Stop Calling It Hypocrisy

They're Not Hypocrites. They Never Were. And Until We Stop Treating Them Like They Are, We'll Keep Losing.

This is a long read. It’s meant to be. What follows is the full case — every receipt, every contradiction, every confession — for what the American right has actually been building for 165 years. Take your time. Read it in pieces if you need to. But read it all. Because the story doesn’t work in fragments. It works when you see the whole thing at once — and realize it was never what they said it was.

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Everyone loves calling them hypocrites.

Pundits do it. Social media does it. Democratic politicians do it with a kind of breathless satisfaction — look, they said one thing and did another! — as if catching someone in a contradiction is the same as stopping them. As if pointing out a double standard has ever, in the history of American politics, slowed the machine by a single day.

It hasn’t. Not once. Not ever.

We’ve been calling the American right hypocrites for decades. On guns. On free speech. On states’ rights, law and order, fiscal responsibility, religious liberty, meritocracy, the sanctity of life. We catch the contradiction, we tweet about it, we write the op-ed, we feel smart — and nothing changes. The machine keeps running. The policies keep advancing. The power keeps consolidating. And we keep standing there, pointing at the gap between what they say and what they do, waiting for someone to be embarrassed.

No one is embarrassed. No one was ever going to be.

Here’s why: hypocrisy requires someone to believe one thing and do another. It requires a gap between conviction and action — a person who knows they’re falling short of their own standard. That’s not what’s happening here. That has never been what’s happening here.

They don’t believe what they say they believe. They never did.

The Real Framework

The stated values — free speech, gun rights, states’ rights, law and order, religious liberty, fiscal responsibility, meritocracy, pro-life, America First — were never principles. They were instruments. Tools picked up when useful and discarded the moment they weren’t. Not beliefs to live by, but weapons to fight with.

And the moment you see that — the moment you replace “hypocrite” with the correct diagnosis — every contradiction you’ve ever catalogued dissolves. There is no contradiction. There never was. There is a single, coherent, internally consistent project that has been running for over a century and a half, and the stated values were always its camouflage.

Here’s the thesis of this piece, stated plainly: The American right is not a political movement with a hypocrisy problem. It is a power project with a messaging strategy. The values are the uniform. The war is the point. And we have been so busy analyzing the uniform that we missed the war entirely.

What follows is the evidence. Nine domains — guns, speech, states’ rights, law and order, life, money, merit, religion, and identity — where the stated value and the actual project point in opposite directions. We’ll take the first few apart in detail so you can see the pattern up close — how it works, how long it’s been running, how complete the lie is. Once the pattern is undeniable, we’ll pick up the pace, because by then you won’t need me to explain it. You’ll see it yourself. And then we’ll look at what they’ve built now that they hold total power. By the end, you won’t be calling them hypocrites anymore. You’ll be calling them what they are.

The Tell

Before we get to the receipts, notice one thing — because it’s the entire pattern in miniature.

One of the most effective rhetorical weapons in American politics over the last decade is the accusation of identity politics. The left is obsessed with race. The left divides people into groups. The left sees everything through the lens of identity. You’ve heard it a thousand times — and not just from the right. Centrist Democrats say it. Liberal pundits say it. It’s become a bipartisan conventional wisdom, the kind of critique that sounds so reasonable that even people who should know better nod along.

Now look at what they’re actually running.

The American right is operating the most identity-driven political project in American history. White. “Christian.” Corporatist. The in-group is defined. The out-groups are named. The hierarchy is explicit — and when it isn’t explicit, it’s enforced. This is an identity project from top to bottom, from the border wall to the Muslim ban to the anti-trans legislation to “vermin” to “the enemy within.” And the “Christianity” deserves those quotation marks — because what they’re running has about as much to do with the teachings of Jesus Christ as a slot machine has to do with charity.

And every single left-wing policy they attack as “identity politics” — every one — traces directly back to defending people from their targeting. Affirmative action exists because they segregated. DEI exists because they discriminated. Sanctuary cities exist because they raided. Trans protections exist because they legislated against trans people’s existence. We’ll prove that exhaustively later in this piece. But the pattern is visible right now: they attack, the left defends, and then they accuse the left of starting the fight. It’s the bully in the schoolyard grabbing your arm and smacking you in the face with it while telling you to stop hitting yourself.

That’s the template for everything that follows. The stated value is the accusation. The real project is underneath. And if you understand that dynamic in the identity politics debate, you understand it everywhere — because it’s the same move, repeated across every domain, for 165 years.

Why This Matters

Calling it hypocrisy doesn’t just miss the point. It actively helps them.

When you call a soldier a hypocrite, you’re treating them like a debater who failed to be consistent. You’re assuming they share your framework — that they want to be principled and simply fell short. You’re domesticating the threat. You’re turning a war into a seminar. You’re making it about character when it’s about power.

You don’t catch a combatant in a contradiction. You recognize them as a combatant.

People are dying — shot at protests, tortured in foreign prisons, disappeared into detention camps, deported to countries in civil war — while we congratulate ourselves for pointing out that the “pro-life” party cut food stamps. The double standards aren’t a bug. They aren’t even a feature. They’re the evidence of something we refuse to name.

So let’s name it. Let’s stop calling it hypocrisy and start building the case for what it actually is. And let’s start with the clearest, most visceral example — the one where the gap between the stated value and the actual project isn’t just wide, but lethal.

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The Second Amendment

The stated value: The Second Amendment exists to protect citizens from a tyrannical government.

That was the argument. For fifty years, that was the core justification for gun rights absolutism in America — not hunting, not sport shooting, not home defense. Tyranny. Citizens needed military-grade weapons because one day, the government might come for them, and when that day came, the armed citizenry would be the last line of defense. That’s why every regulation was fought to the death. That’s why the NRA spent hundreds of millions of dollars building the most powerful lobbying operation in American history. That’s why compromise was treason.

