infiltrate voting machines in Coffee County. They then shared sensitive information from the equipment online, where it was accessed by an unknown number of people within the election denial movement. Both were indicted in Georgia for their crimes — state cases that are in danger of being dropped after Republicans targeted Atlanta prosecutor Fani Willis for having the audacity to prosecute obvious election crimes. Latham and Hampton are among a handful of election deniers and Republican officials who tried to overturn the 2020 election, and who were pardoned on Monday.They include Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, who is running to become Georgia’s next governor. Jones was one of the 16 Republicans who signed fraudulent documents purporting to allocate Georgia’s electoral college votes to Trump in November 2020. Jones and his “fake elector” co-conspirators were all pardoned by Trump on Monday.The pardons come as the Justice Department increasingly operates as the governmental arm of the election denial movement. Across the country, the DOJ is demanding access to the personal information of hundreds of millions of Americans as the Trump administration constructs a national database of voters. This database is currently being used to hunt for undocumented immigrants registered to vote — an occurrence so extraordinarily rare that it almost ceases to exist — and in the process likely purge many Americans from voter rolls.The DOJ is also at work in Georgia, demanding access to ballots and other material from the 2020 election in Fulton County as part of yet another futile investigation into widespread voter fraud there. These two undertakings — voter purges based on overblown claims of voting by non-citizens and bogus fraud investigations — are lining up to be the central themes of election denial efforts going into next year.Combined with executive orders targeting voting machines, mail-in and absentee voting and an insistence on one-day elections, the Trump administration, Justice Department, and officials at the state and local levels are all working in coordination to at minimum sow widespread doubt in any results of next year’s elections that don’t result in a win for Republicans.In the event Democrats rack up large wins in next year’s elections, there’s a final stopgap available to Republicans in Washington. Those tools are part of a doomsday scenario that represents the next step in anti-democratic efforts to dismiss the will of the people and solidify Republican power for years to come. I’ll have more on that front in the coming weeks and months.For now, know that much of this is happening right out in the open. Not only are Justice Department officials like pardon attorney Ed Martin bragging about pardoning those who illegally tried to interfere in the 2020 election, but allies across the country are in place in state and local governments working to implement the policies of the election denial movement. Those policies are rooted in a single, troubling goal: ensure no Republican can ever lose an election again.***Please follow AD on our social media for a little more doom to scroll. That’s what we all need, right?* Bluesky - @americandoom.bsky.social* TikTok - @americandoom_* YouTube - @americandoom_* Instagram - @americandoom_* X - @americandoom_* Facebook This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.american-doom.com/subscribe

I’m getting through a bottleneck of reporting and have many findings to share regarding Republican efforts to interfere in elections. You can support my work by throwing a few dollars my way with a paid subscription to American Doom. As always, thanks for your support. - jgWhen was the last time you remember voting in an election for your public utilities board? Who were the candidates and how much did they win by?If your answer to those questions is anything but, “I have no idea,” please seek help. Kidding, of course. Most Americans don’t pay attention to these types of elections, let alone things as local as school boards or city councils. But things are a bit different nowadays. Have you noticed?Taken by themselves, the wins of Alicia Johnson and Peter Hubbard to become the first Democrats to serve on Georgia’s Public Services Commission — which oversees utility rates — since 2007, don’t amount to much for their implications on the balance of power in Washington. But, as you may have heard by now, Johnson’s and Hubbard’s wins were not the only good news for Democrats last night.Zohran Mamdani beat up Anthony Cuomo in New York. Democrats took the governor’s offices in New Jersey and Virginia. (They also took the lieutenant governor’s office in Virginia and took even more control of one of their legislative chambers.) Voters in California overwhelmingly turned out in favor of a Gavin Newsom-backed proposal to draw new district lines to help Democrats take control of the House of Representatives.Across the country, Democrats didn’t just win; they cleaned up.That includes Georgia’s Public Service Commission, where Johnson and Hubbard beat their Republican opponents by 25 points. It was the first time since 2006 that Democrats in Georgia won a statewide race for a non-federal election, as the AJC’s Greg Bluestein pointed out.While there are certainly voters who took to the polls yesterday in Georgia who were solely focused on the issue of public utilities — the costs for which have been rising substantially since 2022 — the margin of victory for Johnson and Hubbard points to something else: Americans are fed up with Trump and Republicans, and they will vote for just about any Democrat they can get their hands on. That’s an encouraging sign heading into next year’s mid-terms, when Republicans will pull out all the stops to both rig the election in their favor and call into question any results that don’t favor the GOP.More on that soon. But for now, do yourselves a favor and tune into Fox News for a few minutes today to see their hosts being apoplectic over a self-described democratic socialist becoming the mayor of New York in a decisive victory. We’re still a long way from preventing further democratic backsliding, but yesterday was a hopeful reminder that there are many more reasonable, freedom-loving Americans than there are those who support Trump’s authoritarian power grabs.***Please follow AD on our social media for a little more doom to scroll. That’s what we all need, right?* Bluesky - @americandoom.bsky.social* TikTok - @americandoom_* YouTube - @americandoom_* Instagram - @americandoom_* X - @americandoom_* Facebook This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.american-doom.com/subscribe

Lots of info in today’s special Saturday edition of American Doom about how election deniers in Georgia continue to screw with elections here. It’s going to be a mess next year thanks to their success in convincing state lawmakers that they’re serious people (they are not). Anyway, lots of messes these days. You won’t find this information elsewhere — in Georgia or anywhere for that matter. So if you appreciate my work, please consider a paid subscription to support it. A free press ain’t for free! - jgI spent the better part of Thursday watching a meeting of a committee of Georgia state legislators discussing elections. The committee has hosted meetings around the state on various aspects of election administration, and Thursday’s was focused on Georgia’s membership in ERIC, the Electronic Registration Information Center.There has been a lot of right-wing noise about ERIC since 2020 and I’m not going to rehash all that — it’s mostly reactionary nonsense that came as a result of Donald Trump losing that year and many Republican states being very sour about it.Suffice to say that Thursday’s hearing was another example of what has become an unsettling reality in this country: conspiracists, cranks, and plain incompetents re granted the same deference and space as competent professionals who have spent years and decades gaining the respect of peers in their areas of expertise.This phenomenon has been almost entirely facilitated by Republicans, from Trump on down to people like Georgia Rep. Martin Momtahan, who you’ll meet in a moment. The GOP has been taken over by a class of politicians with great disdain for the level of professionalization on display at places like ERIC, or Harvard University, or the FBI — unless the person is someone like Trump who is very good at making money.Of the many shameless grifters working to climb their way up the very crowded and cutthroat ladder of modern Republican politics, election deniers are the largest group and often the most shameless — and bizarre. Their lack of shame is rooted in the fact that they never have to actually do anything. Like everyone in the highest echelons of the Trump administrations, all they have to do is go around breaking what other people have built.Election deniers say our election systems are rife with fraud. Not only can they never actually prove it — instead, they have a lot of conjecture they say should lead to investigations by, you know, actual authorities — but they have no real way of replacing this broken system. Well, that’s not entirely true. They do have a way, but it’s absurd. I’ll get to that in a second as well.Republicans like Momtahan want to point to things like the fact that ERIC has an address listed in Washington DC but no office there. (This, to Momtahan and others, is apparently evidence of some unexplained wickedness on the part of ERIC. For security reasons, ERIC’s director, Shane Hamlin, said on Thursday that he would not divulge the exact location of the organization’s data center, but said it was located somewhere in the Midwest.) Momtahan and Republicans want to point to “their constituents” who have questioned ERIC — nevermind that their constituents have no background in election administration and are getting their information from some of the election denial grifters who were invited to speak at today’s hearing.Republicans in Georgia and elsewhere want to point to the men and women of the election denial movement as if they were reasonable, competent, serious people. They simply are not. But that’s the situation across our society, where unserious flamethrowers now have great power because many of our fellow Americans think that people like Trump and Momtahan are kind of cool. They tell it like it is. They’re just like them, you see — not some fancy bought-and-paid for college professor with a haughty title. Momtahan spent today’s hearing doing his folksy, I’m a small businessman bit, something that is awfully tiring when you’ve been around long enough to realize this isn’t about small-town common sense, but about the deep insecurities of people like Momtahan who want to be liked and respected for their intelligence, but just never quite figured out how to achieve that.I’ve watched countless hours of these types of meetings over the last four years and am always struck by the obvious and profound un-seriousness of both government officials and members of the election denial movement. But there really is something about watching these folks discuss things that are so clearly out of their depth that words just can’t do justice for, so I’ve included a few clips of some of the exchanges that caught my attention.***Momtahan went on to grill Harris over ERIC’s security protocols, consistently conflating access to voter data via the Internet with susceptibility to hacking — despite Harris repeatedly explaining that ERIC staff only access voter data after going through several digital security checkpoints. Just really tough stuff to watch.I’m sorry that you had to watch all of that but it’s important so that you can understand what we’re working with here as lawmakers in Georgia and elsewhere operate under the belief that anything tied to the Internet means that system can be hacked by Antifa, or whatever. This entire exchange could be summed up by simply saying that Momtahan does not understand what a VPN is. I will also note that when Momtahan mentions digital security for his own small business, he is talking about the driver’s education company he runs — not a multi-state data-gathering operation like ERIC dealing with tens of millions of voters and untold billions of data points. Bit of a difference there.There was plenty of other ignorance-based questioning of people like Blake Evans, Georgia’s elections director, but I want to skip ahead to the deniers who spoke at Thursday’s hearing. First up was Mark Davis, an obscure political consultant who appears to run a company that deals with campaign marketing. Last year, Davis was floated by the State Election Board’s Dr. Janice Johnston — herself an election denier — to be on a “monitoring team” for Fulton County, ground zero for Georgia election conspiracies.Here, Davis has an exchange with Georgia Rep. Saira Draper, a Democrat. Draper points out that Davis’ research has led him to advocate for investigating virtually every single person in the state of Georgia who changes their address in an election year. Like many of the tortured theories of the election denial movement, Davis’ work does not show any purposeful acts of voter fraud — like double-voting or false registrations in order to illegally vote for one candidate or party over another — but routine technical errors, like voters forgetting to update their addresses.Davis’ research is based on National Change of Address data, which you’ll hear a lot about if you spend as much time in election denial circles as I do.Just to clarify: poor people move a lot. People in the military move a lot. Young people move a lot. People with aging parents might move a lot. What Davis is saying is that all of these changes of addresses are probable cause to investigate hundreds of thousands of Georgians for voter fraud under the belief — because election denialism is akin to religious belief systems — that something very bad is going on with all of this.Next up was Garland Favorito, who if you are not familiar with, you should consider yourself fairly lucky. Favorito is perhaps the state’s most prominent election denier — and certainly one of its most colorful. Like Davis, Favorito has many theories about widespread election fraud in Georgia, but can never seem to boil them down into a succinct explanation. He’s one of those guys who insists that you listen to him for as long as he is able to speak in order for you to understand that he is correct.But even if you give Favorito all the time in the world, most reasonable people will come away more confused about who is carrying out voter fraud in Georgia and how, let alone why. Favorito’s theories are an amalgamation of disparate bits and pieces of information, lore, and conjecture that, together, add up to his conclusion that the only way to ensure completely secure elections is to have him and all of his people looking over the shoulder of every single poll worker in the state as they hand count paper ballots. (Voting only on paper ballots and having them hand-counted by poll workers is the replacement election system proposed by Favorito and others. Trump has glommed on to this, recently issuing executive orders demanding hand-counted paper ballots.)Draper pointed out that, for all Favorito’s advocacy for what he calls “election integrity,” he has no apparent interest in the actual breach of election equipment in Coffee County in 2020. That breach was carried out by pro-Trump election officials who gave access to their election equipment to associates of Mike Flynn, Sidney Powell, and Mike Lindell. Those associates — including the Atlanta law firm who I busted for their role in the illegal breach — then turned around and published the sensitive information they’d obtained on the Internet.Some in Georgia maintain that that information would allow anyone who accesses it to get inside every voting machine in the state. To reiterate: the most serious breach of election equipment in recent Georgia history — the very thing that Favorito, Davis, and many others are so intent on stopping — was carried out by Trump-supporting Republicans.Favorito and his fellow election deniers have a lot of theories about election fraud in Georgia. They have successfully lobbied the State Election Board — run by a majority of Trump supporters — to pass scores of rules that will affect millions of Georgia voters. They have also called for the board and other entities to investigate supposed fraud in Fulton County.Their claims center around about 3,600 ballots that were double-counted in the county in 2020, which one of the many recounts and audits from that year found was the result of technical errors and had no effect on the outcome of the election. Now, they’re calling for 148,000 ballot envelopes from Fulton County in order to prove their fraud claims.***I watched the Cubs vs. Padres Thursday night and saw a trio of challenges to rulings on the field. Two were overturned and one was sustained, if memory serves me. Both teams clearly thought they were right when they challenged the rulings, but they accepted the results — even when they didn’t go their way — and played on. What Favorito and others are saying is that they simply won’t accept the results unless their team wins. Not only do they truly believe that there is no way that a Republican can lose an election, but they want to be inside the replay booth when the call on the field is reviewed.They simply do not trust the professionals counting the votes to make the right call, and they never will. No amount of ballots handed over from Fulton County, or access as poll watchers to stand over the shoulders of poll workers, or even hand-counted paper ballots or any of the many other demands they routinely make will ever be enough. That’s why none of this is going away any time soon, and will probably get worse before it gets better.With Trump in the White House and enablers leading every federal agency, the situation has become even worse. The Justice Department has joined people like Favorito in investigating bogus fraud claims, setting up even more distrust in elections as we head into next year’s mid-terms. Trump and Republicans will claim fraud and maybe even try to contest the results, leading to a standoff in the House of Representatives that will mirror what happened on January 6. And as long as no reasonable Republicans stand up to this madness, nothing will stop it from consuming much in its path.***Please follow AD on our social media for a little more doom to scroll. That’s what we all need, right?* Bluesky - @americandoom.bsky.social* TikTok - @americandoom_* YouTube - @americandoom_* Instagram - @americandoom_* X - @americandoom_* Facebook This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.american-doom.com/subscribe

As I said the other day, the Jimmy Kimmel debacle is more evidence that harsh crackdowns on freedom of speech and the free press are coming very quickly. It would mean a lot to me to see some of American Doom’s 13,000 subscribers throw a few bucks our way for a paid subscription. Or, you can contribute to our Doom Coffee Fund to support our work. Evidence of the Trump administration’s complete disregard for the rule of law and the checks and balances put in place by the founders to prevent a tyrannical government continues to pile up.The latest instance of the Trump regime telling other branches of government to kick rocks came courtesy of FBI Director Kash Patel in a pair of congressional hearings this week, which I outline today at Public Notice.Patel almost surely lied to members of the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, telling them that he has never pressed FBI agents on their personal political beliefs. That’s not true, according to a lawsuit filed by three former FBI agents who say they were fired for exactly that. The agents, who have a combined 60 years of experience in the FBI, say Patel and deputy director Dan Bongino helped the White House to carry out a political purge within the agency of agents who worked on investigations into Trump’s many crimes, or were simply suspected of being Democrats. These allegations — made by agency veterans under the penalty of perjury if they happen to be lying in their lawsuit — did not stop Patel from completely denying the claims during his Senate testimony.Patel’s apparent act of perjury this week shows his and the Trump administration’s DGAF attitude toward any level of accountability or checks on their power. And this emboldenment is rapidly getting worse. Patel, Trump himself, congressional Republicans, and the entirety of the right-wing media ecosystem have been clamoring since Charlie Kirk’s death for crackdowns on liberal activist groups, NGOs, and media outlets that they say are partly to blame for the stunning and troubling killing of Kirk. Patel made clear this week that the FBI will lead those efforts.***We are witnessing a mass-scale effort to shape a narrative of a vast left-wing conspiracy that involves George Soros, funding for left-wing think tanks, non-profits, advocacy organizations, media outlets, journalists, and academia — all leading to street-level violence and political murders like Kirk’s. (This, despite the fact that the political ideology of Kirk’s killer appears to not fit easily into a standard right-left paradigm.) Trump has even designated the amorphous Antifa as a “major terrorist organization,” which is not a lawful designation of any kind. Like Trump’s use of “emergencies” to justify things like expanded ICE operations and domestic deployment of the military, the Trump regime is using Kirk’s death to justify widespread crackdowns on free speech.The Antifa “terrorist” designation will surely be used to justify investigations into left-wing groups, in addition to that political capital to weaponize the FBI against progressive Americans in the wake of Kirk’s killing.“We’ve seen an explosion of political violence, not just one-off lone wolf attacks, but organized, systemic political violence at a mass scale — it is not organic,” Eric Shmitt (R-Mo.) said at Tuesday’s Senate hearing. “It is the offspring of a dark and clandestine system funded in part with our own tax dollars with a large network of foundations, NGOs, activist organizations and front groups.”Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) repeated Shmitt’s claim that “left-wing violence” is “not organic.”“The violence we are seeing is not purely organic,” Cruz said. “There is, I believe, significant money that is spreading dissension, that is spreading violence.”Schmitt’s reference to “the George Soros empire” financing left-wing extremism, partly with American tax dollars, was also not a one-off. On Monday, as he hosted an episode of Kirk’s podcast from the White House, Vice President JD Vance noted that Soros provides funding to The Nation, which published an article about Kirk’s extremist statements that Vance became incensed about.“Did you know that the George Soros Open Society Foundation and the Ford Foundation, the groups who funded that disgusting article justifying Charlie's death, do you know they benefit from generous tax treatment?” Vance said, referencing The Nation article that declared Kirk’s “legacy deserves no mourning. “They are literally subsidized by you and me, the American taxpayer. And how do they reward us? By setting fire to the house built by the American family for over 250 years”***The growing focus on investigating left-wing organizations, non-profits, media outlets and even social media platforms coincides with the expansion of the federal government into all aspects of American life.The Trump administration has successfully wielded the power of government agencies to pressure companies, non-profits, universities, media outlets, Democratic politicians and others into complying with its authoritarian demands.Companies and universities have cancelled programs aimed at diversity, equity and inclusion under Trump’s “anti-woke” edicts. Non-profit organizations like the Smithsonian and national parks have been forced to comply with the administration’s revisionist history in removing references to slavery, while the military and Republican states have assisted in reviving the legacy of the confederacy by renaming Army bases after confederate generals, and putting monuments back in place across the South.Media outlets have continually cowed to the Trump administration by settling specious lawsuits and firing employees who have been outspoken about authoritarian policies coming from the White House.On Wednesday, in apparent capitulation to FCC Chairman Brendan Carr’s demands to crack down on Trump critics, ABC suspended comedian Jimmy Kimmell indefinitely after he pointed out that the politics of Kirk’s killer were more complicated than is being portrayed by the American right.Kimmell’s suspension also comes as ABC affiliates seek the FCC’s approval for a historic merger that would require changes to federal regulations that limit what share of the American television audience a single company can broadcast to.Meanwhile, some Democratic politicians like Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and California Gov. Gavin Newsom have stood up to the Trump administration’s expansion of federal law enforcement to carry out Trump’s mass deportation policy and his domestic deployment of the military, but others like Washington DC Mayor Muriel Bowser haven’t put up much of a fight.We’re putting up a fight here at American Doom in ways the legacy media is failing to do. But we can’t do it without your support. You can become a paid supporter of American Doom for as little as $6 a month.Since Kirk’s killing, right-wing pundits and politicians have applauded the Trump administration’s efforts to punish anyone who has not sufficiently mourned Kirk — or who have simply pointed out some of his extreme statements.Now, with the help of Patel’s politically-aligned FBI, they’re pushing for investigations and prosecutions of left-wing groups in both the private and public sectors to continue their campaign of vengeance — not just over Kirk’s killing, but of their fundamental belief that anyone who is against Trump is anti-American.The situation could hardly be more ironic: Republicans, long the party of small government and states’ rights, are now backing the most aggressive expansion of the federal government into public and private life in recent history. Congress has completely abdicated its role as a check on executive power, leaving the courts to act as the lone constitutional bulwark against an all-powerful federal government.This brewing battle between the executive and judicial branches is lining up to be a possible endgame to all this madness. For now, the courts are holding. But there are signs on the horizon that they won’t be able to hold Trump back for much longer. ***Please follow AD on our social media for a little more doom to scroll. That’s what we all need, right?* Bluesky - @americandoom.bsky.social* TikTok - @americandoom_* YouTube - @americandoom_* Instagram - @americandoom_* X - @americandoom_* Facebook This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.american-doom.com/subscribe

Forget all the usual, anecdotal ways into an explanation of what is happening at this moment, because we appear to be in that stage of the fall where it all starts happening at once. Following the firing — let’s call it what it is — of Jimmy Kimmel, Donald Trump went even further in comments on Air Force One on Thursday afternoon, saying that any broadcast company that allows criticism of the president to air on television should lose their FCC license. Legacy media is adjusting its coverage and hiring right-wing propagandists under threat of lawsuits from Trump and his government — when those outlets aren’t settling those lawsuits and paying Trump off. The nation’s largest media outlets are also firing reporters for speaking out against the Trump administration, and for putting Charlie Kirk’s legacy in its proper context: he did not deserve to be murdered; he was also a hateful person who viewed a future America in which minorities and the vulnerable were punished or cast aside for their mere existence. Both of these things — the reality of Kirk’s hateful words and policy positions and the evil of his murder — can exist simultaneously. The mainstream press has been unable to consider these two truths at once, capitulating to an American right that is demanding all Americans sufficiently mourn Kirk on the terms his supporters dictate. That ain’t freedom. If we are going to keep our freedoms, we have to focus our energies in areas we actually have influence and some control over. I’m lucky enough to have a small amount of influence thanks to the readers of this newsletter, but I need your help. American Doom’s work is made possible thanks to paid subscriptions. Those funds keep everything you read here free for your fellow citizens. But only a small number of our 13,000 subscribers are paid. I’d like to see a lot more than that — not so I can make more money. For, if financial riches were my goal, I would not have become a journalist in the first place. No, I would like to see more of you choose to spend some of your hard-earned dollars here because I think it sends an important message — however small — that Americans support independent, adversarial journalism at a time when free speech faces the greatest threat of my lifetime. That’s no small thing, even though it takes just a few dollars a month to do.Thank you for your support. - jg This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.american-doom.com/subscribe

At a Tuesday hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee, FBI Director Kash Patel said his agency will investigate organizations that “utilize clickbait to make money for their ideology.”Allow me to translate: the FBI will now go after media outlets, think tanks, NGOs and activist organizations who lean left or are antagonistic toward the Trump administration, Republicans and conservatives. This is the exact type of weaponization of the Justice Department that Republicans in Congress and their allies in right-wing media have wailed about for years — and now that power will be wielded against any media outlet or organization critical of the American right.Specifically, Patel said he’ll seek warrants under 18 U.S. Code § 2703 (d) that will allow the FBI and other federal law enforcement agencies like the Treasury Department to obtain communications from media outlets and other organizations. All of this is in response to media outlets, individual journalists, and everyday Americans who Patel, the Trump administration, and Republicans have deemed insufficiently mournful of Kirk’s killing.In some cases, those who the American right has deemed guilty of inappropriate remarks about Kirk have simply pointed out his own words and extremist policies.***Maybe you remember the climate of fear that permeated the nation after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Democrats and Republicans united to avenge the deaths of more than 3,000 Americans. They also united to expand the powers of the executive branch and the surveillance state.The Patriot Act fundamentally changed the government’s ability to spy on its own citizens.We’re seeing something similar now, albeit far less bipartisan. All the right-wing noise from the last decade about cancel culture, about censorship of speech on social media, about being able to converse on platforms like Parler even if some of those conversations involve coordinating acts of domestic terrorism like the January 6 attack on the Capitol — all of that is now out the window.In the aftermath of the murder of Charlie Kirk, the American right has united under the banner of cracking down on the left, even if that means doing all of the things that the right has claimed were an infringement of their own liberties.Since Kirk’s killing, elected officials and right-wing media have swiftly lurched into action, demanding all of the types of crackdowns they have bemoaned in the last 10 years. In less than a week, the American right has:* Carried out a cancellation campaign directed at anyone the right deems to be not sufficiently mourning Kirk’s death. In Texas, where Gov. Greg Abbott has, in recent years, made a lot of noise about supporting free speech on college campuses so that conservative students can express viewpoints in line with those of people like Kirk, a Texas Tech student was arrested during an altercation with Kirk supporters. She has been charged with assault, although it’s unclear exactly how she physically engaged anyone.* Tried to get an Office Depot employee fired for refusing to print a flyer for a Kirk vigil. (Reminder: this is the same party that fought all the way up to the Supreme Court for the right of a baker to refuse to bake a cake for a gay couple’s wedding.)* Has called for investigations into left-wing advocacy groups and NGOs. (Reminder: this is the same party that criticized the Obama-era IRS for investigating tax fraud by conservative groups.)* Has called for crackdowns on social media. (Reminder: this is the same party that made a mountain out of the Biden administration asking Twitter to moderate content regarding election lies and other subjects.)* Has said, actually, not all speech is protected. (This comes from the nation’s most powerful libertarian politician, Rand Paul.)* Has encouraged the FBI to investigate people who have celebrated Kirk’s killing or, in the case of an Atlanta man, investigate people for buying t-shirts.At Tuesday’s hearing, Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) demanded an end to the “bullshit” narrative of political violence by “both sides.” He listed a series of attacks and violence by left-wing actors in recent years, including mentioning a conspiracy theory about “riot bricks” that stems from unfounded claims of bricks being left on the streets of American cities during protests over the killing of George Floyd in the summer of 2020.Schmitt claimed that these acts of left-wing violence were the product of a “dark and clandestine system” of activists groups and NGOs, specifically singling out liberal megadonor George Soros.“There can be no unity between good and evil,” Schmitt said.Schmitt and other Republican lawmakers have been beating the drum since Kirk’s death that this alleged “network” of left-wing groups needs to be dismantled. Vice President JD Vance said on Monday, while hosting an episode of Kirk’s podcast from the White House, that liberal groups are funded, in part, by U.S. tax dollars. (Schmitt said the same on Tuesday.)“And how do they reward us?” Vance asked. “By setting fire to the house built by the American family [for] over 250 years.”(Reminder: it was Trump supporters who stormed the people’s house on January 6, 2021 and tried to overturn an election for the first time in the nation’s history.)White House advisor Stephen Miller then chimed in as Vance’s guest.“The last message that Charlie sent me was [...] I think it was just the day before we lost him, which is that we need to have an organized strategy to go after the leftwing organizations that are promoting violence in this country,” Miller said. “And I will write those words onto my heart.”Schmitt alluded to going after more than just Soros-funded groups and NGOs. The Soros-funded “anarchists on our streets” are being “propped up by an army of researchers and journalists and propagandists who downplay the political violence.”Stop me if you’ve heard the one about right-wing politicians going after researchers/academia and the press for calling out right-wing violence.At Tuesday’s hearing, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) even mentioned dissent itself as a pretext for investigating left-wing groups.“The violence we are seeing is not purely organic,” Cruz said. “There is, I believe, significant money that is spreading dissension, that is spreading violence.”***Please follow AD on our social media for a little more doom to scroll. That’s what we all need, right?* Bluesky - @americandoom.bsky.social* TikTok - @americandoom_* YouTube - @americandoom_* Instagram - @americandoom_* X - @americandoom_* Facebook This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.american-doom.com/subscribe

Good morning. Long week. I’m out today with a look at the turmoil within the FBI over at Public Notice. A few items on that below and then some stuff on the killing of Charlie Kirk. The last two weeks have felt a little more troubling than normal, which is obviously very bad because our acceptance of the normal level of troubling-ness is already bad. Anyway, if you want to support my work, please subscribe to American Doom.FBI Director Kash Patel took a lot of credit both for himself and his agency at a press conference this morning in Utah. But first, he thanked President Donald J. Trump for his role in law enforcement bringing Charlie Kirk’s killer to justice in “historic” time.“I want to express my deep gratitude to President Trump, the vice president and the entire White House who have been so incredibly supportive with both resources and just personally to the FBI as a team,” Patel said. “They had our backs the entire way.”“In 33 hours,” Patel said, “we have made historic progress for Charlie.”Patel then laid out the timeline. The first FBI agents were on scene within 16 minutes of Kirk being shot. The agency then “launched fixed-wing assets” to “transport personnel.” (This means they flew FBI agents on planes out to Utah, including Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino on Thursday night.)“At my direction,” Patel went on, “the FBI released the first set of FBI photos of the suspect at 10 a.m., local time on 9/11.”For all the Americans across the nation hanging on Patel’s every word — and especially the one at the White House — Patel then got to the most important part: “Myself and Deputy Director Bongino arrived on the scene at approximately 5:30 p.m. on 9/11.”Neither Patel or Bongino are investigators. Their presence at an active crime scene is both unprecedented and unnecessary. It was all for show, for the benefit of one man.By 10 p.m. Thursday night, Kirk’s killer was in custody. But it would be another 10 hours before the nation learned that the manhunt was over — because Trump himself wanted to make the announcement on Fox & Friends on Friday morning.What followed has become the routine American practice of trying to determine what political team the killer is on. I’ll get to more about that in a moment. But first let me tell you about Patel’s FBI, which is, not surprisingly, considering his strange and amateurish performance at the Friday morning press conference for the benefit of making Trump happy so he won’t fire Patel, in turmoil because of Patel’s basic unfitness for the job and the political purge he has carried out within the agency.Also, he and Bongino’s brains are consumed by their online presence, meaning that their primary focus is to gain the approval of their social media followings — not necessarily do the job of running the FBI.These facts have come to light thanks to a lawsuit filed on Wednesday by three FBI veterans with nearly 60 years experience in the agency combined. In any other presidential administration, Wednesday’s lawsuit would be a monumental scandal. In Trump’s second term, it’s simply a news item on a Wednesday.The lawsuit lays out how Patel, Bongino, Trump lawyer-turned federal judge Emil Bove, and a 29-year-old Trump loyalist with no law enforcement experience have purged the FBI of veteran agents simply because they’ve refused to submit to total fealty to the president. In other words: the Trump administration has completely weaponized the FBI so that it can be used to punish the president’s enemies — including perceived enemies within the agency itself, regardless of their level of experience and expertise.The lawsuit also shows the level of online brain rot that Patel and Bongino are working with. Both men, according to the lawsuit, are so consumed by seeking the approval of their online followings that they can’t be bothered to consult the incredible wealth of materials at their disposal.In one instance, Bongino asked Steven Jensen — one of the agents who was fired and is named as a plaintiff in the lawsuit — whether he worked on January 6 prosecutions. Bongino was concerned about this because “people were saying online” that the agent had prosecuted January 6 attackers, the lawsuit states. The agent told Bongino that, yes, he had worked on those prosecutions as part of his role as Section Chief of the Domestic Terrorism Operations Section, which Bongino would have known about if he had read the agent’s “publicly available FBI biography and official personnel file.”Patel’s obsession with online clout-chasing, meanwhile, was apparent on Wednesday night, when he told the world on X that Kirk’s killer had been arrested. Two hours later, he recanted. I reached out to Sen. Mark Warner’s office about all this. Warner has been raising the alarm about the political purge within the FBI and its implications on the agency’s ability to solve and prevent major crimes. This is what he said:“The allegations in this lawsuit only confirm what’s obvious to anyone paying attention: Kash Patel is more focused on curating his social media image than doing the hard work of keeping Americans safe,” Warner told me. “Most Americans expect the FBI Director to be focused on threats to our national security, not how many followers he has on X.”So, the FBI is in turmoil, losing experienced agents because they did their jobs and investigated Trump for his many obvious crimes, or because they might have voted for a Democrat. Plus, it’s being led by two social media addicts who are being directed by the online mobs that they need to appease in order to maintain their influence.Paid subscribers help fund my work, and there’s a lot of work to be done. Maybe you can help send me to Memphis for another domestic military deployment. The wars against ourselves are heating up.It makes perfect sense, then, that Patel and Bongino saw the need to fly out to Utah to… just be there while actual members of law enforcement chased Kirk’s killer. And when it came to actually catching Tyler Robinson, the break in the case came when his family turned him in.Patel kicked off his remarks on Friday morning by saying, “This is what happens when you let good cops be cops.” It turns out the best cop involved was Robinson’s own farther, a veteran of the local sheriff’s office, who turned in his own son.But Patel and Bongino are Internet-warped ideologues. They see everything through the lens of the good vs. evil, right vs. left, LAW AND ORDER vs. DEFUND THE POLICE that they both subscribe to and has greatly aided their rise to positions of power they never should have had. Meanwhile, good cops are getting the boot because they don’t support Trump enough.Now, on to Robinson.***The one potential upside of Patel and Bongino being so terminally online is that they might actually be able to help the FBI move into a modern age of extremism based on incoherent political ideology. In the case of Robinson, it appears that, like Trump’s would-be assassin in Butler, Pa. last year, he either had no traditional conservative or liberal ideology — or he was even more far to the right than Kirk was, which is why he took him out.Much has been made of the “Hey fascist! Catch! ⬆️➡️⬇️⬇️⬇️” engraving Robinson carved into one of the shell casings in his gun. Right-wing media and Republicans have glommed onto this as evidence that Robinson was a left-wing extremist. But as younger reporters and non-legacy media outlets are pointing out, the engravings on Robinson’s bullets are more complex than the smoothed-out, HE WAS ANTIFA storyline being pushed by the American right.At a minimum, the engravings are “a confusing mix of internet memes and pop culture,” reports the Verge. Taken further, it’s entirely possible that Robinson was a far-right supporter of Nick Fuentes — a Groyper — who disagreed with Kirk for not being further to the right.Regardless, Kirk is dead partly because of the ironic, nihilistic gamer culture of the Internet that pervades so many young American lives.“Many young extremists now believe in a much simpler binary: Order and chaos,” Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day writes. “And if you are spending any time at all trying to derive meaning from violent acts like this then you are, by definition, their enemy.”I spend a lot of time reading and reporting on right-wing extremism, constantly consuming content posted by election deniers and deciphering their conspiracies, and this is damn far out there even for me. I can’t imagine what the FBI, let alone local cops in Utah, are making of all this.But it seems like now would be a good time to have someone like Steven Jensen at the FBI, running investigations into domestic terrorism. Too bad he’s gone, and the Trump administration has scaled back investigations of domestic terrorism in favor of immigration enforcement.*** This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.american-doom.com/subscribe

Less of a news thing today and more of something that you’ll want to sit down with a cup of coffee for. The University of Georgia Press has completed design on the cover for my forthcoming book, and I’m very excited to share it with you today. Below is an excerpt from the book. If you support my journalism and writing, please consider a paid subscription to American Doom or a contribution. Founding members will get a signed copy of the book, called If I Am Coming to Your Town, Something Terrible Has Happened - The Life and Times of a Domestic War Correspondent. As far as domestic conflict zones go, this one was pretty tame. The Georgia State Troopers who were blocking access to part of the Hyundai Metaplant last week let me drive right on by into an area that looked like it was meant for employees only.On the main road leading into the plant no one bothered the small group of us press who had gathered there. The helicopter flew overhead at a distance. Inside, what I imagine were dozens of armed immigration agents rounded up terrified workers, including a pregnant woman, eventually arresting more than 400 of them. A Republican political candidate took credit for the raid, providing more evidence that if armed authoritarian forces don’t get you, your neighbors just might.I left this troubling scene and drove to meet a contractor at our new home. There I discussed the gates to a white picket fence we’ll have constructed to keep the dogs in the yard, fixing minor termite damage, running some new electrical, and when the permits will be secured. In other words, normal, everyday life stuff.This juxtaposition between the worlds I inhabit as a journalist and a citizen, husband, and otherwise normal guy, are jarring at times. I flew to Los Angeles in June to witness an illegal domestic military deployment and the ensuing police riot. A few days later I was back at home, mowing the lawn.Over the years, I’ve learned to balance these two opposing versions of reality, but it’s taken a lot of work and some pain to get here. For a while, the everyday niceties of life — this semi-suburban reality I often find myself in now as I come into middle age — were difficult for me to cope with. How could I partake in, let alone enjoy these things, knowing that flames, violence and strife were ravaging some city just a quick plane flight away?I rebelled at the thought of doing anything other than concentrating on conflict and chaos; you go have your nice things, I would think of others with derision. I’ll stay here in the dirt.Now, I’m much better at maintaining a balanced perspective — one that reminds me, for every ugly and violent thing, there is a beautiful and peaceful one.This should come in handy over the next few months and years, because even as I’ve achieved this greater sense of balance and acceptance, things have gotten worse.As a nation, we are hurtling toward a version of government and society that is brutal and punishing. This violence and vindictiveness has always been just under the surface of American life — the subject of most of my reporting throughout my career — but is now emerging in the open, as the official policy and characteristic of not just elected officials and the governments they control, but of our friends, neighbors and families.Now, I’m faced with a new juxtaposition to come to terms with: that even as my personal life gets better, more loving, more peaceful, more stable, the collective American life continues to decline into conflict and instability.I am very lucky to be able to leave a situation like the Hyundai raid and return to my comfortable, stable personal life. Many others are not. I’m also very lucky to be able to make a living doing what I love, and to be able to express my opinions and have a voice while so many are increasingly constrained from doing so.Coming to terms with this injustice — that for a variety of reasons that include privilege, circumstance and luck, I am able to travel freely between the theaters of conflict and peace — has taken a long time. It’s one of the themes of my forthcoming book, which will be published next year by the University of Georgia Press — another thing in my life for which I consider myself very lucky.In February, on the first anniversary of this publication, I shared an excerpt from my book, which is called If I Am Coming to Your Town, Something Terrible Has Happened - The Life and Times of a Domestic War Correspondent. Below is another excerpt. I hope you’ll read it and think about all the things in your own life that you’re grateful for. Because in the face of brutality and oppression, we all need reminders of gratitude and hope.Hundreds of local election officials across the country are in place to screw with next year’s mid-terms. Support my work investigating those officials with a paid subscription.***PEORIA, Ill. — On a hot July morning with the sun beating down on the dirty dashboard of one of the newspaper’s cheap Dodges, I was driving on a street on top of the west bluff that separates a part of Black Peoria from white Peoria when I heard the call on the police scanner. “10-32,” and then the address. “10-32” means someone has been shot. The address I knew, more or less: an ice cream shop called Tall Bob’s in the South End of Peoria. I got there before the police had crime scene tape up. A man had been shot somewhere else before he ended up in the parking lot where he screamed as the paramedics tried to stop the blood from running down his leg. The blood ran down the side of the tan leather seat of the SUV and dripped onto the door jamb. I watched the man bleed and scream as the paramedics around him tried to stop him from doing both. Fifteen minutes before I stood there in the parking lot I had left the newsroom for my first full shift on the cops beat. This was my first morning on the job. By the time I stopped to look away from the bleeding man I realized I was on the other side of that tape. I remember a cop saying that I’d have to stay now that I was on that wrong side of the line. But he was just joking so I left and drove down the street to where the police were having a press conference where they explained what had happened. When the police and the paramedics had finished their jobs and left, there were bloody plastic surgical gloves strewn all over the parking lot where people waited in line for ice cream like nothing had happened. Tall Bob’s was open for business again.It was 2012 and I was a cub reporter. Technically, I was an intern but I worked 40 hours a week just like everyone else at the paper. The newspaper’s headquarters sat on the edge of the east bluff, which overlooked the river on a road called 1 News Plaza. The bluffs, as they had since Peoria was founded, were natural markers between the Black and white neighborhoods of the city, between poor and rich. The paper’s printing press took up an entire building with three stories of glass windows that lit up the giant printing press inside like a snow globe at night. Toward the river from the press room was the main entrance, where in neon red gothic font the words Peoria Journal Star shone across the parking lot. I never saw anyone in the lobby but I walked through it each day and nodded at a secretary who is no longer there because no one is there anymore. up a stairwell with seafoam green tiles on the wall was the hallway that led either to the executive suites or past advertising and photography. I always chose the path past advertising because it meant I didn’t have to walk by the editors’ offices. I was scared of them and thought it was only a matter of time before they figured out I didn’t belong there and fired me.Six and sometimes seven days a week I walked into the newsroom through the back entrance by the photography room and passed a cork board that was supposed to be for upcoming events — fundraisers, happy hours, birthday parties — but never seemed to have anything current on it. Next to letters mailed to the newsroom from reporters who had left the paper behind was a photograph taken less than a decade before. It showed more than 100 people all standing under the gothic font of the newspaper’s entrance smiling on a blue sky day. More than half of their faces were covered with red Xs. Some quit, some took buyouts or were laid off as different owners of the paper looked to cut costs. The newsroom was filled with empty desks that once belonged to these departed reporters. The reporters who were left just kept working next to the empty desks, absorbing them into their own workspaces and filling them with whatever clutter couldn’t be contained on their own desks. Stacks of yellowing newspapers sat on the empty desks of the reporters who once put stories on those pages. I walked into the newsroom hungover and with dry mouth from the night before while sipping a cup of coffee and carrying a sub for lunch. I went to the desk where Anthony or Brad or Gary sat under a brown plastic sign hanging from the ceiling that said “Metro City Desk” and grabbed a chunky, black police scanner.When something bad happens the scanner plays the all clear tone, a high-pitched boooooooooooooop followed by a click. When the scanner hears a voice, it stops on that frequency and plays the sounds back to you. Then the information comes in from the dispatcher or an out-of-breath cop: a person shot, an armed robbery, police opening fire. After the all clear tone I waited to hear the address. “10–32, 600 block West Main.” Once I heard it I’d grab the scanner and a notepad and drive to the scene. There were a lot of them in the summer of 2011. That year, Peoria had the most homicides in a year since 1989. Twenty-three people were killed, including a five-year-old boy who took a bullet that went through his bedroom wall when he was at his uncle’s house for a sleepover. The cops thought whoever killed the kid was actually trying to kill the uncle but the uncle never cooperated with police and so they never solved the child’s murder.Boooooooooooooop the scanner would say and I’d perk up. Even today, I can hear that all clear tone when its musical key plays in some commercial or on someone’s phone over the din of any barroom or the whine of any highway. It comes back to me at times when I’m least expecting it and puts me right back in that newsroom or driving around the streets of Peoria.I heard the all clear tone one day and listened for the address, then drove toward Trewyn School in the South End. There was a car with the doors open and little yellow placards with numbers on the ground where the shell casings had fallen. There was a 19-year-old boy under a white sheet. Neighbors came out of their houses to see what was going on and people driving by stopped to get a look. A woman called out to anyone who would listen that if all these kids in the neighborhood were so good with guns that they should “go to Iraq” and fight in the war there. A police lieutenant hugged her by promising to find her son’s killer. She landed on her knees and cried and begged God to bring her son back but there was no answer.I drove back to the newsroom and wrote up the story which went under the headline 1 DIES IN SHOOTING. That story got the front page because it happened in the daytime when a photographer was able to get to the scene and take a photo. You need a photo if a story is going to go on the front page. Most of the stories I wrote about people who were killed in Peoria didn’t end up on the front page. Instead, I wrote them up in a few paragraphs called a brief. The brief would say when and where the person had been killed but not much else. The briefs went on the inside of the paper in the B section, where only those who knew where to look could find them.About a month later I walked into the newsroom to find a note on my desk. A 23-year-old man named Robreco King was found dead the night before in an empty lot in the South End, where a lot of the city’s crime and most of its murders took place. I called the coroner and asked for the man’s home address, which she wasn’t supposed to give out but did so under an unspoken agreement with the paper.I knocked on the screen door to a small screened-in porch and told a woman who I was. Then an old man came out and invited me to sit down with him in the porch. He was the victim’s grandfather, he said. His son, the dead man’s father, fiddled with a car parked in the driveway but didn’t want to talk. Besides, the father couldn’t hear very well because he had been shot himself years before and the injuries had taken some of his hearing. But the grandfather wanted to talk. He was frail but wiry and strong in the way that old men, insistent upon continuing to live, are. What a meaningless thing, to take a life, he said, more upset than sad. He knew. He had done it before and paid the price with a long prison sentence for a killing he did decades earlier in Chicago. After that he’d come to Peoria to get away from the violent madness of the big city, only to find a different variant here. His son had almost been killed in the shooting that partially deafened him, and now his grandson was dead. He just wanted the cycle to stop. “I wish someone would make these people put it on paper: What do you get out of killing another man? People don’t put value on life, but it’s worth a whole bunch.”I called my editor and told him this incredible story: a reformed murderer whose son was almost killed and now had a dead grandson, and who was calling for peace on the streets of Peoria. So we sent a photographer. The grandfather sat on the couch with his daughter-in-law and her children and posed for the photo. The photographer and I thought we had done something powerful: humanize a murder victim and his family as something more than just another “Black man killed in Peoria’s violent South End.” The next day, I opened my email to find that I had missed what the Journal Star’s readers had not: the grandfather’s fly was open. He had bared his soul for all of Peoria to see but all that the readers saw was that he had forgotten to zip up his pants.***After a few months at the paper, the editors asked me what cops shifts I wanted. I chose nights because that’s when the most action was. But no matter how big of a night I was expecting — maybe a revenge killing after a week of violence in a certain neighborhood — I always had to write a feature to fill the front page. Splitting your time between writing fluff stories about Oktoberfest or the opening of a new Bass Pro Shop and standing around at crime scenes is a fucked up exercise in understanding the ubiquity of violence in American life. It’s everywhere and nowhere at the same time. It is hard to enjoy a dinner party when you know that someone is being murdered just across town and you’ll have to write about it. On nights when I wasn’t working I was usually listening to the scanner anyway. If I wasn’t listening, I was usually distracted, keyed up, unable to concentrate on whatever was happening around me because I was thinking about what I was missing out on the streets. I call this straight life and real life. Straight life is what most of us do all day every day. We pretend everything is fine as we buy houses and clean our cars, plan dinners and happy hours with friends, go to see bands or play in a softball league. Real life is what happens when the sun goes down and someone pulls out a gun.I started to spend less time in the straight life. Instead of going home after work I went to the bars downtown and sat in back booths alone and watched people pass by, knowing nothing of what had happened in the city that day or what would happen that night. But I knew Peoria as if it were a person and I could read her face. When fall is coming and gray skies hang over the city for weeks, the city’s abandoned homes stick out a little more. When summer is peaking and everyone’s grass is green and you can hear lawnmowers and sprinklers and kids giggling as they play in the streets, Peoria seems as good as any place. But nighttime is different. Sometimes daytime is different, too. It just depends on the time of year, or how much someone has had to drink, or nothing at all. Sometimes people kill just because they feel like it.***There is one very quick and simple way to tell that the past sins of this country were never really addressed, and that’s by taking a trip to any given courthouse on any given day. In Peoria, the white lawyers and judges constantly doled out sentences and judgment to the city’s poor Black residents. The dockets there were filled with Jacksons, Kings, and Hightowers; in Bemidji, Minnesota, last names like Whitefeather and Kingbird filled court filings.I could see dozens of little lights from the fish houses out on the frozen lake as I drove into town on a freezing December night. It took 12 hours of driving to get from Peoria to Bemidji, where I had landed a job as a reporter at the Pioneer. Bemidji was in the middle of a trio of reservations: White Earth to the west, Leech Lake to the east, and Red Lake to the north. Like a lot of cities, even small ones, Bemidji is racially segregated, with most of the Natives living on reservations and coming to town mostly to work and to go to court.I made a spreadsheet of cases I wanted to write about. There were killings, stabbings, and sex crimes in this little town that hadn’t gotten much attention in the Pioneer before I got there. I had taken the job because the Journal Star. had no place for me. After working as an intern for more than a year, I interviewed for an open reporter position. One editor told me she was concerned about my lack of a college degree. I had made the mistake of thinking that the words I was putting into the paper themselves were worth more than a degree from some school.After weeks of sending résumés and clips to newspapers around the country, the Pioneer was the only one that took my call. It helped that a friend from Minnesota who had interned in Peoria had taken a job there to cover City Hall. He got my foot in the door. I worried that there wouldn’t be enough bad news in the small town for someone like me to cover. An editor in Peoria told me that there were stories to be told everywhere, and sometimes the small places had plenty of ugly things going on.I didn’t trust the cops or the people in the courthouse and they didn’t trust me. Not long after I got to the paper, a longtime sports reporter at the Pioneer told me that I would attract more flies with honey than vinegar because I was making some people in town angry with my style. They thought I was a hard-charging city slicker or something like that. I was and I was fine with it. As far as I was concerned, vinegar was the only thing that could get the job done. The newsroom was clean, new and comfortable and smelled like carpet glue and fresh paint. The people who worked there were all from the area and had worked there for years and probably had never seen a body under a white sheet. I was convinced something was wrong with this town and that I was going to find out what it was. I began my search by pissing off the police.The cops had killed an Iraq war veteran in his own home during a nighttime standoff. I put the veteran’s widow on the front page with her questions about why police had killed him. Six months later a SWAT team sniper killed another man after an hours-long standoff at his home. I spent the day standing down the road from the man’s home while listening to police chatter on my scanner. I also put out some of the information I heard from the scanner on Twitter. After almost five hours, the standoff ended with a helicopter taking the man’s body to Fargo for an autopsy. The next morning, the sheriff and the police chief came to the Pioneer newsroom and sat in a small conference room with the editor, telling him that I shouldn’t have posted information about the standoff online. They said that I could have put officers in jeopardy and compromised the entire operation. I had a hard time believing that the subject of the standoff was following my Twitter account for updates when he could have simply listened to the same police radio frequencies I was. I also had a few questions about why police had to kill the man. They said it was because he pointed a rifle at them. I think the cops just got tired of standing around in the sun all day and wanted to go home — a thought I did not share with the two law enforcement veterans staring me down in a conference room at the newspaper.Then, a few days later, I reported the name of the officer who fired the fatal shot. In Peoria I had been taught that the profound responsibility society gives to police officers to take a life means that we get to know their names when they do. The town’s two top cops didn’t see it that way. They refused to release the names of the officers involved, so I went around the sheriff and the chief of police and got the names from the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. I called a reporter in Peoria for a gut check and he confirmed my thoughts — it’s that simple, he said. Cops kill someone, you print their name. I didn’t think much of it. I did my job and went about my day, not knowing what would happen next.The newsroom was flooded with letters and emails to the editor and publisher deriding the paper for its decision to publish the officer’s name. In Peoria, this would have been no big deal. It was a city, and everyone there played by the rules of a city. There was an expectation that if you did something newsworthy — whether you were a teacher who had molested students or a cop who justifiably killed an armed madman — your name would end up in the paper. But before I’d arrived in Bemidji, this apparently wasn’t always the case.Plus, I’d learned something else, something that would come back years later and continues to shape the grievance-based politics of our present and future: I had made the mistake of thinking that police considered themselves responsible to their fellow citizens in the same way that I was held accountable by the people reading my stories. I thought we were all part of the same society. Instead, I learned that many police consider themselves separate from the rest of us, maligned defenders holding chaos at bay so we can enjoy cookouts in our backyard without being murdered in cold blood.*** This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.american-doom.com/subscribe

Big story last week in Rolling Stone that exposed the genesis of what we now know is the largest single immigration raid in the history of the Department of Homeland Security. Long story short: a Republican congressional candidate and her union-worker helper called ICE on the Hyundai Metaplant outside of Savannah, GA. If you appreciate my reporting on this story — which you won’t find anywhere else — please pay for it. The Trump administration violated two landmark laws that have been in place for over 200 years that codify the military’s presence in everyday American life — and in doing so has laid the groundwork for military interference in the 2026 mid-term elections.Donald Trump, the Justice Department, Homeland Security and the military will face no concrete consequences for violating the Posse Comitatus Act and the Alien Enemies Act, as determined by two federal courts last week. In fact, Trump and his backers throughout the federal government, federal law enforcement, and the National Guard and the military, have signaled they’ll continue to violate laws created to prevent the executive branch from establishing martial law, or otherwise using men with guns to enforce their policies and protect their rule.That includes using the military to “impact” elections, as one of the judge’s who handed down last week’s rulings wrote.If it weren’t for the typical firehouse of news and scandal that has become a hallmark of Trump presidencies, the decisions last week from four federal judges that the president violated both the Posse Comitatus Act and the Alien Enemies Act would be massive, impeachment-level developments. Instead, the judges’ decisions landed like a feather in a nation that is increasingly hurtling toward open authoritarianism even as daily life continues relatively normally.In the days following the decisions — which came from Judge Charles Breyer in the Northern District of California and a three-judge panel in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals — the Trump administration oversaw a military execution in the south Caribbean, while the president himself has continued to threaten Democratic cities with military occupation and infiltration from the federal immigration agencies that have effectively become Trump’s personal law enforcement forces.While all of this is obviously very troubling, the National Guard presence in Washington DC — complete with scenes of Guard members picking up trash and mostly just standing around — belies the seriousness of the precedent that the White House is setting.The grave consequences of accepting Trump’s military and law enforcement occupations of Democratic cities as normal was alluded to in Breyer’s decision, which laid out some of the scenarios with which Trump could use the military toward anti-democratic ends. Those scenarios are made more feasible thanks to a June decision from the Ninth Circuit, which determined that Trump can deploy the National Guard if “his ability to execute federal law has been ‘significantly impeded.’”Breyer compares the legal threshold granted by the Ninth Circuit givingTrump wide leeway to deploy the National Guard or the military to “the stricter statutory requirement that he be ‘unable with the regular forces to execute the laws’” in order to send in the troops, as Trump is so fond of doing.Breyer then lays out several theoretical instances in which, under this broad interpretation of executive power over domestic military deployment by the Ninth Circuit, Trump could use the military. One scenario is simply to halt elections."The President, relying upon anecdotes from state election officials that voting machines are glitching, or that fraud exists, could claim that he is unable to execute the election laws."In fact, we are already seeing this argument being laid out by the Trump administration. Through the Justice Department’s pressure on states for access to sweeping and detailed voter data, in addition to Trump’s executive orders on election rules, plus his statements about completely doing away with mail-in ballots and voting machines, the White House is preparing for a takeover of elections.One way Trump could do this is by claiming some sort of national emergency that would allow him to employ the Ninth Circuit’s interpretation of domestic use of the military.“For instance, the Ninth Circuit’s test would likely enable a President to use federal law enforcement agents to stoke tensions and then use any resistance as justification to call forth the National Guard,” Breyer wrote. “As long as the President actually believed that the resistance significantly impeded his ability to execute federal law, it is hard to see how a court could find that he acted in bad faith, especially under the Ninth Circuit’s deferential standard of review.”In other words, Trump can say crime is really bad in a Democratic city — or that election officials in a blue state are corrupt and elections are rigged — and send in the National Guard to get the situation under control.“Could the President, for instance, assert that he is unable to enforce obscure tax or drug laws and then use the federalized National Guard to execute the election laws?”Yes and yes. This is where we’re headed.On the same day of Breyer’s decision, the Fifth Circuit determined that the Trump administration “improperly invoked” the Alien Enemies Act (AEA) by claiming that the presence of Tren de Aragua gang members inside the United States amounted to an “invasion.”Using this tortured legal rationale, the Trump administration then renditioned undocumented immigrants to the notorious CECOT prison in El Salvador and elsewhere.The same day that the Trump administration was deemed guilty of violating the AEA, it announced that it had blown a boat to smithereens in the waters of the south Caribbean. The boat contained 11 people — either drug runners or migrants trying to make it to the United States, depending on who you believe.Now, military assets are gathering off the Venezuelan coast ostensibly to take out drug cartels, meaning Trump is fighting illegal wars both at home and abroad.***It has become fashionable in recent years to compare current events in the United States to those in pre-war Germany — and for good reason. This isn’t because it’s simply easy or lazy on the part of writers, historians, journalists and others, but because it’s so applicable to what we’re currently witnessing.William Shirer’s doorstop of a book, the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, provides, in excruciating detail, the tale of the tape of how Adolf Hitler consolidated absolute power in an otherwise democratic society. The first third of Shirer’s book shows how a nation can vote itself into authoritarianism, dictatorship, and far worse.Fear and violence played a major role in that consolidation of power. Germans of all political, religious and socioeconomic stripes thought they could appease Hitler and his Nationalist Socialists through compromise or cooperation. One after another, each of these groups was crushed by the Nazi party as it ruthlessly continued upon its authoritarian path.Some of our friends and neighbors on the American right — be they pocketbook Republicans, Reagan conservatives, Bush-ian neo-conservatives or whatever other non-authoritarian factions remain of the GOP — think these comparisons to Nazi-era are ridiculous.What these Americans fail to recognize is that the Republican Party as a non-authoritarian institution fails to exist. From the top down, anyone who calls themselves a Republican is either fully supportive of the party’s anti-democratic efforts toward something like total authority or competitive authoritarianism, or they falsely believe that all of this is overblown.Either way, like the Germans who thought the same, they’ll get run over by the authoritarian rumble just the same.The best way to do this is to first convince your party that there is an existential threat that must be eliminated, and only you and your people can do it. Then you have to actually start eliminating the threat — or at least making it look like you are.The deployment of the National Guard and robust Homeland Security forces to Los Angeles in June was called Operation Excalibur. (Breyer alludes to the fact that this is probably no coincidence, writing that “Excalibur is, of course, a reference to the legendary sword of King Arthur, which symbolizes his divine sovereignty as king.”)The goal of Operation Excalibur was “to demonstrate, through a show of presence, the capacity and freedom of maneuver of federal law enforcement within the Los Angeles Joint Operations Area,” according to Breyer.In other words: we can do whatever we want, whenever we want, to you, and there’s nothing you can do to stop us.Further, anyone who does try to stop Trump’s forceful incursions into the territories of his political enemies — either through protest or legal argument — will be accused of crime and disloyalty.When National Guard Major General Sherman told DHS officials that his troops were prevented from performing certain law enforcement tasks by the Posse Comitatus Act, they began “questioning Sherman’s loyalty to the country,” according to Breyer.The questioning of Sherman’s “loyalty” to the United States came from Gregory Bovino, who as DHS chief for the Los Angeles region has emerged as a steadfast authoritarian voice. Bovino was the DHS face of the immigration raid carried out last month at a fundraising event held by California Gov. Gavin Newsom.Bovino’s comment “is relevant because Chief Bovino’s accusations of disloyalty go to the state of mind of decision makers who are tasked with ensuring that the Posse Comitatus Act is followed,” Breyer wrote.Again, in other words, they don’t care about following the laws that prevent military incursion into everyday American life — one of the very things that prompted the founders to declare independence from England.Among the reasons listed in the Declaration of Independence for our separation from Great Britain — many of which could easily apply to Trump — is the issue of troops in our lives.“He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.”All of this comes down to elections — the only thing preventing us from Trump and Republicans obtaining absolute rule. By succeeding in getting the courts to agree with the White House on domestic use of the military, we’re getting closer and closer to free and fair elections being a thing of the past, according to Richard Bernstein, a former clerk for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and a charter member of the Rule of Law Society. If courts continue, as the Ninth Circuit did in June, to accept the Trump administration’s arguments for domestic use of the military, “ […] such a decision would neuter the federal criminal prohibitions on the use of the military, including National Guard units in federal service, to interfere with elections,” Bernstein wrote last week. “These arguments are thus a dagger pointed at elections — the heart of our Republic.”***Here are some other examples of our growing acceptance of martial law.* The Trump administration is using drones to monitor protests and releasing the footage — with no apparent relation to any crime being committed. * The Trump administration is immigration judges and replacing them with inexperienced ones, including military judges.* Deportation training is now the sole priority for federal law enforcement, meaning that the occupation of majority-minority American cities will grow. Even without sending in the National Guard, Americans in large cities will become more and more accustomed to the sight of Trump’s masked agents on the streets. * A small company with no experience in large projects won a bid to build a detention camp in the Texas desert, part of rapidly increasing detention capacity for immigrants. This is an example of powerful and growing incentives for people, companies and communities to participate in the enforcement of Trump’s authoritarian policies on immigration and other issues. * Federal law enforcement continues aggressive behavior towards the press, furthering an attitude of lack of accountability to the public and loyalty to the president alone. *** This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.american-doom.com/subscribe

It’s 2:06 a.m. and I’m wrapping up a story at Rolling Stone that details how a Republican candidate for congress in Georgia was partly behind yesterday’s ICE raid at a Hyundai plant here. Like, as basically an informant. Pretty wild stuff! I wish I had more time and energy to lay out more about that story below but I’m pretty tired, so the following will have to suffice. You can read more here. FYI this was not at all what I planned to spend the last 12-plus hours on but when the dystopian stuff happens right down the road from your house, you just sort of have to go. Anyway, if you appreciate this journalism please pay for it.Oh, something cool: Here’s the cover of my first book, which will be published by the University of Georgia Press next year.Cool, right? Anyway, on to the news…On the drive to a massive Hyundai plant outside Savannah, I passed entire neighborhoods that have been built to house the workers there. The plant, which opened in March, was lauded as the biggest economic development project in Georgia history by elected officials like Gov. Brian Kemp. Thanks to Hyundai’s decision to build the plant on the side of the interstate in Bryan County, there are more than 7,000 new jobs there, county officials said last year. The plant and its offshoots have resulted in more than $2 billion in investments in the county.I drove past the new neighborhoods and pulled off the interstate, passing a handful of brand new gas stations that weren’t there last year, and driving through new roundabouts on the outskirts of the plant. Then I drove around the plant for a while until I found the Georgia State Patrol cars blocking an entrance. Overhead, a helicopter hovered. Somewhere past the state troopers were the masked agents from ICE and Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), who arrested as many as 400 undocumented immigrants there on Thursday.I came home to check on the dogs and the wife and checked online to see what folks were saying about the raid. That’s when I found Tori Branum, a Georgia woman who is running as a Republican for the 12th congressional district. Branum claimed credit for alerting ICE to the presence of undocumented immigrants working in and around the plant that the agency raided on Thursday.“For months, folks have whispered about what’s going on behind those gates now the truth is finally catching up (sic)” she wrote on Facebook. “I reported this site to ICE a few months ago and was on the phone with an agent.”I called Branum up to learn more about how she helped ICE in its investigation and operation today in Georgia. She told me she simply contacted the agency on its website at first. At some point, she came into contact with a local union worker who spoke Spanish. That person had access to the facility, apparently spoke to some employees there, and reported to Branum that undocumented immigrants were on site. She then put the union worker in touch with ICE.Barnum said she’s been getting “a lot of hate” but isn’t really bothered by it. She said she feels good about what she did. After all, she said, busting “illegal immigrants” and getting them out of the country is why she voted for Donald Trump in the first place. That, and cracking down on crime, among I’m sure many other things that we didn’t get a chance to talk about.She told me that, if it were up to her, everyone not born in the United States should have to leave, more or less.“Every person that wasn’t born here would go back to the country they came from and come back the right way,” she said. “And we’d have a whole reset of this whole debacle.”Anyway, you can hear some of her comments as well as some videos from the raid above. More at Rolling Stone today and more here next week on election denier stuff.*** This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.american-doom.com/subscribe

Today’s post contains a checklist for progressive Americans to use in fighting back against the authoritarian actions coming from the Trump administration. These tasks are the result of my two decades reporting on American violence, decline and extremism. If you support this work and insight, please consider a paid subscription or contribution to help fund my reporting.After a few days last week digging back into the epidemic of election denialism that has roiled the nation over the last four years, I was struck by just how difficult the task that lies ahead seems.And I’m not just talking about how to combat the scourge of efforts to interfere with — or completely suspend — next year’s mid-term elections and maybe even elections after that.I’m talking about the bigger task, the one that begs the question, How do we get out of this? The path forward seems impossible at times. After all, Republicans have it easy: completely detached from fact and truth, all they have to do is convince what appears to be an increasingly uneducated electorate that the scandalous lies they tell about liberals and Democrats are somehow true.I’ll provide some evidence of what this demonization of non-authoritarian Americans looks like, then offer an initial checklist of things we can do to protect our values and communities. That checklist is based on my reporting on myriad issues related to American decline over the course of my career, from everyday street crime, to police brutality, online radicalization, immigration, right-wing extremism and election denialism.You can skip straight to the checklist or keep reading to learn a bit about how we got here. This checklist is incomplete, but can be considered a partial antidote to the authoritarian checklist that Trump and Republicans have had great success in working on these last eight months.To skip straight to this list, scroll down. But first, some evidence of how challenging this will be.***As I combed through election data for Pennsylvania’s 67 counties last week, Doug Burgum was on CNN, repeating what the White House clearly believes is a winning talking point — one of those salacious lies the Trump administration constantly tells. Burgum told CNN’s Kaitlin Collins that he just couldn’t understand why any Democratic mayor or governor wouldn’t welcome Trump’s twisted “offer” to send National Guard troops into the nation’s largest cities. Considering that such deployments would virtually eliminate crime in the country, Burgum concluded that Democrats must simply be “pro-crime.”Now, any reasonable person would understand this is not true. The only people who are “pro-crime” are criminals. But just in case there was any ambiguity in Burgum’s messaging, senior White House advisor Stephen Miller helpfully offered his take on why Democratic leaders don’t want troops on their streets.The entirety of the Democratic Party — including everyday Americans who don’t support the president — are “domestic extremists,” Miller said last week. I’m not sure what’s more depressing: the fact that grown adults have resorted to this pathetic behavior in service of their party’s leader, or that something like one-third of Americans actually believe such obvious nonsense.But the number of Americans who apparently support straight-up authoritarianism is stunning.Ten months after the election, I finally took some time this week to go through county-level election results from important states like Pennsylvania, Nevada, and North Carolina. The data is troubling, to say the least. I’ll have more on my findings in a future post, but for now I’ll just say that the data shows that these three supposedly “swing” states are becoming redder. Perhaps worse: blue counties have voted less and less for Democrats over the last 16 years. Meantime, stable Republican counties have voted at higher and higher percentages for their candidates.The bottom line is, I found no evidence that even progressive areas of the small sample of states I analyzed were becoming more progressive. I did, however, find substantial evidence that the Republican areas of those states are becoming more Republican. This means that — having seen exactly who Trump is, knowing full well what the plans were for his second term — Americans have voted in greater numbers for Republicans.I saw someone the other day posit that the reason that Democrats largely can’t combat Trump’s increasing authoritarianism is that, as relatively well-educated people, they simply can’t believe it’s actually happening. That time is well past. Y’all better start believing it, or we’re double-fucked.Democrats and progressive Americans must start coming to terms with the fact that many of their friends and neighbors — either through ignorance or abject support — back a political party that cannot be thought of as anything but mostly-authoritarian. In the starkest terms, this means that Americans who don’t want to live in an authoritarian society must prepare for the worst. Whatever bad thing you can imagine happening, it probably will.The upside here is that if you prepare for the worst and it doesn’t happen, you’ll be pleasantly surprised.I think that part of this inability or unwillingness to accept the simple fact that our government is now led by an openly authoritarian political party lies in the widespread belief that the United States was sort of post-history. At least, that’s the perception that I had growing up. All that bad shit was behind us — fascism, racism, sexism, tyrannical government oppression. We had figured it out. America wasn’t perfect; there were disagreements, but we had evolved beyond the extremism, the wars, and the ignorance of societies that preceded us. We had a messy but functioning democracy that, through the long arc of history, always seemed to get better. Until it didn’t. That time is now.Part of the reason this can feel so hopeless is because all of us who aren’t on the side of authoritarianism simply cannot compete with the lies. By the time journalists publish their stories fact-checking the false claims and lies, they’ve already rocketed around the Internet, flooding the minds of millions, thanks to an army not of right-wing journalists, but full-on propagandists. People who have come of age as young adults in the last 10 years don’t remember a time when, between the hours of 9-5, Fox News was a relatively normal news network. Now, even as news breaks, the personalities on Fox run cover for Trump and Republicans, credulously sharing their claims as objective fact. This is the most watched news apparatus in the nation. The speed of this cycle has become faster over the last decade, making it so that news no longer holds attention in the way that it once did. As a result, we quickly forget things that have already happened — hastening what I think is a growing perception among younger generations that what is now is what has always been.But those of us who haven’t been swindled by the false promises of authoritarianism remember the lessons of the past. It’s incumbent upon us, then, to ensure that each of our little portions of this society reflect our values.As such, here are some suggested areas of focus for progressive Americans to consider when organizing in their communities. I hope to expand on these more in future coverage here at Doom, in addition to my ongoing investigations of the election denial movement, and other adversarial reporting on the authoritarianism that is increasingly surrounding us.***GovernmentSchool boards, boards of elections, county commissions, city councils, state legislative offices, metropolitan planning organizations, sheriffs, prosecutors, and judgeships should all be the focus of progressive organizing and get-out-the-vote efforts. The American right has made incredible progress over the course of the last decade in taking over these government bodies, while the left has fallen short.Healthcare and social servicesProgressive communities should partner with hospital systems and universities to continue providing research for and access to vaccines, as well as general healthcare, elder care, and access to abortion and gender-affirming care throughout communities. Local governments should work with allies in business and activist communities to ensure that social services are properly funded as the federal government reduces funding and perverts the missions of agencies like FEMA, HHS, HUD, the FHFA and more.Law enforcementProgressive communities should work with local law enforcement agencies to institute a broad variety of policies that reflect progressive values. At the top of the list is ensuring that local law enforcement in our communities do not participate with ICE on immigration enforcement. Further, cities and states can and should pass rules and laws that prohibit the hiring of ex-ICE agents as police, as well require more robust education qualifications to become a member of law enforcement. Cities and states should create citizen review boards to hold law enforcement agencies accountable for improper use of force and other abuses of power. Finally, cities, counties and states must immediately stop the practice of encrypting police radio frequencies in order to allow the continued monitoring of day-to-day police activity by journalists, community members and activists. Localities that have already encrypted their police communications should, at the very least, provide access to those frequencies to responsible media outlets and activist groups.Investigation and prosecutionProgressive areas of the country should utilize aggressive enforcement of all administrative licensing, taxation, code and ethics rules to pressure Republican elected officials and community leaders. Government agencies, advocacy groups and citizens should aggressively investigate compliance with professional licensing rules and regulations, and tax and code compliance for all businesses, organizations and prominent community members who provide financial or other aid to Republican and conservative causes and officials. Additionally, all Republican elected officials should be aggressively investigated by the press, Democrats and allied law enforcement for compliance with municipal, state and federal rules and regulations regarding their personal and business interests, as well as their compliance with campaign finance laws and financial disclosure rules.MediaProgressive citizens, businesses and activist groups should monitor local press for uncritical, supportive or simply lazy coverage of Republican-authoritarian policies and statements by elected officials. Advertising boycotts, public pressure on editors and news directors, and relationship-building with local reporters, influencers, and media personalities should all be utilized to ensure that local press is accurately and responsibly reporting on authoritarian threats to communities.Activist trainingLawyers, military veterans, first responders, retired law enforcement and others with knowledge of civil disobedience, civil unrest, and conflict zones should offer training and education for citizens and activist groups. Progressive communities should provide regular training opportunities and education regarding individual rights during interactions with local law enforcement, federal authorities and the military. Safety training for civil unrest, mass casualty events and military or law enforcement incursion into communities should also be a part of ongoing education and training within communities.***Please follow AD on our social media for a little more doom to your scroll. That’s what we all need, right?* Bluesky - @americandoom.bsky.social* TikTok - @americandoom_* YouTube - @americandoom_* Instagram - @americandoom_* X - @americandoom_* Facebook This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.american-doom.com/subscribe

Just a quick thing today about a comment from Trump that most people missed. Then I’m back in the research chamber finding out how the Trump administration, the Justice Department and others are working to interfere with next year’s election. But I wanted to flag Trump’s comment, made during a back-and-forth with reporters and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office.Zelenskyy was asked if he’ll hold elections once peace is reached between Ukraine and Russia. Of course, Zelenskyy said. But he couldn’t safely guarantee “legal” elections while the war continues. That’s when Trump chimed in: Oh, you mean you can suspend elections during wartime? Imagine if I did that, Trump said. Joking? Not joking? It doesn’t matter because something like this is a reasonably foreseeable. If you don’t believe me, just listen to Trump’s own words about how maybe being a dictator isn’t such a bad idea, or how he can declare national emergencies whenever he wants, send the troops wherever he wants, and maybe even serve a third term.Anyway, share this post and video far and wide, because I don’t think everyone is paying close enough attention. It’s going to take a lot of work to expose the massive network of election deniers standing between the nation and a free election. Choose a paid subscription today to support my work. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.american-doom.com/subscribe

Will we have elections next year? I hope so but honestly, I don’t know! What I do know is that there are thousands of election officials and untold amounts of court cases that stand between right now and an honest-to-goodness, free and fair election next year. It takes a lot of work to stay on top of all that and expose bad actors, like I’ve been doing for years. If you want to support those efforts, please choose a paid subscription to American Doom or throw a few dollars in our Coffee Fund. It’s hard to imagine in today’s environment of non-stop authoritarian rumblings coming from the White House, but just less than five years ago, as Donald Trump tried to cling to power amidst an election loss to Joe Biden, the Trump administration hatched what was then a shocking and unthinkable plan.In a never-issued executive order, the most fervent conspiracy theorists and executive power absolutists that the American right has to offer drew up plans to seize voting machines — with the military, if necessary. Trump’s direct involvement in those plans — if any — has never been fully revealed. The plan never came to fruition, and what followed was Trump’s flailing and criminal attempt to overturn the 2020 election. The never-issued executive order was just a part of that attempt, helping conspiracy theories about voting machines to rise from the dregs of the election-denying American right to mainstream Republican policy. Since then, the election denial movement has continued its assault on all aspects of elections, including voting machines. Trump is firmly at the head of the movement. I’ve already touched on efforts by Republicans and the Trump administration to interfere with next year’s mid-term elections. Those efforts and more will only continue. In the coming weeks and months, and — god help me — years, I’ll be detailing developments that will be familiar to those who followed reporting by myself and others in the lead-up to 2024. Among the most extreme scenarios with which Trump and Republicans could seize something resembling absolute power are the cancellation of elections or the throwing out of votes entirely. It is not hyperbole to say that both events are reasonably foreseeable.That’s because Trump continues to accumulate unprecedented military and law enforcement powers.There are many troubling possibilities that arise from Trump’s increasing use of the military for both domestic policing and immigration enforcement, some of which we’ve been seeing for the last few months, since Trump first sent the military to Los Angeles. But since we’re not in an election year, we haven’t seen another scenario play out — yet. It is not implausible to envision Trump using the military or law enforcement to enforce his election demands. The never-issued executive order from 2020 shows that Trump and members of his administration already considered using the military to disrupt the 2020 election or throw out its results completely. Trump has shown no evidence of slowing down, despite the two-term limit that nearly the entirety of the nation’s media-academic complex continues to believe will not be somehow overcome to land Trump back in the White House in 2028.Trump’s election demands — in the form of several executive orders aimed at fundamentally remaking American elections in ways that benefit Republicans and the election denial movement — include completely eliminating voting machines. Trump doesn’t have the authority to do this, not that not having legal power to do things has ever stopped Trump and his administration from simply doing things. That’s why an executive order signed by Trump on Monday caught my eye. The order, which mostly lays out more authority for the National Guard and other agencies as they continue their “mission” in Washington DC, also created a special “quick reaction force” of Guard members to be quickly deployed to, well, what I guess we’ll have to call “domestic conflict zones.” Specifically, the new “quick reaction” forces of the National Guard will be deployed to assist “local law enforcement in quelling civil disturbances and ensuring the public safety and order whenever the circumstances necessitate, as appropriate under law.”As if that last part matters: recent history has shown that the Trump administration will deploy the Guard and whatever other military or law enforcement agencies it wants under the most legally questionable of circumstances. The order calls on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to “designate an appropriate number of each State’s trained National Guard members to be reasonably available for rapid mobilization for such purposes.”In addition to ICE and other sub-agencies of the Department of Homeland Security, Trump is now waist-deep in perverting the mission of the National Guard. Clearly, the powers-that-be within the White House and the upper ranks of the American right view the Guard as a tool at their disposal.How that tool will be used is now apparently up to Trump and Republican governors, who hold tens of thousands of Guard members under their command. ***Please follow AD on our social media for a little more doom to your scroll. That’s what we all need, right?* Bluesky - @americandoom.bsky.social* TikTok - @americandoom_* YouTube - @americandoom_* Instagram - @americandoom_* X - @americandoom_* Facebook This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.american-doom.com/subscribe

In these times — that strange and insufficient phrase that we’ve all become accustomed to — balance is important, I’m told.I try to achieve balance and I think we all do. But sometimes things get out of whack. I’ve been mulling over a couple of things this week that I just can’t get past. First, how does one balance their life in the midst of such obvious turmoil? Second, how can we possibly get out of this?To answer the first question, maybe there is no balance. If this is it — and I’m beginning to believe it is — then we have to be on something of a war-footing. For me, this means being as engaged as possible, doing everything I can to share news that I think tells us where we’re going. To consume this amount of bad news takes a toll, but in what is beginning to feel to me like a wartime environment, I think it’s just something I have to do. I’ll explain why I think we’re on a path to domestic military conflict in a moment, but first, to how we get out of this: I’m not sure we can. That’s because there is no gray area here. This is black and white: you either believe that Donald Trump is right or you don’t. You either support mass deportations, military incursion on the nation’s streets, dismantling of the government, and all the other fundamental changes to American life that the Trump administration is putting into affect, or you don’t. I saw a video of a man in Washington DC confronting National Guard members yesterday. He told them they have “a duty” to disobey “unlawful orders.” Now, those Guard members in that armored Humvee are either going to go one of two ways: they’re going to come to agree with the man who had confronted them, or they’re going to continue obeying the orders they’ve been given. There is no third way, no gray area to retreat in to. I believe we’re headed toward that will make it even more difficult to come back from, which is to say, something that will make it nearly impossible for Americans on either side of this right-wrong, pro-Trump or anti-Trump divide: domestic military conflict. I believe we’re headed there because of what Trump said yesterday when asked about his takeover of Washington DC.He was asked by a reporter whether he was concerned that the federal law enforcement agents the president has deployed to DC streets would be pulled away from other, more important tasks. Like what? Trump asked. Well, counter-terrorism for one. “Oh, really, terrorism?” Trump scoffed. “They’ll stop terrorism as part of what they’re doing right now.”This means that Trump believes — as he has said repeatedly — that his fellow Americans are the enemy. Trump considers criminals on the streets of DC and, let’s face it, pretty much anyone who stands in opposition to his regime, a terrorist. There is only one way to eradicate terrorism, and that’s to eliminate it. This means domestic deployment of the military — or whatever paramilitary units of law enforcement Trump can employ to carry out his crackdowns. Lastly, this means that Democratic elected officials and law enforcement in places like Chicago, New York, Los Angeles and elsewhere, will have to start making very difficult decisions about how to respond to Trump’s military incursions.Trump has previewed his plans for further domestic military deployment, and some of his sycophants, like Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), spent yesterday laying the groundwork for these unprecedented actions. Comer called domestic deployment of the military an “experiment” whose time has come. But we don’t have to wait for troops to show up on the streets of, say, Chicago because it’s already occurring in DC and Los Angeles. Not only have Trump’s masked immigration agents been operating with impunity on the streets of LA and elsewhere in California for months now — likely ignoring a judge’s order to stop their racially discriminatory operations — but they went a step further yesterday. Masked agents showed up at a press conference being held by Gov. Gavin Newsom. They said they were there for immigration enforcement operations, but that was just pretext — the only immigrant the agents took during the raid was harmlessly delivering strawberries.Sending the National Guard and federal law enforcement into cities and states run by Democrats is not just an intimidation tactic, it’s effectively the launching of a military front against anyone who opposes Trump. What do you call that other than war? I’m not sure, but I know there isn’t much balance in war. ***Please follow AD on our social media for a little more doom to your scroll. That’s what we all need, right?* Bluesky - @americandoom.bsky.social* TikTok - @americandoom_* YouTube - @americandoom_* Instagram - @americandoom_* X - @americandoom_* Facebook This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.american-doom.com/subscribe

I continue to monitor events in DC from my home in Savannah but am ready to go should anything major go down. Trips like these cost money, though, so if you want to support my reporting, please consider a paid subscription or dropping a few bucks in the Doom Coffee Fund. Through next week I’m offering half off all Doom subscriptions, so you can support my independent, adversarial journalism for as little as $3 a month. - jgHere’s how this is going to go: Federal police from agencies like the U.S. Park Police — like the guy in the video above — and DHS sub-agencies are going to find themselves interacting with DC residents in the days and weeks ahead.With little in the way of training of how to carry out these interactions without violating people’s constitutional rights, these officers will inevitably do so. And they’ll be doing so primarily in Black communities. The best case scenario looks like what you see above — an annoying but mostly harmless encounter with a federal agent who is walking a fine line between harassing people for no reason and just doing what he’s told. The worst case scenario is that one of these agents — who I presume overwhelmingly support the president because they chose to enlist in agencies like ICE that are staffed with some of the most aggressive law enforcement this country has to offer — shoots or kills someone.Then, all hell breaks loose. Right now, things seem relatively calm. A photographer friend working the streets in DC today told me that nothing much is going on. He found National Guard members outside the DC armory carrying in fruit snacks. All that could change in an instant, and then we’ll be headed toward unrest. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.american-doom.com/subscribe

If you appreciate my journalism please consider a paid subscription to American Doom. I’m currently offering a 50 percent discount on Doom subscriptions, which means you can support my work and help fund trips to places like Washington DC to cover conflict there for as little as $3 a month.Whatever happens in Washington DC this weekend — and something will happen, because that’s the point in the swinging pendulum of American conflict at which we’ve arrived — it will probably be good for Donald Trump.He both desperately needs the media to be chasing fires and also probably doesn’t care. The reason he doesn’t care is because he doesn’t have to: his extremely powerful army of right-wing media and propagandists have followed their marching orders perfectly, spending the last 36 hours talking about in-depth crime numbers in Washington DC.Funny how none of them were talking about DC crime two weeks ago, when Trump was somewhat reeling from the fallout over Epstein. Funny how Republicans weren’t talking about the need to engage in racial gerrymandering in Texas and elsewhere until the last few weeks, after Republicans there were shown to have been out to lunch while hundreds of children died in flooding there.If there are large-scale protests in DC this weekend, they stand a good chance of being met with force. Scenes of conflict between National Guard members or local police and protesters will play on a loop across right-wing media, playing right into Trump’s hands. (Still, I hope DC protests en masse.)The level of authoritarian onslaught any given day really is overwhelming. I’ve been trying to find time to dig into the Justice Department’s work on behalf of the election denial movement, but the news just keeps breaking like waves on a beach that I can’t get out from under.Here are some alarming items from the last few days that you might have missed:* The Washington Post has obtained Pentagon plans to stand up a quick response force for deployment to domestic unrest zones. The force will be made up of a few hundred members of the National Guard to be stationed in two locations within the interior of the nation in order to respond to civil unrest within hours, the Post reports. Unprecedented doesn’t begin to cover it.* Not only does the Trump administration want secret police, but secret courts as well. Justice Department attorneys asked a judge to shield proceedings in a lawsuit between the state of California and Trump’s government from the public because it could expose immigration agents. The judge ceded somewhat and made access to the hearing audio-only.* Authoritarian crackdowns continue in Los Angeles, where local police continue to help Trump’s masked immigration agents violently confront protesters — and beat journalists.***Please follow AD on our social media for a little more doom to your scroll. That’s what we all need, right?* Bluesky - @americandoom.bsky.social* TikTok - @americandoom_* YouTube - @americandoom_* Instagram - @americandoom_* X - @americandoom_* Facebook This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.american-doom.com/subscribe

Hey, thanks for opening this email or clicking on the link. It’s good to have you here. Things are crazy. I know I keep saying that but it’s the truth so just get used to it, I guess. Anyway, if you appreciate this adversarial journalism as we continue to slide into a strange and troubling future of hyper-connected authoritarianism, consider throwing a few bucks my way. Basically, if you like what you see here, please pay for it. - jg***It’s late on Friday so by the time you read this we’ll probably know a lot more about the anti-vax shooter who, as of press time, killed at least one person — a police officer responding to the scene. I imagine I’ll be spending at least some of this weekend keeping an eye on this story. Meantime, here’s a rundown of the right-wing noise over a July 26 brawl in Cincinnati. Long story short: things aren’t quite adding up. I broke down the video and found a handful of Black men trying to intervene on behalf of a man who was actively yelling the n-word. And yet, the American right has mobilized around this “Black mob” who beat up white people as part of their efforts to beef up Trump and Republicans’ claims of rising crime. More on that early next week…***Please follow AD on our social media for a little more doom to your scroll. That’s what we all need, right?* Bluesky - @americandoom.bsky.social* TikTok - @americandoom_* YouTube - @americandoom_* Instagram - @americandoom_* X - @americandoom_* Facebook This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.american-doom.com/subscribe

Hey, thanks for opening this email or clicking on the link. It’s good to have you here. Things are crazy. I know I keep saying that but it’s the truth so just get used to it, I guess. Anyway, if you appreciate this adversarial journalism as we continue to slide into a strange and troubling future of hyper-connected authoritarianism, consider throwing a few bucks my way. Basically, if you like what you see here, please pay for it. - jgIt used to take months or years for the news to grind my brain into a fine, mushy enough pulp to necessitate rereading my own stories to remember what I’d reported. Now, that takes weeks or even days.What happened last week? Can’t remember. Feels like three months ago. It’s 2025? I keep forgetting. Last year never ended. Maybe it never began. The firehose of insanity continues to flood the American consciousness — at least for those of us who are still paying attention. To be very clear about why this continues to happen: it is not a distraction, from Epstein or anything else.This administration and the political machine behind it — a broad coalition of white nationalists, reactionary authoritarians, extremely greedy nihilists, just plain weird rich people, and common white trash — are not intelligent or organized enough to pull off something like a competent public relations campaign to distract the American public from the Epstein scandal, which at this point I think is fair to simply call a cover-up.No, the chaos of each day is a result of the enraged madness that has permeated the minds of millions of Americans, including nearly the entirety of the Republican party, almost all of its elected officials, and every single member of the Trump administration. All are engaged in a radical remaking of American society based on their desire for vengeance against perceived enemies and desperate need to dominate and oppress anyone who disagrees with them.As the authoritarian carnage continues, our institutions are just barely holding up. Even Democratic officials are capitulating to Trump’s authoritarian tactics. Orange County (Florida) Mayor Jerry Demings recently caved and signed an agreement for the county’s police to assist ICE in deportation efforts. Demings did so after Gov. Ron DeSantis and the state’s attorney general threatened to suspend local officials from office for refusing to cooperate with ICE.Meanwhile, the U.S. military is expanding its work at the southern border; ICE now has the funds to hire 10,000 additional agents; the FBI is now assisting Texas Gov. Greg Abbott in locating state Democratic lawmakers who have left in order to prevent a quorum that would allow Republicans to carry out an unprecedented redistricting plan that will give the GOP five additional seats in Congress; immigration agents are lying in court as part of the Trump administration’s attempt to criminalize protest and stifle dissent; Trump is threatening to “federalize” Washington DC over a random carjacking of a 19-year-old DOGE official, even though crime was down there last year, just like it was across the country in 2024.It’s only $5 a month to support my work. You might as well so we can all have a little fund during the Decline. That’s on the bullets and blood front. Meanwhile in the information warfare space, Trump is once again leading the charge in the American right’s assault on free and fair elections, including open attempts to rig the 2026 midterms in favor of Republicans.Trump’s departments of Justice and Homeland Security are asking for access to the personal information of millions of voters, part of the administration’s attempts to identify supposed perpetrators of voter fraud. (This is really just an attempt to locate undocumented immigrants for deportation, as well as probably part of an effort to identify trans Americans for opaque purposes that are nothing if not concerning.) The DOJ voting rights section has essentially become the official government arm of the election denial movement.The voting rights section is now led by a woman who previously worked for an election denial group called the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF); the DOJ has asked for voter rolls from nine states and been granted the information by two; it has filed a statement of interest on behalf of right-wingers who would like to purge Black voters in Alabama; the department has also filed a statement of interest on behalf of Tina Peters, the Colorado election official who believed in Trump’s lies about election fraud so fervently she granted access to sensitive voter information to an associate of Mike Lindell; Justice has also filed suit in North Carolina, following the lead of frivolous lawsuits filed by the RNC there and elsewhere in the lead-up to the 2024 election, as well as California, where the department is suing to learn the identities of 16 noncitizens who were so honest that they informed local election officials that they were improperly registered to vote.Meanwhile, the main PAC supporting Trump had a record-breaking eight month stretch of fundraising — all for a president who we’re told is prohibited from running for a third term.This is just what I got to this week. Next week, we’ll dig into the strange case of a brawl in Cincinnati and an attempted carjacking of a DOGE staffer. Both events are being used as justification for more authoritarian power grabs by Trump, to be carried out by the military or local law enforcement. Whichever comes first, or is easier, I guess.******Please follow AD on our social media for a little more doom to your scroll. That’s what we all need, right?* Bluesky - @americandoom.bsky.social* TikTok - @americandoom_* YouTube - @americandoom_* Instagram - @americandoom_* X - @americandoom_* Facebook This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.american-doom.com/subscribe

I’m not going to get into the weeds of the White House’s latest “biggest scandal” that is clearly a distraction from Epstein. You can watch the video above to hear all about that. Suffice to say it’s all for show — throw “Obama” and “treason” into a sentence and it’s like chum in the water for our fellow Americans who just want to see a Black man on the gallows. At press time I don’t have the energy to break all this down in these paragraphs because I am pretty damn pissed off after learning about the arrest of two young journalists following a protest in Cincinnati. It’s early, and things may change, but as it stands right now: a judge has refused to drop misdemeanor charges against the reporters even though they were simply doing their jobs in covering what looks like an aggressively violent over-reaction to an anti-ICE protest by local police. Here is one officer beating up a protester, throwing haymakers like it’s a drunken barroom brawl. Man, today is one of those days where I’ve had enough of people. I’ve had enough the Americans who voted for this because their brains are so melted by Facebook and Fox News that they think poor immigrants are their problem — and not the millionaires and billionaires who run this country and don’t give a damn about the average American. I’ve damn sure had enough of guys like that cop — his name is Zachary Stayton and he’s thankfully on administrative leave from the Covington (Kentucky) Police Department, just over the bridge from Cincinnati — although I hold out little hope that he’ll be held accountable for his actions. I’m pretty weary, too, of every other cop like him who has abdicated their oaths to the constitution and has watched as Trump’s federal goon squad has run roughshod over cities and towns all across the country. A judge in California deemed that Trump’s masked immigration agents — essentially his personal army of lawless, secret police at this point — are engaged in widespread racial profiling and are violating the constitutional rights of both immigrants and U.S. citizens. But police there and a lot of other places — when they aren’t outright helping ICE — are standing idly by like a bunch of aw shucks Barney Fifes.It’s past time for local law enforcement to actually do something right for a change and arrest the federal agents violating the law in their own cities and states. This is the stuff of failed states, but unfortunately that’s where we’ve gotten to.For a long time now but especially in the past few months, I’ve had quite enough of supposedly tough, anti-government right-wingers who’ve been salivating over the prospect of armed conflict with the government since the publication of the Turner Diaries and well before who haven’t said a damn thing about the masked thugs terrorizing our cities under the president’s direction. Clearly, when the American right said it was against government tyranny what they meant was they were against it unless the government was oppressing others on their behalf. Democratic mayors, governors and other elected officials need to tell the law enforcement agencies under their command that this has to stop. The longer all of this goes on, the more that people like Trump will try to push. They always want more. This is about control. Someone has to stand up to stop them or else they’ll keep going until there’s nothing left for the rest of us. They will rule over us in a way few will like — as they have been promising to do for years. By then it will be too late. If local cops in blue cities aren’t going to stop Trump’s agents, they should be replaced by those who will. Democracy cannot stand if lawless paramilitary organizations are allowed to continue acting with impunity. It certainly can’t continue if Americans who protest those agents along with the journalists covering those protests are arrested as rioters. We are heading down a dark path. Seeing things like what happened on the bridge between Cincinnati and Covington makes me think we’re speeding up. ***Follow the show:* Bluesky - @americandoom.bsky.social* TikTok - @americandoom_* YouTube - @americandoom_* Instagram - @americandoom_* X - @americandoom_* Facebook This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.american-doom.com/subscribe

Hey there, I’ve been doing my best to keep up with the news while also wrapping up my book. I’ll be back to doing some more investigative work once I’m through this bottleneck. Meantime, you can support my work holding the American right accountable through independent, adversarial journalism with a paid subscription (discount here) or a contribution to American Doom. Your support keeps this newsletter free for all comers. It’s all pretty obvious: reeling from the blowback from the decision not to release the Epstein files — after years of revving his supporters up with the prospect — Trump is now in peak distraction mode. His surrogates have been all over right-wing media in recent days pimping theories and possible indictments of Obama- and Biden-era officials, including the two ex-presidents themselves. Obviously, these indictments will never happen but some version of cooked-up “investigations” are sure to make the rounds in congressional committees overseen by the likes of James Comer and other Trump mouthpieces. This is all a desperate attempt to distract from the obvious: as part of its investigation into Epstein — which spanned the previous Trump administration and Biden’s term in office — the Justice Department surely found a ton of ties between Trump and Epstein. They found these ties for the very obvious reason that they quite clearly exist, as has been well reported publicly, and because they are investigators whose job it is to dig stuff up. There is plenty to be dug when it comes to Trump and Epstein, as last week’s Wall Street Journal story based on these investigative findings made clear. After Trump was re-elected, Attorney General Pam Bondi and others began going through the Justice Department’s files on Epstein and found all those mentions of Trump — the ones that Bondi and Trump had hundreds and maybe thousands of agents across the country flag in the voluminous material that the government had compiled on Epstein.All of this brings us to the reason why Trump can’t release the files in bulk, as he and many others in his administration have repeatedly promised: Trump is all over the files. To fully explain how all of this is a Democratic “hoax,” Trump would have to do a lot of explaining about his appearance in the files. That’s not likely something he’d be able to do very well, which is why you get people like Rep. Tim Burchett explaining away Trump’s appearance on the Epstein flight logs.You see, rich folks fly on private jets all the time, Burchett explained on CNN the other day. And when one of their planes breaks down, they just hitch a ride on another rich person’s plane! That’s probably what happened with Trump and Epstein, Burchett claimed. No mention of their decades-long friendship or any of the many, many instances of ties between the two men. No, Burchett wants America to reserve its judgment on Trump and give him the presumption of innocence. Trump is now going even further, insisting that he’s innocent and that Obama, Biden and other Democrats are guilty of an ever-expanding number of crimes that Trump’s Justice Department is now going to prosecute them over.Except they won’t, because this is all one big, desperate deflection of the very uncomfortable truth.**** Bluesky - @americandoom.bsky.social* TikTok - @americandoom_* YouTube - @americandoom_* Instagram - @americandoom_* X - @americandoom_* Facebook This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.american-doom.com/subscribe

I’ll have more on this over the weekend but for now I wanted to share a rundown of the completely nonsensical claims about the Epstein files that are being made by the White House, as well as Donald Trump’s 40-year history with Epstein himself. Check the video above for all that. And if you want to support my work, you can subscribe or support American Doom here. I’ll be honest: things have been a little tight lately and it’d be nice to have a few new paid subscribers to give me a boost. For those who haven’t been paying attention to every minute development in this growing saga, Trump and White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt are claiming some impossible things. Mainly, they say that the Epstein files were created by Democrats — ostensibly to make Trump look bad — but also that those Democrats didn’t “do a dang thing” with the Epstein investigation.To put a finer point on this theory: Under President Joe Biden, Democrats who hate Trump and were facing off against him in last year’s election had compiled a dossier filled with extremely damaging information — all false — about Trump and Epstein. These same Democrats then “didn’t do a dang thing” with this intel, as Leavitt said yesterday in the White House press room. Does that make any sense? I didn’t think so. Regrettably, I don’t see a press conference scheduled for today at the White House. That’s a shame, because I was really looking forward to hearing how Leavitt explained the bizarre letter that the Wall Street Journal reported last night that Trump had written to Epstein on his 50th birthday.The letter included a tantalizing line about how Trump wished for Epstein that “every day be another wonderful secret.”Lots of secrets these days, it seems. More coming. - jg***Please follow AD on our social media for a little more doom to your scroll. That’s what we all need, right?* Bluesky - @americandoom.bsky.social* TikTok - @americandoom_* YouTube - @americandoom_* Instagram - @americandoom_* X - @americandoom_* Facebook This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.american-doom.com/subscribe

Want to support efforts to push back against authoritarian threats to democracy? I humbly submit that supporting independent journalist like myself is a great addition to the fight. You can do so by choosing a paid subscription to American Doom or contributing a few dollars to our coffee fund. Through July I’m running a 20 percent discount on subscriptions — so you can support my work for as little as $4.80 a month. - jg***A California judge has confirmed what any reasonable person has known for weeks now: the immigration raids being carried out by Donald Trump’s masked agents are unconstitutional. In a functioning democracy, society can simply not abide by what are effectively secret police running around and detaining and arresting undocumented immigrants and U.S. citizens alike.The judge, a Biden appointee named Maame Ewusi-Mensaah Frimpong, which the right is up in arms about, noted the obvious: what has been happening in Los Angeles and elsewhere is a clear violation of Americans’ rights against improper search and seizure. Frimpong found that there was no “official” policy when it came to these “roving patrols.” In other words, in a legal sense this is all exactly what it has looked like all along: an unconstitutional, race-based operation by a paramilitary organization that has acted with impunity for the better part of two months now. The U.S. government, through its immigration agents on the streets, has effectively been engaged in widespread racial profiling.The 52-page ruling came down on Friday night and requires the government to stop conducting these raids as they’re currently being carried out. That means that agents have to have an actual reason for stopping someone — other than that they look Mexican, speak Spanish or with a Spanish accent, or are sitting in a certain location — for immigration enforcement operations. Frimpong’s temporary injunctive order (TRO) also requires the government to provide detainees being held in poor conditions in the basement of the federal building in downtown LA better access to attorneys.Frimpong granted the TRO based on a “fairly modest request” made by immigrant advocacy and workers’ rights organizations that filed a lawsuit against the government that Trump’s masked agents simply stop conducting an unconstitutional, racially discriminatory reign of terror.Some key findings from the ruling:* One man, a U.S, citizen, was improperly detained and had an immigration agent point a taser at his head — another instance of this troubling tactic, which I touched on in late June, which is not an approved use of force for any law enforcement agency I’ve ever reported on* Immigration agents took a U.S. citizen’s ID and did not return it* The government used protests and what they called “riots” as a pretext to deny detainees access to their attorneys, going so far to say that “if ‘riots’ resumed” and a TRO preventing the government from arbitrarily detaining whomever they liked was issued, immigration agencies at the federal building “would not be able to protect their employees and the detainees” there. Frimpong shot down this argument, saying that “granting access to counsel is not the same as granting unrestricted access to the public,” nor was “permitting confidential” phone calls between attorneys and detainees the same as letting protesters in the front door of the federal building.* The government had a week to present evidence to the court that it was basing its arrests and detention of people on something other than that they believed undocumented immigrants were present at certain locations ,but failed to do so.* The government also couldn’t explain why immigrants and citizens who ran away frightened by Trump’s secret police represented “reasonable suspicion.” “Defendants do not explain why fleeing upon seeing unidentified masked men with guns exiting from tinted cars without license plates raises suspicion,” Frimpong wrote.* The government also couldn’t explain how it was identifying possible undocumented immigrants to stop based on any factors other than where they were and what they looked like. “Defendants do not explain why being at a bus stop in Pasadena raises suspicion that [targets] may be undocumented immigrants.”* The government argued that it would have to retrain its agents if the TRO were issued — meaning that the agents are currently either not educated on the basics of constitutional rights against improper search and seizure. Or, what is obviously more likely the case, agents on the streets of LA and elsewhere simply do not care about these rights as they strive to reach immigrant arrest quotas that have been handed down from the White House.Towards the end of Frimpong’s order, the judge says something that should also be very obvious to Americans of any political persuasion with a love and appreciation for personal liberty: “Requiring law enforcement to comply with the Constitution does not prevent law enforcement from enforcing the law.”***Whether the Trump administration, DHS and its immigration agents on the ground will actually comply with Frimpong’s order is an open question. I’m guessing there’s a Trump rampage coming on this TRO pretty soon, probably to be accompanied by a screed from White House Press Secretary Caroline Leavitt on Monday decrying the order as a move by a “liberal activist” judge preventing immigration agents from doing their jobs. By Saturday afternoon, reliable Trump sycophant Rep. Andy Biggs had already begun the proselytizing on behalf of the administration’s unconstitutional behavior:Defiance of the order could — and in my mind, should — bring about a troubling but necessary scenario in which local law enforcement in Los Angeles and elsewhere begins to stop Trump’s masked immigration agents from violating the constitutional rights of citizens and immigrants under the purported protection and jurisdiction of agencies like the Los Angeles Police Department.This scenario is the stuff of autocratic regimes: provincial law enforcement in direct conflict with other law enforcement or military is something typically reserved for failing or failed states. But in the interest of trying to stop the United States from becoming the latter, that difficult choice between allowing the federal government to continue violating the rights of citizens and utilizing local law enforcement to enforce the law may become necessary. If Trump’s immigration agents ignore Frimpong’s order, I think it’s time for local law enforcement to step up and uphold their oaths to the constitution — because the Trump administration, DHS, ICE and agents on the ground clearly will not.Please follow AD on our social media for a little more doom to your scroll. That’s what we all need, right?* Bluesky - @americandoom.bsky.social* TikTok - @americandoom_* YouTube - @americandoom_* Instagram - @americandoom_* X - @americandoom_* Facebook*** This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.american-doom.com/subscribe

For anyone who may have missed it, you can watch my conversation with the Texas investigative journalist Steven Monacelli from Friday’s live Doom broadcast. I also wanted to flag a few things that I wasn’t able to get to during this very busy week. If you appreciate my work staying on top of all of the madness, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription or throwing a few bucks my way. I’m still running the Fighting Season discount, which gets you a 20 percent discount to Doom subscriptions. Your support keeps my work free for everyone who can’t afford to chip in, and helps fund my investigations and reporting trips to places like Los Angeles, which is still reeling from the violence that the Trump administration is inflicting on the city through immigration raids, and what I think can be fairly considered straight-up attacks on Americans. Now, some notes from the ongoing transition of American life into full-fledged authoritarianism…Trump’s Justice Department and FTC are infiltrating the relationship between parents, doctors and trans AmericansFrom the Times: The Justice Department has issued subpoenas demanding confidential patient information from more than 20 doctors and hospitals that provide gender-related treatments to minors, according to officials with knowledge of the move.The action marks a new turn in the Trump administration’s efforts to limit transgender medical care. Most of the subpoenas, issued through the consumer protection unit of the department’s civil division, attempt to pierce powerful federal confidentiality protections for patients and their medical providers.The FTC is also involved in the ideological battle against trans Americans. Check this illuminating thread on a meeting held Wednesday in which officials alleged that gender-affirming care involves “deceptive trade practices.”Meanwhile, a trans migrant from Mexico who was raped by cartel members there and fled the country to seek asylum remains in solitary confinement in a mens detention center thanks to a Trump executive order. I’ll have more on this very troubling story soon. The migrant was arrested by ICE when she showed up to her immigration court hearing. A Trump executive order that has forced trans women to be transferred to mens prisons — which a judge had put a temporary restraining order on — has forced the migrant woman to stay in solitary confinement for her own safety. This week, her lawyers alleged that ICE forced the woman to sign documents that she didn’t understand and that could expedite her removal from the country. Georgia’s Republican kingmaker accused of half-million Ponzi scheme — and the money went to big name GOP politiciansThe AJC has the scoop on an SEC investigation of Brant Frost, who along with his family is one of the most powerful figures in Georgia Republican politics. Frost was at the top of a Ponzi scheme that saw more than $500,000 laundered to GOP politicians like Ted Cruz, Chip Roy, Matt Gaetz, and more, as well as the House Freedom Caucus. Remember what I said the other day? A small authoritarian government is an inherently corrupt one? Yeah, that.Trump’s Justice Department lawyers purposefully lied about immigration flightsThe lawyers were texting in court about how one of them had just lied to a judge that the flights were no longer taking place when they were. Now, a former Justice Department lawyer who dutifully worked on Trump’s immigration agenda during the first Trump administration is blowing the whistle, as Lawrence O’Donnell explained Thursday night.Trump’s masked immigration agents vow to continue their occupation and attacks in Los Angeles“Better get used to us now, because this is going to be normal very soon.” Those were the words of Border Patrol’s Greg Bovino, who was responding to LA Mayor Karen Bass’ demands that Trump’s masked and violent immigration agents stop terrorizing her city. The threat is well understood, Mr. Bovino. Meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security is working with local law enforcement agencies to criminalize many protest practices, Wired reports. If this were happening in another country we’d call it what it clearly is: an attempt by the federal government to crush opposition and stifle dissent. DHS is led, of course, by Secretary Kristi Noem. Noem dragged her feet when allocating resources to Kerr County, Texas for days as the missing and dead piled up. Meanwhile, Noem was busy posting to Instagram to ask her supporters which official portrait of her they liked the best. Maybe this one? I know it’s summer and folks are trying to take some time off but the authoritarians in charge of our federal government are plowing ahead. Please consider throwing a few dollars to Doom to help us stay on top of the madness. Until next time. - jg***Please follow AD on our social media for a little more doom to your scroll. That’s what we all need, right?* Bluesky - @americandoom.bsky.social* TikTok - @americandoom_* YouTube - @americandoom_* Instagram - @americandoom_* X - @americandoom_* Facebook This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.american-doom.com/subscribe

If you want to ante up to a paid subscription or drop a few dollars in the Doom Coffee Fund, I sure would appreciate it. There’s a lot of news lately — I know, it’s summer and we’re supposed to be relaxing — and I’m tracking a lot of things. Election denialism and rampant authoritarianism within the government are combining to present some very real threats to democracy that the seasons care not about. More on that later. Now, on to some news…***Republican lawmakers in Texas passed on providing more funding for the kind of emergency alert systems that might have saved some of the more than 100 lives that were lost at Camp Mystic in Kerr County. As usual, Republicans in the Lone Star state — goaded on by their largely conservative electorate — were worried about keeping their belts tightened. This, despite a $24 billion budget surplus that the state enjoys. But the failures don’t end there. Local officials allowed the camp to build a group of new cabins in a federally-designated flood zone — the exact type of thing that happens when anti-regulation Republicans are put in charge of local governments. This is what electing Republicans gets you. I say this with no pleasure: kids are dead, families are in mourning, tragedy abounds. Making matters worse, much of this tragic death and destruction looks like it could have been avoided if competent, well-meaning professionals who care about more than the money in their pockets had greater power in Texas. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. It’s helpful to think of what happened in Kerr County as a preview of the future for the rest of America, should Republicans continue to be allowed to carry out their minimal-government philosophy thanks to a majority in Congress, possession of the White House, and strong numbers across the judiciary. You get what you vote for — and in this case, Americans are getting a political party that sees the destruction of government as its biggest selling point and primary goal. Contrary to popular Republican belief, it’s not big government that is inherently corrupt, it’s small government, like the kind our federal bureaucracy is being made into under the second Trump administration. When everything has to go through the person at the top, nothing really gets done. That’s why Trump is effectively clueless as to what’s actually happening within his own administration, as Lawrence O’Donnell pointed out Wednesday night.When confronted by a reporter with the fact that Trump wasn’t aware that munitions shipments to Ukraine had been suspended, Trump lied — or bumbled, or more accurately, rambled his way through an answer that ended with saying that he’d “most likely give the order” if something like withholding weapons shipments to an ally were carried out. “I’d most likely give the order.” When a president and a government only have to answer to the feelings of less than one-third of Americans — the percentage of the population that voted for Trump — how can any of us expect that government to perform effectively? It cannot. A government run by the few will be inherently corrupt because it limits the amount of stakeholders from across society from contributing their expertise and manpower. A government run by an even more select few — like the coalition of hard-right authoritarians and unbelievably wealthy businessmen who populate the Trump administration — will be even more corrupt. It will only be effective in achieving things that benefit those people, which is to say, Trump’s government will never help out the average American — even if that American voted for Trump.Sadly, the people of Kerr County have learned this lesson in the most tragic way possible. Whether they, all of Texas, and the rest of America will learn that lesson, will begin to become more clear next year. ***Please follow AD on our social media for a little more doom to your scroll. That’s what we all need, right?* Bluesky - @americandoom.bsky.social* TikTok - @americandoom_* YouTube - @americandoom_* Instagram - @americandoom_* X - @americandoom_* Facebook This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.american-doom.com/subscribe

Do you believe Pam Bondi when she says it wasn’t the list she was talking about on Fox News in February, but the Epstein case in general? My bullshit detector started vibrating the whole house when I heard her fib the other day. I laughed. It is laughable! This is the type of stuff — bumbling and obvious lies over gussied-up claims that should have never been made — that you’d see a small town mayor make. (Speaking of, remember this one from the stacks?) Instead, it’s the Attorney General of the United States, getting crossed up by a reporter on live TV. Anyway, this was always coming because Epstein was just another crumb that Trump and his people handed to their supporters to get their votes. Now that they have the power granted to them by (our still somewhat functioning) elections, they don’t care to give them anymore crumbs.But don’t believe the hype that Trump’s MAGA base or his “coalition” of conservatives, fascists, and everyday Americans who very proudly don’t read the news is fading. Just because Alex Jones cried on Tik Tok doesn’t mean that any of these people are going anywhere. They’ll support him to the last man. Trump could come and take all of their belongings — leaving them with an empty bag of hopes and dreams — and they’d still believe he was doing it for them.This empty bag was supposed to contain all the secrets of Jeffrey Epstein that proved their suspicions about liberal pedophiles. Trump sold them that bad bill of goods and then bailed, like he always does. You get what you pay for — or in this case, what you vote for. *** This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.american-doom.com/subscribe

Note: Still got that Fighting Season discount going. Get 20 percent off subscriptions to American Doom so I can buy a steak this weekend. On to the news…***Good Wednesday morning. Hot as hell here in Savannah. I took a brief cruise through some sources yesterday and after only an hour or two I had enough material to reach an unsurprising conclusion: the Republican party is already hard at work trying to rig the midterm elections in their favor. I really wish I wasn’t already talking about elections again but the GOP just can’t keep their hands off the process. From the promise of politically-motivated prosecutions of election officials from Trump’s Justice Department to the current (and legally questionable) prosecution of voting rights groups in Texas, Republicans are laying the lawfare groundwork for suppressing the vote and silencing opponents who are, in most cases, simply competent public servants who believe in free and fair elections. As has been increasingly apparent over the last five years, Republicans do not believe in this tenet of representative democracy. Last week, the Times reported that the Justice Department is exploring criminal prosecutions of state and local election officials for failure to properly secure election infrastructure — a part of a sweeping strategy to suppress free and fair elections that harkens back to Project 2025. You might remember this from my story about the right’s plans to prosecute Democratic election officials at Rolling Stone in April.This is quite rich considering a few things. First, the only actual breaches of election equipment in recent history came at the hands of Republicans. In Coffee County, Trump-supporting members of the election board gave access to voting machines and other election equipment to the Trump campaign, its lawyers, and probably Mike Lindell, although his direct involvement has never been specifically proven. Also in Georgia, in Spalding County, lawyers from that same firm were in talks with Trump-supporting election officials there to access voting machines in their attempt to overturn the 2020 election.If all that weren’t enough to prove my point, since taking office for the second time, Trump has gutted the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA. CISA is responsible for helping state and local election officials secure their equipment against bad actors like Russian hackers. Trump has reduced CISA’s abilities to perform these tasks, which according to Democratic election officials like Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, have made our election systems less secure.As usual, Texas is leading the way in the GOP’s aggressive legal efforts to suppress voter turnout and stifle dissent. There, a politically-motivated prosecution of voting rights groups signals bad things ahead for free elections. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has indicted nine voting rights advocates for helping voters turn in their ballots — despite the fact that courts are up in the air whether these actions even constitute the “ballot-harvesting” crime that Paxton alleges. (Another way to think of their actions is that they were simply helping seniors navigate the complicated mail-in ballot process.)Paxton’s efforts to suppress voting are mirrored elsewhere, like in North Carolina where Republican legislators are trying to pass a bill that would prohibit election officials from “promoting voter turnout.” (That Republicans are explicitly against promoting voter turnout should tell you everything you need to know about their support for representative democracy.) The bill would also further entrench partisan politics in the electoral process by expanding the number of political appointments at the State Board of Elections. Meanwhile, Marjorie Taylor Greene is leading efforts to remove immigrants from the U.S. census count. This will result in fewer congressional seats for swing states with large immigrant populations like Georgia and North Carolina. Whether Republicans like it or not, undocumented immigrants live here — and they are actual human beings. By not counting them in the census, Republicans are essentially erasing our neighbors, the people who often cook our food, clean our homes, tend to our lawns. This is just another way to establish minority rule.And to wrap things up for now, Burt Jones is running for governor of Georgia. For those who might have forgotten, Jones is an avowed election denier who was deeply involved with the illegal scheme to have fake electoral college electors hand over their votes to Trump in 2020. Jones avoided legal consequences for his role in the fake electors scheme because the prosecutor who had charged him, Fani Willis, was deemed to have a conflict of interest because she once donated to the campaign of Jones’ political opponent. ***Please follow AD on our social media for a little more doom to your scroll. That’s what we all need, right?* Bluesky - @americandoom.bsky.social* TikTok - @americandoom_* YouTube - @americandoom_* Instagram - @americandoom_* X - @americandoom_* Facebook This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.american-doom.com/subscribe

Hey, I’m still running that Fighting Season discount where you can get 20 percent off subscriptions to American Doom. Also, you can throw a few bucks my way at the Doom Coffee Fund so I can stay hydrated while holding the authoritarian right accountable. Now, on to the news…Good Monday morning and welcome back to the show. I spent most of this weekend gloriously offline but pulled up my phone Sunday morning to see the latest from the craziest wing of the craziest political party in American history. Yes, the batshit brigade of the GOP is all over the flooding in Texas, working hard to right the wrong of the many young children who died there. Marjorie Taylor Greene and her fellow Georgian, a woman named Kandiss Taylor who you might remember running for governor under the campaign slogan “Jesus, Guns and Babies,” believe that cloud-seeding and geo-engineering are responsible for the deadly flooding in Texas.These are two woman who — along with the entirety of the Republican party — consistently lecture Americans who call for gun control in the wake of mass shootings. The aftermath of deadly gun violence is simply not the time to “politicize” a tragedy and restrict Americans’ access to weapons like military-grade assault rifles, they say. It’s interesting, then, to watch them spring into action in the wake of the deadly Texas floods. Taylor spend some time over the weekend writing about how she supports legislation in states other than the Georgia that would ban the practice of geo-engineering. (Just FYI: 10 states use cloud-seeding and other forms of geo-engineering on what the Government Accountability Office describes as a pretty limited basis to induce more rainfall and prevent hail.) Greene touted a bill she’s working on that would make geo-engineering a crime — despite the fact that it almost surely helps out a lot of farmers who she counts on for support.Anyway, Taylor is an up-and-coming Greene clone who has announced her bid for Georgia’s First Congressional District — my district, as it happens. She probably won’t win but… who knows? Donald Trump is president. As far as I know, no Georgia Democrat has announced their intention to run to replace Rep. Buddy Carter, who would like to replace Sen. Jon Ossoff.Hate to say it, but I’ll probably have to put my political reporter hat on pretty soon in order to start covering these races. Meantime, I’m keeping my eye on immigration matters and a whole lot else. If you have any tips on anything related to authoritarian rumblings — election denialism, improper use of the military, extremism in law enforcement, illegal immigration practices — I’m all ears. ***On a completely different note, I’m doing quite a bit more music these days now that all my time isn’t taken up by book work, elections, etc. (The constitutional crisis is slow-rolling so I figure I can justify spending some time not steeped in the news.) If you want to check out my band, the Savannah Morning Blues, you can access all our social channels and hear our music at this link. For those of you on YouTube, you can subscribe to SMB’s page there, as well as American Doom’s home on YouTube. ***Please follow AD on our social media for a little more doom to your scroll. That’s what we all need, right?* Bluesky - @americandoom.bsky.social* TikTok - @americandoom_* YouTube - @americandoom_* Instagram - @americandoom_* X - @americandoom_* Facebook This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.american-doom.com/subscribe

It takes a lot of work to put together all the pieces like this. Last March, Rachel Maddow praised my ability to “connect the dots” with my investigation of local election officials throughout the country who support Trump’s election lies. But all this work digging up clues to what’s coming next in our new age of American authoritarianism isn’t easy — and is very time consuming. If you support this work, please consider a paid subscription to American Doom or contributing a few dollars to our coffee fund. I’ve extended the Fighting Season discount through July, so you can get 20 percent off the regular subscription cost. Paid subscribers can also get discounts by referring a friend and giving gift subscriptions. Thank you all for your support. - jg***Donald Trump has made it clear that he would like to strip Americans of their citizenship — and his loyalists at the Justice Department have now been given new tools to do so.A June 11 memo to all employees of the Justice Department’s Civil Division advises attorneys and staff to begin prioritizing “denaturalization” proceedings for several categories of naturalized citizens, which is just a more complicated way of saying Americans. Most disturbingly, the memo provides the government with the ability to strip citizenship away from virtually anyone it feels like.While the directive currently only applies to immigrants who have become citizens through the naturalization process, it isn’t difficult to imagine how easily this can — and likely will — creep toward efforts to strip citizenship away from natural born Americans.This writing has been on the wall for years. For all of our history, a key plank of American conservatism has been to establish rules about who actually gets to call themselves Americans. You see this in the culture wars — “real” Americans are the folks sitting at diners in the Midwest, being interviewed during an election year on Fox & Friends. Everyone else — like people who live in large cities — are to be considered part of an un-American insurgency. Obviously, the biggest determining factor of who gets to be American has to do with the color of your skin. Second to that is your politics: liberalism is not just un-American but anti-American. Over my lifetime I’ve watched as Republican politicians and their media allies have achieved great success in making “liberal” a dirty word, and making “conservative” synonymous with patriotism.What the June 11 memo from the Justice Department’s Civil Division makes clear is that any pretense of Trump’s mass deportation operation being directed at “criminal illegal immigrants” is just that — a fake-out, an excuse to expand the practice of determining who gets to be here based not on criminality but on an entirely different set of parameters that are defined by people like Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, and whomever has the most highly-rated show on Fox News at any given moment.That’s because the memo gives wide leverage for Justice Department lawyers and staff to initiate denaturalization proceedings. There is of course some language about how the government should focus on stripping citizenship away from objectively bad people like terrorists, sex offenders and violent criminals. But the memo makes clear that the Justice Department has carte blanche to denaturalize virtually anyone it wants, for virtually any reason government lawyers can come up with.These reasons include stripping citizenship from anyone who poses a “potential” danger to national security or are somehow involved in a “nexus” to terrorism. You can see how quickly this can — and almost surely will — be abused by Trump loyalists within the Justice Department.The memo also orders the Justice Department to pursue denaturalization of anyone who has “acquired naturalization through fraud,” which could apply to transgendered people — a new piece of evidence in growing suspicions among trans Americans that the Trump administration is effectively trying to criminalize being trans.Your support keeps American Doom free for all our readers wanting to stay on top of authoritarian threats. Paid subscriptions make this possible.Beyond this already-vague language, the memo directs Justice Department attorneys to pursue denaturalization proceedings against anyone with “pending criminal charges,” even “if those charges do not fit” in categories of immigrants like those who have committed violent crimes. Government attorneys can also strip citizenship from anyone it “determines to be sufficiently important to pursue.”“These categories are intended to guide the Civil Division in prioritizing which cases to pursue; however, these categories do not limit the Civil Division from pursuing any particular case, nor are they listed in a particular order of importance,” the memo reads, in part. “Further, the Civil Division retains the discretion to pursue cases outside of these categories as it determines appropriate. The assignment of denaturalization cases may be made across sections or units based on experience, subject-matter expertise, and the overall needs of the Civil Division.”In other words: denaturalize anyone you want.***Stripping away citizenship of Trump criticsWith a vengeful strongman at the helm, this is going to get out of hand quickly. In fact it already has. We only need to look at the cases of Mahmoud Khalil and Reyna Ozturk, two university students who spoke out against the war in Gaza and who were subsequently black-bagged by immigration agents before being ordered released by judges.Marco Rubio’s State Department led those efforts, which were likely unconstitutional. Threats — both carried out and implied — to detain, deport or denaturalize anyone Donald Trump simply doesn’t like are right at home in the American right’s forever war of determining who is a loyal American and who is not (the constitution be damned). The difference now is, the president and those behind him wielding the logistical power of government agencies like the DOJ, people like Russell Vought and Stephen Miller, are actually putting policies in place that will bring Trump’s authoritarian dreams into the realm of reality.This includes masked cops on American streets, terrorizing immigrant communities and detaining them at will, as well as new facilities to hold scores of migrants as part of Trump’s mass deportation initiative. It also includes people like Rep. Andy Ogles asking the Justice Department to explore denaturalizing Zohran Mamdani. In just the last 24 hours, Trump has glommed onto this idea, rolling out a Trumpian classic of those ever-helpful but always-anonymous “people” who tell him things. In this case, those “people are saying he’s here illegally.”Trump’s vague threat to deport Mamdani came during a visit to a new immigration detention facility in Florida, where he once again mused about deporting Americans who have been convicted of crimes — just another group of citizens he would like to remove from the country. As of the June 11 DOJ memo, the Trump administration’s efforts to decide who is American and who is not also include the memo’s broad directive to strip citizenship away from pretty much anyone, for pretty much any reason. I imagine this includes criticizing Trump himself — an offense that several tourists and others traveling to the U.S. have said resulted in their detention and denial of entry.But for me, one of the most eye-raising parts of the memo comes in the ninth category of immigrants whose denaturalization should be prioritized by the government — those who have “acquired naturalization through government corruption, fraud, or material misrepresentation.” This broad language could be applied to lots of classes of naturalized citizens, including the trans community.***Targeting trans immigrantsFirst, “government corruption” is extremely broad. If I had to guess, I’d say that this will be applied to asylum-seekers who were granted temporary or other protective status during the Biden administration — which government lawyers under Trump will claim improperly granted asylum to immigrants as part of a “corrupt” scheme to import Democratic voters. (This argument has been made by Trump and many, many others for years now, but it’s not hard to imagine it being made in court in order to support the administration's efforts to continue removing asylum-seekers.)But what to make of immigrants who were naturalized through “fraud or material misrepresentation?” Thankfully, we have a State Department cable (above) from February to shed some light on what that could mean. Under the guise of transgendered people seeking to enter the country for sporting competitions, the cable provides direction on how to deny them entry.The cable says that any immigrant or traveler whose self-identified sex doesn’t match their sex at birth on government documents like passports is making a “misrepresentation,” and should therefore be denied entry into the United States. Trans advocates have told me they believe this is an important and troubling step toward charging trans immigrants and even trans citizens with fraud for “misrepresenting” their sex.If that’s the case, the June 11 Justice Department memo would allow government lawyers to strip citizenship away from trans people whose current sex does not match their sex at birth, as defined on government documents.Hanging over all of this is the Supreme Court’s decision on birthright citizenship, which allowed the Trump administration to continue to pursue undoing a law that provides citizenship for anyone born in the United States. If birthright citizenship is done away with, does that mean even those of us who were born here will have to go through some new, yet-to-be contrived naturalization process? If that’s the case, the June 11 Justice Department memo makes clear that the government has the discretion to deny citizenship — or take it away — from virtually anyone they like.***Please follow AD on our social media for a little more doom to your scroll. That’s what we all need, right?* Bluesky - @americandoom.bsky.social* TikTok - @americandoom_* YouTube - @americandoom_* Instagram - @americandoom_* X - @americandoom_* Facebook This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.american-doom.com/subscribe

We’re in it, folks. I say that with no pleasure, but what no reasonable person would describe as anything other than obvious authoritarianism has arrived in the form of secret police on American streets and military involvement in domestic matters. The system is failing. Much of the mainstream press continues to bury its head in the sand over this reality, so if you have the ability, please consider throwing a few dollars our way for a paid subscription to American Doom or our coffee fund. Your support keeps this newsletter free for everyone out there trying to stay on top of the madness. - jg***In one video, agents tackle a man in downtown Los Angeles, pinning him to the ground. An agent then puts the business end of a taser to the man’s head before turning it on a woman filming the scene with her phone. The agent points the taser at the woman’s face.In another video, agents break the window of a box truck to nab a woman sitting behind the wheel. The man behind the camera — his phone — says, “Are you serious, bro?” and is then taken down by agents. The woman in the truck was a tamales vendor who has been in the United States for 25 years. The man behind the camera was a U.S. citizen who was detained and then released.Another tamales vendor, an elderly woman named Matilde, had a heart attack when masked agents ripped her from a van. Immigration agents then arrested a U.S. citizen who was filming the incident, telling him that he was “never getting out” and that he had “better get a good lawyer.”Of course, you have probably seen the video of Narciso Barranco, a landscaper and father of three Marines, being pinned to the ground and punched in the face by immigration agents.These are just a few examples of the campaign of terror that immigration agents are carrying out on American streets. You can see more at a piece I have out today at Aaron Rupar’s Public Notice newsletter. Gone is any pretense that the Trump administration’s mass deportation plan has anything to do with undocumented immigrants who have committed crimes. Instead, agents wearing masks to conceal their faces and bulletproof vests, tactical gear and bearing assault rifles, are taking down elderly tamales vendors, landscapers, construction workers and apparently any brown person they feel like stopping on a given day.If you support my work in tracking all of these troubling developments, please consider a paid subscription to American Doom. I’m an independent journalist and your support helps me pay the bills.In some cases, it’s not even clear who these agents are. LA Mayor Karen Bass noted this week that some agents are wearing generic bulletproof vests that can be purchased online. Concern that DHS has deputized corrections officers and even bounty hunters to carry out immigration enforcement is growing. In a photo released by DHS a few weeks back, an agent is seen wearing a hat with the logo of the U.S. Army’s Psychological Operations division. I don’t know of a more clear example of authoritarianism than masked agents — secret police, effectively — rounding up people based on their ethnicity, and then threatening, arresting or detaining even U.S. citizens who try to get in the way. After all these years covering the growing extremism of the American right, police brutality, and civil unrest, it seems like we have finally arrived: authoritarianism is here, and the only question that remains is what we are going to do about it.I’m not saying anyone should attack a cop or an immigration agent. I’m saying that if you see these actions taking place, you should document the incident. Each day, Americans with backbones and morals should be publicly shaming any immigration agent or member of law enforcement involved with these actions.Preventing American authoritarianism from going any further requires us to make the men and women carrying out these actions pay a societal cost for them. They should be ostracized from their friends and families. They should be made to feel ashamed for what they are doing, because what they are doing is quite simply wrong. They should not be allowed to get jobs in local law enforcement when they leave their work as immigration agents. They should be forced into the fringes of society, and perhaps even have no choice but to work the same low-paying, thankless jobs that immigrants hold. The time for excuses — they’re just following orders; they have bills to pay and families to feed — has passed. Put simply: anyone who is working on behalf of the Trump administration’s mass deportation plan, from DHS Secretary Kristi Noem on down to the agents on the ground inflicting fear and chaos on the streets of Los Angeles and elsewhere, can no longer have a place in our society until they repent for their actions.This is already happening in LA and elsewhere, where everyday citizens are standing up to agents as they violently detain harmless immigrants. Each day, a new round of videos emerges showing Americans doing the right thing — shaming the agents on the ground and in some cases preventing them from carrying out the often illegal detainments in which they’re engaged. More of this peaceful resistance will be required.More on authoritarianism from American Doom* Autocratization in action* New American fascism and competitive authoritarianism, with Steven Monacelli* Authoritarian sirens from Day One* How we live now - What the beginnings of authoritarianism feel like Those of us who grew up in the aftermath of 9/11 will remember the “See something, say something” mindset that required all of us to keep our eyes open for anyone wanting to do harm to our fellow countrymen. That same mindset is required of us now, but unfortunately must be applied to many of our fellow Americans, who have lost their way and are engaged in an unconstitutional and immoral campaign of terror against immigrants.Courts ceding power, military involvement in domestic law enforcement***It’s certainly distressing that it’s gotten to this point. For a while, I thought the systems were holding relatively well, but I no longer believe that’s the case. In recent weeks, the Trump administration’s attacks on the independence of the judicial branch and the failure of the courts to act as a check against the regime’s authoritarian assault on democracy have made it clear that street-level resistance and electoral upheaval are the only ways out of this mess.The conservative majority on the Supreme Court has been responsible for three unsigned orders in recent months that grant the president more power and discretion over removing immigrants than the constitution allows. In the most recent of these unsigned orders — which are supposed to be used only in emergency cases but seem to be increasing — the court’s conservative majority essentially did away with the due process rights of noncitizens. Now, the Trump administration is free to send immigrants its agents detain to whatever country it pleases — even if the immigrant has no connection to that country. This includes sending immigrants from south and central America to places like Libya and South Sudan, countries in the midst of government upheaval and civil war.To give a real-world example of why this matters, one of the immigrants at the center of the dispute over what’s known as third-country removals, a gay man, was locked in a room and repeatedly raped by other men in Guatemala. He was only released when his sister paid a ransom. After detaining the man, the Trump administration then facilitated his deportation back to Guatemala.The court’s Republican appointees granted this sweeping power to the Trump administration to deport immigrants wherever it likes despite the fact that Justice Department lawyers had clearly violated lower court orders. The New York Times has reported that DOJ officials purposefully defied judges by sending immigrants to third countries and elsewhere via deportation flights, but the Supreme Court’s conservative justices let it slide.The court also recently granted sweeping immunity to immigration agents like those terrorizing American streets from being sued for violating the constitutional rights of citizens and noncitizens alike. This removes another mechanism for holding the Trump administration and its agents accountable for their actions. In early June, the court also sided with the Trump administration — thus giving the president more power over immigration matters — in allowing the administration to remove protections for Cubans, Nicaraguans, Venezuelans and Haitians fleeing unrest and government oppression in those countries.While the Supreme Court has been busy granting Trump more and more power over everything from immigration to blanket immunity for any crimes he or his administration may commit while in office, the creep of the administration’s foot soldiers into everyday American life has continued. Masked immigration agents are showing up not just in Los Angeles, but in cities and towns across the country. The expansion of the military to deal with domestic matters is also increasing — and not just in the form of U.S. Marines guarding the federal building in downtown LA, where many immigrants are being held in cramped conditions, and immigration lawyers are often prevented from seeing their clients for hours on end.Members of Trump’s federalized California National Guard — which a three-judge panel in federal court determined the president was within his rights to do — is now helping the DEA with drug busts. So, in addition to masked, secret police roaming American streets, we now have members of the military involved with both immigration and domestic law enforcement operations. It’s hard to imagine a more troubling sign of the arrival of authoritarianism than that.But in case you’re still on the fence, just look up “ICE raids” on any given social media platform for more evidence of the moment at which we have arrived.***Please follow AD on our social media for a little more doom to your scroll. That’s what we all need, right?* Bluesky - @americandoom.bsky.social* TikTok - @americandoom_* YouTube - @americandoom_* Instagram - @americandoom_* X - @americandoom_* Facebook This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.american-doom.com/subscribe

The following was written before we bombed Iran. This development is cataclysmic for a variety of reasons, but for the purposes of this newsletter — which chronicles the frontlines of America’s wars against itself, waged on behalf of right-wing authoritarianism — last night’s military incursion into Iran presents more opportunities for Trump and the authoritarian right to strengthen their grip on power and control. The future threat of Islamic extremism in response to last night’s attack will be used as pretext to further erode our civil liberties and stifle dissent. Things are almost sure to get worse, I hate to say. ***This first paragraph is where I would set up what is known in journalism as the anecdotal lede. I would describe something that is seemingly unrelated to the rest of what you’re about to read, but in a very clever way I would tie it all together. The anecdotal lede would become part of a metaphor for the subject matter of this piece, maybe even a lesson I’ve learned or a discovery I’ve made.Wrapping it all up, the end of this column — “the kicker,” as we call it — would harken back to the lede, completing a circular path that was taught to me by the star columnist at my hometown newspaper, which is now mostly dead. If I were interested in doing this, I might talk about the house projects I’ve completed in the last month, or re-reading Moby Dick, or playing and writing a lot of music — all of which has consumed my time since I’ve been away from the day-to-day business of this newsletter. I would certainly find a clever way to reach a profound conclusion about modern American life from the inglorious work of replacing faucets and cleaning bathroom tile. But I’m not interested in that because it doesn’t feel honest. That’s because for the first time in my journalism career, I am truly questioning whether all of this is worth it. In a bigger sense, I’m questioning not just the merits of journalism as I’ve practiced it over the last two decades but also how I — and we — spend our time and energy.This is not directly about Trump or the forces of authoritarianism that threaten us. This is about the exhaustion of modern life — the hustle, the noise, the polarization, the addiction and distraction of social media and the Internet, the dumbing down of discourse, the victories of the stupid and evil, the volume of it all, and the general feeling of decline that I just can’t shake.All of this makes me want to focus more on what I can control and less on what is well beyond that. I can help out my neighbors and friends with daily tasks. I can make a nice dinner for my wife and take my dogs for a walk because they need to get out of the house. I cannot change the forces of a society that seems bent on its own destruction, and a people that seem to have largely abandoned everything from good taste in music to a societal foundation of reason and intellect.Part of this is because I’m 41-years-old, and have been at my job of being a journalist for most of the last 20 years. Before heading to Los Angeles, I saw a few new faces on cable news describing the situation on the ground there — another piece of evidence that there are generations coming behind me who both see the world differently than I do, and were not around to experience things like the past unrest that I’ve spent much of my career documenting. “Amateur hour,” I muttered to myself as I watched on Fox News as they interviewed an independent (and, I’m assuming, right-wing) journalist wearing a painting respirator and what looked like a batting helmet.Let me add to the feeling of dystopia by asking for your money in the middle of a post about how stuff like that feels strange. Thank you for your support!By the time I got to LA, I watched one of Fox’s correspondents scurry behind the police line for her live shot. She joined other members of the press in staying behind a line of police as they swept down a street, clearing protesters out of downtown ahead of an 8 p.m. curfew. I never attended journalism school so I don’t know if they teach this, but if you are behind the men with the guns who are shooting at unarmed civilians, you are on the wrong side to do your job as a journalist.Later, I watched a clip of the Fox correspondent explaining to the anchors in New York what was happening there. They asked her questions as if she were embedded with American soldiers storming Omaha Beach. The correspondent expressed much sympathy for the police who were, by then, indiscriminately firing on protesters who were mostly walking away, claiming that they had been throwing “boulders” at the cops. She assured Fox’s patriotic viewers that, even if protesters had their faces covered, that they would be found thanks to the surveillance cameras throughout the area.Don’t worry, folks at home, the agents of the state who are marching on the citizens will find those citizens and punish them.In places other than California, Republicans are trying to criminalize wearing masks at protests. At Savannah’s No Kings march, a woman was briefly detained by police for wearing a medical mask. Meanwhile, Republicans apparently see no issue with the masked ICE agents black-bagging undocumented immigrants and detaining U.S. citizens during their raids on American streets.As the corps of American journalism has been depleted, we’ve lost a lot of institutional knowledge. That includes everything from the simple fact that overly-aggressive law enforcement has been present not just for a very long time, but got a relatively recent moment in the spotlight when we learned of the militarization of American law enforcement in the wake of Ferguson just 11 years ago. If the institutional knowledge of newsrooms were more intact, there would be people around to tell younger reporters things like this, and that a painting respirator is not an effective way to avoid becoming incapacitated by tear gas. (For that, you’ll need something from the excellent line of Mira gas masks, which I swear by. And Mira, if you’re reading this, because I am 41-years-old and need money to fix things around my house, I will happily become a paid spokesperson and/or accept your advertising dollars.)The institutional knowledge of newsrooms has been depleted thanks to the degradation of the industry. Folks have also simply died. I recently lost two people who played a major role in my journalism career: Chuck Haga, the longtime columnist for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune and Grand Forks Herald, and Bill Kotsatos, the New York-based photojournalist. Chuck was there when I was fired from the Herald in 2013 and went into freelancing. He read and supported my work over the ensuing years. I met Bill in Ferguson the next year, and we spent much of the next few years together on the road covering police shootings and unrest.As the unrest in Los Angeles unfolded, Bill was not there for me to text to see what he thought about it — and whether he would meet me there, so we could once again do what we did best together.Bill and I had been in touch quite a bit in the last year as he was diagnosed with and quickly succumbed to pancreatic cancer. At the same time, he was reading the first draft of my book — in which he plays a large role — and looking through photos I wanted him to include in it. I flew to New York to attend his memorial, where his son and ex-wife put on an exhibition of his work. Just inside the door of the room where the exhibition was held was Bill’s bulletproof vest and helmet, which I hadn’t seen since they were on his body as we navigated a riot in 2016.Strangely, it was not at Bill’s memorial where my faith in journalism was restored — and that’s not anyone’s fault but my own. Bill would have understood the strangeness of what I and many other people are feeling. Still, in the middle of the unrest in downtown LA, which a more just world would have allowed Bill to join me for, I did consider that there is a path out of the troubling place we’ve found ourselves.But my work in LA is a very specific type of journalism, and not one that can be practiced all the time. That’s because, at least for now, this country is not experiencing street-level, violent upheaval all the time. Riots are relatively rare. So, I have to find a way to spend the rest of my time, and that work has left me wondering how effective traditional journalism can be in a country that seems to be bent on decline — and the path toward something better.***The failure of journalismI think it used to take much longer for a reporter to reach the point at which I’ve arrived, where I’m questioning whether journalism is not just a productive use of my time but whether it can achieve the ideological goals that lie at its core. Even completely objective journalism, which I have never really practiced but was the kind that Bill and many others pursue, is based in idealism. By seeking that “closest attainable version of the truth” there is an inherent belief that it will lead toward justice. I set out to nail bad guys not just because it feels good but because I hope that it will result in change. Over the years, my work has changed some things for the better, but that progress has begun to feel insufficient compared to the exhausting march of the American right and the decline it seems to be hastening. This is the part that is directly about Trump.He has given up the game in a way. That someone so obviously stupid and corrupt can achieve the heights of power that Trump has speaks to this sense of societal decline. Half of Americans who actually voted for Trump looked at his clear ignorance, heard his childish and abusive words, and witnessed his obvious disdain for everyone other than himself and chose to give him the power he now wields against the very people that voted for him. The many Americans who didn’t even bother to vote prove our decline is not just based on poor decision-making, but in self-obsessed laziness and a flawed or non-existent understanding of how the world works.All the journalism in the world couldn’t stop this country from continuing down the path of self-destruction. Seeing this firsthand, what evidence do I have that we can somehow turn this doomed ship around? When I look back on the positive changes that my journalism has made, each instance of progress is counteracted by regression.At one of my first newspaper jobs, in Northern Minnesota, a series of stories I wrote about Native American homeless people resulted in the creation of a 24-hour homeless shelter to help get people off the streets — and freezing to death, as my reporting revealed. Since then, with the relative exception of that small town, I have watched homelessness be largely criminalized, to say nothing of the Trump administration’s crackdown on programs that fund social services like those that help the unhoused.Around 2018, my reporting likely also played a role in pressuring ICE to release an Iraqi asylum-seeker. Do I need to explain how this has been counteracted in the ensuing years? Also around the same time, my reporting on former U.S. Rep. Chris Collins resulted in the House closing a loophole in the STOCK Act that allowed elected officials to invest in foreign IPOs. This was important because lawmakers could simultaneously pass laws that helped those companies, as Collins did. Now, insider trading among members of Congress and the Trump administration is a regular occurrence that barely elicits controversy.These are just a few examples of how I’ve reached the point, in less than 20 years in journalism, that used to take much longer to reach. The speed of the news cycle, the proliferation of social media, and the firehose of content have all quickened my path toward this feeling of defeat and exhaustion. But it’s more than just the feeling that my work — and the work of all American journalists — has largely failed to propel this country toward justice, peace and a better way of life than past generations.In this country, it seems that the social progress of my lifetime has been outpaced — even if only by a little bit and for the most part in the last 10 years — by regression and decline. Whether it’s the investigations that constantly reveal the corruption and ineptitude of Trump and everyone around him, or the day-to-day soundbite coverage that gives him and his people the airtime to expose themselves as the strange and hateful people that they are, all the journalism in the world couldn’t stop the past decade of regression and decline from taking place.***An overwhelming sense of being overwhelmedAt a time when it’s perhaps most necessary to be informed about all the bad shit that goes on each day in order to make a living, I find myself simply wanting to check out — and I know I’m not alone. In a world that values the quantity of creative content over its quality, am I allowed to say that? Am I allowed to say that I want you to pay me money to read what I’m writing about but that I don’t care to convince you to do so, and that I can’t guarantee whether you’ll get something to read in your inbox all the time? Am I allowed to also say that I don’t care to promote some of my work on social media because it’s simply exhausting and feels pointless? Because at this moment, that’s how I feel. It seems disingenuous to write this, then hop on over to all the social media platforms to say, “Here’s this thing I wrote about how everything is exhausting and I don’t care to put up a front anymore.”It seems insane to continue fighting in an ecosystem that prioritizes the churn over the thought, knowing that to participate in the churn often means having to be aware of all the things all the time. This apparent utter lack of presence seems like the opposite of what brings a sense of serenity to people. I often wonder what it would be like to live in a time and a place that’s just in that time and place. I wonder what it would be like to go back to a time in which I wasn’t able to know exactly what’s happening in another city because I don’t live in that city. Instead, we are everywhere at once, looking through what increasingly feels like the parlor wall in Fahrenheit 451, except that the escape mechanism that allows us to look at a beach in Tahiti while sitting at our desks somewhere else is in our hands all the time, not just in our living rooms.Understanding that no one is ever truly where they are anymore, powerful forces have abused the freedom and democratization that the Internet initially promised and have instead flattened modern life. This “tyranny of the algorithm” has led to a homogenization of even our physical spaces. The exploitation of the internet and social media algorithms naturally infiltrated our politics, which is why all politics is now national, not local, as the old adage went. Now, everything is culture war, from the cars we drive to clothes we wear and the coffee we drink.Simply living in our cities and towns and mostly only knowing about what’s going on where we live seems both very pleasant and impossible to achieve. Instead, the abusers of our modern information ecosystems have created a system that, for the most part, only allows the most extreme voices or those who participate in the firehose of content production to rise to the top. Inundated with this noise, we have all increased our tolerance to the point where the old amount of drugs don’t work anymore. We need more drugs — and stronger doses of them. This is how you get people voting for Trump and Marjorie Taylor-Greene. They are the shiny objects that stick out from the masses of reasonable, thoughtful, kind and hopeful people who don’t wake up each day thinking only of how they can get more of what they want.They, along with the endless promise of infinite social media scrolling, have rewired many people’s brains to consume in a way that was previously only understood by addicts and alcoholics in recovery, like myself. Except it doesn’t appear that most of us are seeking recovery.The irony of this lack of presence — where we’re all anywhere we want to be no matter where we actually are, or are getting sucked into things that the powerful abusers of the algorithm want us to — is that everything actually is about right now. Things that happened five days ago, let alone five years ago, are demolished by the unending flow of content that demands we look at what’s happening in this very moment. This is both the definition of news and one of the problems with journalism that has led us to this point: by bombarding the public with context-free content about what’s happening in the current moment, journalism often fails to explain that much of what we’re seeing has happened before. We know where the path that Trump and the American right are trying to lead us ends up, and it’s objectively not good for anyone who is not at the top of that power structure. (Like many authoritarian power structures, our current one is brittle and based on the whims of one man. This means that the structure is constantly shifting. People are in it and then they’re not. Because of this survival-of-the-fittest mentality within authoritarian politics, only the most craven and extreme can rise to the top, exacerbating the extremism of the policies that the regime seeks.)If all this feels brain-breaking, it probably is.***Dystopian blipsWhile navigating clouds of tear gas in Los Angeles, I was looking at my Google maps to see whether I was getting any closer to my hotel. (In a random stroke of luck, the police were pushing the crowds in just that direction. My long day of walking with protesters and fleeing police volleys had led me right back to where I began!) I closed the app to concentrate on the scene in front of me before getting a notification: “Check out top spots to eat near you.”This is what I call a dystopian blip. It’s a moment when technology’s invasion of convenience collides with the reality of the physical world. It’s ordering a Waymo in order to set it on fire during a protest, or thousands of phones buzzing at the same time with a notification to leave downtown LA because a riot is taking hold — a notification sent by the same government apparatus whose police largely initiated the riot itself. It’s all of us watching scenes of masked ICE agents scooping people up on our phones only to keep scrolling to see targeted content for whatever our personal algorithm has decided we should see.Combined with the obvious hypocrisy of our politics — the anti-government right supporting masked, secret police; police in Democratic cities doing the work of an authoritarian White House by clearing out protesters with a heavy hand — it can be difficult to separate reality from works of dystopian fiction. In an environment where reality can seem like fiction and even the most out-there fiction seems like it can’t adequately describe the absurdity of modern life, much of traditional journalism feels equally inadequate to protect us from what’s happening, and what’s coming next.I don’t know where this is all headed and that’s the point. What you’ve read here — if you’ve read it, and if you have, my god, thank you — would never be published in any of the publications that we think of as institutions of American journalism and public intellectualism. That’s because it doesn’t have a tight angle, a concise thesis. It’s also because those publications are still mostly playing by the same rules that got us into this mess. As institutions, they’re part of the mess themselves.So, it’s time for something new. I think that looks something like a popular uprising against technology overlords, corporate America, monied politics, traditional law enforcement, and media that is either ineffective or directly in cahoots with authoritarianism. It’s about supporting voices, organizations and movements not simply because they are the loudest and produce the most content, but because they have good ideas. The way out of everything that’s wrong with right now, and everything that’s wrong with where we’re headed, is to slow down and think.Imagine a world based on thought instead of reaction. Imagine a world where we simply create and don’t worry about whether or not the algorithm will pick it up — where things don’t have to fit in the neat little boxes that massive tech companies decide they should in order for us to simply make a living by doing what we love. Imagine having technology, media, and content work for us instead of the other way around. It won’t be easy but it will be worth it.The circular path of the old-school newspaper column works because it’s a bookend, and it cleverly and neatly wraps things up in a satisfying way. But it requires you to read until the end of the piece, which seems quaint in a world where we’ve trained our brains to only pay attention to something for a few seconds at a time. Maybe if more of us read things all the way through, we’d learn a lesson about where we’ve been, and make a discovery about where we can go.***Please follow AD on our social media for a little more doom to your scroll. That’s what we all need, right?* Bluesky - @americandoom.bsky.social* TikTok - @americandoom_* YouTube - @americandoom_* Instagram - @americandoom_* X - @americandoom_* Facebook This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.american-doom.com/subscribe

Kilmar Abrego Garcia is currently — as of the last court filing and the Trump regime’s word — residing in one of the worst prisons in the world in El Salvador. He’s there because of a mistake, lawyers representing the Trump administration have said. It was a mistake in the micro sense, but Garcia’s deportation and confinement in a Salvadoran hellhole are no accident: this is about punishment and pain.Today, Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) will travel to El Salvador to try to get Garcia back. This is something pretty brave in terms of American politics — he is standing up for an undocumented immigrant in Garcia, thereby doing what Republicans think will help them. You see, the Trump regime and vehemently anti-immigrant ghouls like Stephen Miller believe it’s in their electoral interest to have Democrats defending people like Garcia — who because of his skin color and where he’s from they naturally associate with being a bad guy. But Van Hollen doesn’t appear to care about any of that and is simply doing the right thing.Remember that? Remember when, regardless of party or whether it was politically advantageous, lawmakers would occasionally do what was right? Like John McCain telling one of his supporters that Barack Obama was a good man, or Obama being courteous and respectful to Trump. That all seems like a thing of the past now that the American right is engaged in a zero-sum, point-scoring game that rushes us ever closer to democratic decline. Meanwhile, people like Garcia get caught in the middle.American Doom is free but is not possible without the support of my subscribers. I’m an independent journalist and your paid subscriptions help keep me independent.Legal immigrants who have played by the rules are also getting the shaft under the Trump regime. Not only are Elon Musk and his pals lying about them getting Social Security benefits, as I reported two weeks ago for Rolling Stone, but now, Musk’s DOGE goons have classified legal immigrants as dead in a ham-fisted effort to cut them off from benefits they aren’t receiving. This will result in many legal immigrants not being able to get on-the-books jobs, access their bank accounts, and many of the other things that require having a Social Security number. The apparent hope is that by making them even more of second-class citizens, these immigrants will deport themselves. Meanwhile, Garcia has been sent to a place that is life-threatening for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that Garcia was granted some level of protective status by an immigration judge because he had fled El Salvador, fearing gangs like MS-13. Now, he’s in one of the worst prisons in the world right alongside of all of those gang members, and people like Trump, Stephen Miller, Marco Rubio, Karoline Leavitt and congressional Republicans are both lying about Garcia being a member of MS-13 and simultaneously saying, Fuck it. He deserves to be there anyway because he came here illegally.That’s some of where we’re at, but unfortunately there’s a lot more where all this comes from. To unpack this distressing case I caught up with Arturo Dominguez, who runs Decolonized Journalism, which you should immediately subscribe to. Arturo has a piece out today that explains how Garcia has gone from a random immigrant from El Salvador to the face of the Trump administration’s illegal and unethical immigration plans. ***Want to scroll more Doom? Why not:* Bluesky - @americandoom.bsky.social* TikTok - @americandoom_* YouTube - @americandoom_* Instagram - @americandoom_* X - @americandoom_* Facebook This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.american-doom.com/subscribe

Donald Trump is an existential threat not just to American democracy, but to our role as the world’s most prosperous and powerful nation. Many people have known this for a long time—Republicans have known this, as have decorated military generals who are lifelong conservatives. Americans of all political stripes, socioeconomic statuses and educational backgrounds know this. Democrats certainly know this.Which is why I am so confused as to why Al Green, the representative from Texas, was the only member of Congress and the only Democrat to forcefully protest Trump’s speech last night. Not long into Trump’s remarks, Green stood to interrupt the president, waving his cane. House Speaker Mike Johnson first called for order, then for Green’s removal.Outside the chambers, Green said he’d simply had enough. He told reporters he couldn’t stand by anymore as Trump claimed to be ushering the nation into a new “golden age” while working to cut services like Medicaid and Social Security.“You don’t have a mandate to cut Medicaid!” Green yelled before being removed, referencing Trump’s oft-cited claim of a mandate from the American electorate to do basically whatever he wants.That’s it. That’s all you need to know. One guy stood up and said this is enough, was kicked out, and now he’ll be in the history books as a footnote to this particular chapter in our ongoing story of decline.***If you appreciate the clarity of this brief story, please consider a paid subsciption to support the independent journalism of American Doom. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.american-doom.com/subscribe

Just a reminder that my work here is made possible by the support of paid subscribers. In the last week I’ve covered the militarization of immigration enforcement; UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s visit to the White House; the Trump-Zelenenskyy debacle; DOGE’s failure to find a single instance of fraud in the federal government; and DOGE’s work dismantling the Social Security Administration. If you appreciate me keeping up with the news—and breaking it—please consider a paid subscription to American Doom for as little as $5 a month, or contributing to our Doom Coffee Fund. Onward - jg***Last week, a video went viral that I think is a sad and troubling reflection not just of where we are, but where we’re headed. In it, Teresa Borrenpohl, an outspoken liberal in her community of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, is ripped from her seat at a Republican town hall by three private security guards. Nearby, Sheriff Bob Norris filmed the ordeal, threatening to pepper spray Borrenpohl.Now, I’ve discovered that Norris is deep into far-right belief systems. His online footprint shows a man who is up to his eyeballs in right-wing culture war battles and messaging, which you can read below at Public Notice.Private security acting with the approval of law enforcement is a troubling situation in any context, but it becomes more so in a political climate in which many members of law enforcement are openly supportive of the authoritarian tactics of Donald Trump and Republicans.It’s bad enough that Trump is talking about militarizing immigration enforcement and using the military to crack down on protests. Adding fuel to that fire is the support for and emboldening of private citizens to act as police themselves—vigilantes is a word that comes to mind. That seems like a recipe for widespread civil unrest and the actual denigration of law and order that Trump and Republicans claim to care so much about.In today’s episode of the American Doom Podcast, I speak to Laura Tenneson and Tamara Sines-Kermelis, two friends of Borrenpohl’s who witnessed the ordeal. ***Please follow AD on our social media for a little more doom to your scroll. That’s what we all need, right?* Bluesky - @americandoom.bsky.social* TikTok - @americandoom_* YouTube - @americandoom_* Instagram - @americandoom_* X - @americandoom_ This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.american-doom.com/subscribe

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy did the best he could, but there’s just no way to win — or even compromise — with American leadership this far afield from reasonable adult behavior. A day before the world watched Donald Trump and JD Vance ambush Zelenskyy in the Oval Office, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer had to negotiate the same environment — albeit one less fraught as the political and culture war hell that Zelenskyy walked into. Whether you’re Zelenskyy, or Starmer, or a Democratic or Republican member of Congress, the problem with negotiating with Trump is that it’s like negotiating with a terrorist. There can be no compromise with people whose only goal is to break things, and that’s exactly what Trump, Vance and congressional Republicans are doing. They have no plan other than to break the government, then divide the pieces amongst themselves, and allow the rest of us to fight for whatever is left.I know things are already crazy, but it’s probably going to get much worse. To support American Doom’s work cutting through the madness, please consider a paid subscription below.It’s an odd plan because it potentially reflects a complete lack of a sense of self-preservation. If Trump and his government-breaking toady, Elon Musk, succeed in dismantling Social Security as it appears they’re trying to do, it could result in older Americans — largely Republican voters —revolting against their elected officials. I think you’re starting to see that in the form of voters at town hall events in Republican districts speaking out against congressional Republicans. But the terrorists among us like Trump, Vance and their army of actual insurrectionists and far-right base don’t care about any of the negative consequences that could harm Americans if Musk’s breaking of the social safety net is effective. They just want to break, punish and inflict pain on anyone and everything they perceive as an enemy. In this way, they’re really are true belivers. They’re willing to sacrifice themselves for a higher cause. This makes them impossible to negotiate with, because they have nothing to fear. Still, we must try. This seemingly impossible scenario of having to negotiate with a madman is the position that Starmer was in when he walked into the White House just a few days ago. So, I wanted to get the British perspective on his visit from Daniel Bates, a British writer and journalist based in New York who has covered some of the biggest stories of the last decade. I met Dan in Ferguson a few days after Michael Brown was killed there in August 2014, and we’ve kept in touch ever since. These days, Dan spends a lot of time updating UK readers o court battles and other developments related to Jeffrey Epstein. I caught up with Dan about Starmer’s visit, what American abdication of responsibility in Ukraine means for Britain and Europe, and the latest debacle involving the White House, right-wing influencers, and documents tied to the Epstein case.***Please follow AD on our social media for a little more doom to your scroll. That’s what we all need, right?* Bluesky - @americandoom.bsky.social* TikTok - @americandoom_* YouTube - @americandoom_* Instagram - @americandoom_* X - @americandoom_ This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.american-doom.com/subscribe

Legacy media is capitulating to Trump (just Google Jeff Bezos if you haven’t already heard). That’s why it’s important to support independent media like American Doom. The best way to support our work is through a paid subscription. Last week, news came from Texas that an 11-year-old girl killed herself because her classmates were bullying her about being deported. She is a victim of Donald Trump and Republicans’ endless denigration of immigrants of all races, from all walks of life. May the memory of Jocelynn Rojo Carranza live on forever, and be a lesson to those of us who care enough about our fellow human beings to speak out against the ruthlessness and oppression we’re seeing from the White House. One of those speaking truth to power when it comes to immigration is Arturo Dominguez, who runs the excellent Decolonized Journalism newsletter. In today’s edition of the American Doom Podcast, Arturo and I discuss the ways in which the Trump administration is essentially trying to stop all non-white immigration—including by military force, if necessary. To support my work, please choose a paid subscription to American Doom or drop a few dollars in the Doom Coffee Fund. There’s a lot of news right now, so I have a lot coming down the pike. Your paid support goes directly toward helping me to continue my independent journalism here at American Doom.***Please follow AD on our social media for a little more doom to your scroll. That’s what we all need, right?* Bluesky - @americandoom.bsky.social* TikTok - @americandoom_* YouTube - @americandoom_* Instagram - @americandoom_* X - @americandoom_ This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.american-doom.com/subscribe

Today I’m speaking with Steven Monacelli, an independent investigative journalist based in Texas. Steven does an incredible job covering right-wing extremism. His latest pieces include an examination of what experts are calling a new form of fascism helmed by the White House, and a more complex understanding of what we’re witnessing called competitive authoritarianism. Steven also just published an explosive investigation into an ICE lawyer in Dallas who runs an anonymous, white supremacist X account.I first met Steven in Dallas — where I lived for a couple of years while covering immigration and the border — at a QAnon conference where disgraced Gen. Mike Flynn infamously called for a Myanmar-like coup to install Trump in power. That was in 2021, which seems like a quaint time as I write this just four years later. Our previous conversation focused on threats posed to democracy by Christian nationalism, another focus of Steven’s work. To support my work, please choose a paid subscription to American Doom or drop a few dollars in the Doom Coffee Fund. There’s a lot of news right now, so I have a lot coming down the pike. Your paid support goes directly toward helping me to continue my independent journalism here at American Doom. Support American Doom’s independent journalism for as little as $5 a month.***Please follow AD on our social media for a little more doom to your scroll. That’s what we all need, right?* Bluesky - @americandoom.bsky.social* TikTok - @americandoom_* YouTube - @americandoom_* Instagram - @americandoom_* X - @americandoom_ This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.american-doom.com/subscribe

It’s becoming more and more clear that the Trump administration is simply the enforcement and policy arm of an American right that believes in a post-democratic world order. That’s why we see things like Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth speaking the language of autocrats like Vladimir Putin—and more or less doing their bidding. Your subscription dollars help fund my independent journalism. Throw a few bucks my way to stay on top of the madness to come. The dismantling of USAID has already resulted in the loss of funding for aid programs in Ukraine, like one that helps fund refugee centers in cities near the frontlines of the country’s war with Russia. But the Trump administration wants so much more. Unfortunately for Ukrainians, few of the administration’s goals appear to align with that of the war-torn country, which for the last three years has been the victim of Russian expansionism.Today I’m talking with Tim Mak, a former NPR reporter who I first met a decade ago when he was working at the Daily Beast. Now, Mak runs the Counteroffensive, a newsletter that focuses on the human stories of war—and life—in Ukraine. You can listen and watch today’s episode here, on YouTube and Spotify and Apple podcasts. If you’re not already a paid subscriber, I humbly ask for your support for as little as $5 a month or $40 a year. You can also throw some cash my way at the Doom Coffee Fund.***Please follow AD on our social media for a little more doom to your scroll. That’s what we all need, right?* Bluesky - @americandoom.bsky.social* TikTok - @americandoom_* YouTube - @americandoom_* Instagram - @americandoom_* X - @americandoom_ This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.american-doom.com/subscribe

Good afternoon and welcome to the latest edition of the American Doom podcast. Today I’m talking with Teddy Wilson, a journalist and researcher who runs Radical Reports, a newsletter focused on the far-right. I highly suggest you sign up for Teddy’s newsletter to stay abreast of all the swirling madness of domestic extremism, which is most certainly not going away and whose adherents are not sitting idly by as Trump continues his dismantling of the federal government. You can listen and watch today’s episode here, on YouTube and Spotify and Apple podcasts. If you’re not already a paid subscriber, I humbly ask for your support for as little as $5 a month or $40 a year. You can also throw some cash my way at the Doom Coffee Fund. ***Please follow AD on our social media for a little more doom to your scroll. That’s what we all need, right?* Bluesky - @americandoom.bsky.social* TikTok - @americandoom_* YouTube - @americandoom_* Instagram - @americandoom_* X - @americandoom_ This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.american-doom.com/subscribe

Executive orders continue to come flooding from the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office. Donald Trump signed a handful more on Thursday afternoon, his signature black Sharpie pen squeaking as he went.It’s a lot to process — not just for members of the press like myself but for the public, who must then (hopefully) consume and understand scores of news reports on these many executive actions. Courts are also scrambling to keep up, as many of the orders propose novel interpretations of laws that must now be argued in front of judges. Or, as a federal judge said Thursday, “blatantly unconstitutional” orders that have come from a stroke of Trump’s pen.That was the judge’s immediate judgment of Trump’s executive order to end birthright citizenship, a right enshrined in the 14th amendment that was originally intended to grant the full protections of American citizenship to children of slaves. Since then, the American right has become convinced that birthright citizenship is being abused by undocumented immigrants who come here illegally, then have children who are then granted citizenship under the amendment’s provisions.While that certainly has been the case, no one until now has ever tried to seriously argue that the 14th amendment should be done away with. But, as I wrote before Trump took office, everything bad that you can imagine happening, Trump and his people will try to make it so. Plus, all systems will be tested — including heretofore universally-accepted norms, rules and laws like birthright citizenship.But that’s just one of the executive orders Trump signed this week. I went through many of them and have provided a brief rundown not just of what they mean, but further context that is often missing from the political press’ coverage of these actions. There’s a certain level of translation required to understand the why behind many of these orders. That’s because the American right speaks a different language rooted in the alternate information ecosystem in which they live. Luckily, I speak that language and can help shed light as to why Trump and his team are pushing for the following changes to our laws and society.***This post is for all subscribers to American Doom. To help support my reporting, I encourage you to sign up for a paid subscription. It’s the best way to support the independent journalism I’ll be producing—fact-based investigations and news that are going to be crucial to cutting through the chaos of the coming days, weeks, months and years.That’s why I’m offering an Inauguration Special—a 20 percent discount on annual subscriptions to American Doom, from $50 a year to $40. This gets you access to all paywalled posts containing exclusive reporting, past posts that contain exclusive findings on election denial officials working across the country, subscriber live chats, and audio versions of posts for those times when you don’t have the time to read but still want to keep with the news. I hope you’ll join me. And as always, you can also buy me a cup of coffee at the Doom Coffee Fund if you prefer a one-time contribution.***Before we get to the executive orders, a couple quick news items worth paying attention to. First up, House Republicans have launched a new January 6 committee — not to look into Trump’s role in the attempted overthrow of the 2020 election and the attack on the Capitol or anything like that, but instead to probe Democrats’ role in supposed security failures. It also looks like it’s a decent possibility that some of the rioters themselves will end up testifying in front of the committee. This isn’t surprising, because the real purpose of this committee is to explore conspiracy theories about the FBI or Antifa being the actual parties responsible for the violence that day. Basically, it’s only a matter of time until January 6 insurrectionists are applauded on the floor of Congress.Speaking to reporters this afternoon, Trump said he was open to the idea that some of the people he pardoned be given the opportunity to testify in front of the committee. It doesn’t look like former Trump staffer Cassidy Hutchinson, however, will be testifying to the new committee. That’s because an aide to House Speaker Mike Johnson recommended to Republicans that they not subpoena Hutchinson. If they did, the aide warned, their graphic sexual texts to Hutchinson could become part of the congressional record, the Washington Post reported Thursday afternoon.You might remember Hutchinson as the former White House staffer who blew the doors open on Trump’s involvement in the attack on the Capitol. She’s the one who claimed that Trump tried to overtake a Secret Service agent in his furious attempt to join his supporters as they marched toward violence that day. Naturally, Republicans hate her guts for this, so one can only imagine how bad these texts must be.Prepare for the wars to come* Executive orders: Trump's personal army, abandoning Afghan war heroes, more expensive prescriptions* Trump's first victims* What comes next - Rules of procedure for the next four years* You are not alone - On recovery.* Feelings over facts in a new information ageAgain, the whole point of this committee is to platform conspiracy theories about the attempted insurrection that could deflect from Trump’s involvement, reduce the amount of focus on the violence of his supporters and, I’m assuming, once again dig into conspiracies about the 2020 election. Yes, we’re probably headed there again.One other quick item: Trump lied to his supporters on Tuesday night, telling them that the southern border is “closed.” It’s not, of course. Trump says this stuff all the time but what struck me is that he reiterated the point with specifics.“As you know, the border was closed at exactly 1:05 in the afternoon today,” Trump told those gathered at the Starlight Ball, an inauguration gala. “And I don’t mean closed. I mean really closed. It’s closed.”What Trump meant to mean is that the border isn’t just closed for asylum seekers and refugees, it’s closed. As in, you can’t go across it. I know this is a little thing but stuff like this drives me nuts. The border is absolutely not closed. Just to be sure, I texted a photographer friend at the border who confirmed he had come back from Juárez into El Paso after Trump claimed to have closed the border.I know, Trump lies and the sky is blue. But still, the truth is the truth. Now, onto the executive orders.It takes a lot of time to put these posts together, so if you want to support my work the best way to do so is with a paid subcription for $40 a year or $5 a month. Your funds go directly to my independent journalism.***Executive orders* Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship - This order allows for witch hunts of government officials who call out right-wing misinformation. Part of this order comes from a section of Project 2025 written by Gene Hamilton, a former DOJ official in the first Trump administration and a high-up in Stephen Miller’s America First Legal. Hamilton is also behind recommendations that the Justice Department investigate and prosecute local and state election officials if they follow state election rules that Republicans don’t like. I’m waiting for some shoes to drop on that front but will have a report soon that details this push to weaponize the DOJ to engage in voter suppression and intimidation.* Declaring a National Emergency at the Southern Border of the United States - This order allows for deployment of troops to the southern border, the building or strengthening of the border wall, increases drone surveillance, and gives more leeway in use of force policies to law enforcement coming into contact with migrants.* Guaranteeing the States Protection Against Invasion - This looks to be the executive order that deals with Miller's attempts to identify diseases carried by immigrants as a pretext to create harsher immigration rules and laws. It prohibits entry for immigrants who "fail to provide Federal officials with sufficient medical information." Key language: “... millions of aliens who potentially pose significant threats to health, safety, and national security have moved into communities nationwide.”* Protecting the Meaning and Value of Birthright Citizenship - This is an executive order in search of a Supreme Court case and the accompanying media coverage. It seeks to cancel birthright citizenship and will almost surely end up in the Supreme Court, where Trump and the American right will get their wishes and be able to argue to the public that immigrants are taking advantage of the 14th amendment.* Restoring Accountability to Policy-Influencing Positions Within the Federal Workforce - This order allows for the arbitrary firing of federal employees—i.e. career public servants who are not loyal to Trump. Key language: "In recent years, however, there have been numerous and well-documented cases of career Federal employees resisting and undermining the policies and directives of their executive leadership."* Protecting the American People Against Invasion - Rescinds a handful of Biden executive orders on immigration and orders DHS to begin contract solicitations for expanding immigration detention facilities. The order also seeks to "withhold federal funds" from so-called sanctuary cities, and advises DHS and the DOJ to undertake "any other lawful actions, criminal or civil, that they deem warranted" in relation to sanctuary cities. This likely means prosecuting Democratic officials in cities and states that don't comply with Trump's immigration plans. The order also demands the hiring of more immigration officers in several agencies.* Securing Our Borders - Resumes construction of border wall, cancels the CBP One app that migrants were using to navigate the immigration court system, resumes the Remain in Mexico program, and removes specific protections for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans.* Realigning the United States Refugee Admissions Program - Suspends the U.S. refugee program for 90 days except for on a case-by-case basis. Revokes a Biden-era executive order that created a program to study and prepare for the effects of climate change on migration—climate refugees, in other words.* Holding Former Government Officials Accountable for Election Interference and Improper Disclosure of Sensitive Governmental Information - Got all that? This order reprimands the 51 signatories of a letter proclaiming stories about Hunter Biden's laptop to be the product of a Russian misinformation campaign, as well as John Bolton for publishing a memoir that the Trump administration claims contained sensitive national security information. This looks to be the Trump administration's response to him being charged for illegally possessing classified information at Mar-a-Lago.*** This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.american-doom.com/subscribe

Next week, Donald Trump will be inaugurated as president. The ensuing months and years will bring much chaos and catastrophe. I say that not to scare you but because it’s the truth. Much of the legacy media continues to fail to meet this fraught moment by acting as if this is politics as usual — American life as usual. (See these many examples as well as the general turmoil at the Washington Post.) Needless to say, none of this is normal.Independent journalism like the kind I produce here will be crucial to getting factual information free from authoritarian spin, which is why I’m grateful for the support of my subscribers here at American Doom. Many of you have chosen to support my work with a paid subscription, but many more of you remain on the fence. I’d like to hear from you about what you’re looking for, what I can provide for you, and what will push you over the edge to supporting my work here with your hard-earned dollars.This week, I’m offering an Inauguration Special — a 20 percent discount on annual subscriptions to American Doom, from $50 a year to $40. This gets you access to all paywalled posts containing exclusive reporting, as well as audio versions of posts for those times when you don’t have the time to read but still want to keep with the news. I hope you’ll join me. As always, you can also buy me a cup of coffee at the Doom Coffee Fund.Thank you for your support.***While the fires out west have continued to rage, the American right has been in rare form, blaming any Democratic official or progressive policy they can think of for this ongoing natural disaster.The behavior has been particularly grotesque and craven — which is saying a lot for a political party led by Donald Trump — but mostly unsurprising for those of us who have been documenting the hyper-polarized information warfare of the last decade. Naturally, Trump has led the attack, not waiting for even a hint of relief in the battle against the flames before launching a series of attacks against Gov. Gavin Newsom and others.Republicans have fallen in line, putting on display the party’s utter lack of empathy. It’s an emptiness of the soul that is juxtaposed by the emptiness felt by so many people in California as they look around at possessions, homes, neighborhoods and lives that are now, in some cases, completely gone, as Brian Tyler Cohen put it the other day.More from the Doom podcast* The coming misinformation war - Meta is ending fact-checking at a time when reputable information is needed more than ever.* Threats, harassment and intimidation at the polls with Mike Wendling of the BBC* 'Hands up, don't shoot' - The legacy of Ferguson with DeRay McKessonCohen, who has called Los Angeles home for the last 15 years, has been one of the lucky ones. His home and life are intact. A powerful voice in independent media, Cohen has consistently called out the insanity, absurdity, lies, cons, and shamelessness — as the title of his recent book makes clear — of the American right in the Trump era.I caught up with Cohen recently about the causes of the California wildfires, which have little to do with the culture war grievances being put forth by Trump and Republicans, and more to do with the issue they continuously ignore: climate change.You can view our discussion above, listen to it here, or subscribe to the American Doom podcast on Apple and Spotify, as well as our YouTube page.*** This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.american-doom.com/subscribe

A week from today, Donald Trump will be inaugurated as president. The ensuing months and years will bring much chaos and catastrophe. I say that not to scare you but because it’s the truth. Much of the legacy media continues to fail to meet this fraught moment by acting as if this is politics as usual — American life as usual. (See these many examples as well as the general turmoil at the Washington Post.) Needless to say, none of this is normal.Independent journalism like the kind I produce here will be crucial to getting factual information free from authoritarian spin, which is why I’m grateful for the support of my subscribers here at American Doom. Many of you have chosen to support my work with a paid subscription, but many more of you remain on the fence. I’d like to hear from you about what you’re looking for, what I can provide for you, and what will push you over the edge to supporting my work here with your hard-earned dollars.This week, I’m offering an Inauguration Special — a 20 percent discount on annual subscriptions to American Doom, from $50 a year to $40. This gets you access to all paywalled posts containing exclusive reporting, as well as audio versions of posts for those times when you don’t have the time to read, but still want to keep with the news. I hope you’ll join me. As always, you can also buy me a cup of coffee at the Doom Coffee Fund. Now, welcome to American Doom, 2025.***By now it has become clear that the world’s biggest tech companies and most of corporate America are willing to do anything to get on Donald Trump’s good side. They have been donating vast millions to Trump’s inauguration fund and, in the past week, the platform perhaps most responsible for the degradation of reputable information and the hyper-polarization of U.S. society — Facebook — announced that it will essentially act as propagandist arm of the Trump administration and the misinformation infrastructure of the American right. Yes, Facebook is doing away with fact-checking. This means you can expect even more misinformation madness than that which has roiled the nation and the world in the last decade as a result of Meta’s lax approach to stopping dangerous lies from proliferating on its platforms. Chaos will surely follow.That’s why it’s important to get your news not just on what’s happening in the world but on what’s happening with Big Tech from reputable sources. I can think of none better than Katie Paul, director of the Tech Transparency Project. The last time we spoke with Katie, she was monitoring social traffic — primarily on Facebook — from right-wing militias preparing for violence in the wake of the election. Today, Katie and I discuss Meta’s decision to do away with fact-checking, a troubling development considering Facebook’s past role in real world violence based on misinformation and lies spreading on the platform.You can view our discussion above, listen to it here, or subscribe to the American Doom podcast on Apple and Spotify, as well as our YouTube page.*** This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.american-doom.com/subscribe