The entire edifice rested on a single premise: the guns are here to fight a tyrannical government.

Let’s test that premise.

The Fabrication

Before we get to 2026, you need to understand something about the premise itself — because it was manufactured.

The individual right to bear arms — the idea that the Second Amendment protects a personal right to own firearms, unconnected to militia service — did not exist as constitutional law until 2008.¹ For over two hundred years, every time the Supreme Court ruled on the Second Amendment, it ruled the other way: the amendment protected the right of states to maintain militias.² Not individuals. Militias.

The shift began in 1977, at the NRA’s annual convention in Cincinnati. A group of hardliners — led by Harlon Carter, a former head of the U.S. Border Patrol who had been convicted of murder as a teenager — staged what became known as the Cincinnati Revolt.³ They ousted the old guard leadership, scrapped plans for a new recreational headquarters in Colorado, and redirected the entire organization toward political lobbying. The NRA went from a sportsmen’s club to a political juggernaut in a single night. Membership tripled. They made their first presidential endorsement — Ronald Reagan, 1980.³ And they began a decades-long campaign to rewrite what the Second Amendment meant.²

It worked. In 2008, in District of Columbia v. Heller, five Federalist Society-aligned justices ruled 5-4 that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to own firearms.¹ Justice Stevens, in dissent, said the majority had announced “a new constitutional right” that had never existed before. Justice Breyer called it a departure from settled understanding.¹ Both were right: Heller didn’t discover an old right. It created a new one.

And here’s the detail that should stop you cold: Warren Burger — Chief Justice of the United States, appointed by Richard Nixon, a lifelong conservative — called the NRA’s individual-rights interpretation of the Second Amendment “a fraud on the American public.”² A fraud. That wasn’t a liberal critique. That was a Republican-appointed Chief Justice looking at what the NRA was selling and calling it what it was.

The stated value — “the guns protect us from tyranny” — wasn’t an ancient constitutional principle. It was a political product, manufactured by a lobbying organization, sold to the American public for fifty years, and finally ratified by a one-vote majority of ideologically aligned justices. There was nothing to be “hypocritical” about. The principle was invented to serve a purpose. And the purpose was never what they said it was.

The Test

We now have a government that:

• Deploys 3,000 federal agents into a single American city — Minneapolis — against the explicit wishes of the governor and attorney general, while running immigration enforcement operations across the country⁴

• Kills citizens during enforcement operations — Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of three and award-winning poet, shot in her car by an ICE agent in Minneapolis;⁵ Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse at a VA hospital, shot while helping a woman who’d been knocked down⁶

• Has the FBI refuse to share evidence of those killings with state law enforcement, claiming exclusive federal jurisdiction⁵

• Threatens to invoke the Insurrection Act against domestic protesters⁷

• Violates 96 court orders in a single state in a single month⁸

• Builds detention camps on American soil — one constructed in eight days in a Florida swamp, named after a prison famous for brutality, with branded T-shirts sold by the state Republican Party⁹

• Ships people to foreign torture prisons where the justice minister publicly promised inmates would “only leave in a coffin”¹⁰

By any definition of “tyrannical government” the gun rights movement ever offered — by any standard articulated in fifty years of NRA fundraising letters, convention speeches, bumper stickers, and campaign ads — this qualifies. This is the scenario. Federal agents, killing citizens, defying courts, building camps, operating beyond legal restraint. This is what the guns were supposedly for.

Not a single militia has mobilized. Not one “patriot” group has shown up to defend liberty. Not one Second Amendment absolutist has taken to the streets with the AR-15 they swore they needed for exactly this moment. The silence is absolute.

Alex Pretti

Alex Pretti was 37 years old. He was an ICU nurse at the VA hospital in Minneapolis — he spent his days caring for veterans. He had a valid Minnesota concealed carry permit. No criminal record.⁶ On January 24, 2026, he went to a protest against Operation Metro Surge — the federal government’s armed occupation of his city.⁴

Here’s what the video shows — six verified cameras, compiled minute by minute by ABC News:¹¹ Pretti was in the roadway, holding his phone, recording federal agents. He’d been there for three minutes. An agent shoved a woman toward him; Pretti raised his hand to signal he wasn’t a threat. They pepper-sprayed him. They pulled him into the street by his hood. At least five agents piled on top of him. One of them punched him repeatedly. Then an agent reached into the pile and removed the gun from Pretti’s waist — three cameras captured the moment. The agent stood up holding the weapon. Pretti was disarmed, pinned, and being beaten.

Then two agents opened fire. Ten shots in less than five seconds, according to forensic audio analysis.¹¹ A doctor who treated him at the scene filed a sworn affidavit: at least three bullet wounds in his back. One in his upper chest. A possible wound in his neck.¹¹ Shot in the back, while pinned to the ground, after being disarmed. The Hennepin County Medical Examiner ruled his death a homicide.⁵

The next morning, FBI Director Kash Patel went on Fox News and said: “You cannot bring a firearm loaded with multiple magazines to any sort of protest that you want. It’s that simple.”¹²

Thirteen legal experts told PolitiFact that Patel was wrong. Minnesota law explicitly allows concealed carry permit holders to carry firearms at protests.¹² The NRA called the administration’s stance “dangerous and wrong.”⁶ The Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus — a conservative gun rights organization — reviewed four bystander videos and concluded that lethal force was unjustified. Rob Doar, the group’s senior vice president, said: “If Mr. Pretti was disarmed — absent any other evidence of any risk to an officer — I don’t see how deadly force would be justified.”⁶ A former acting DHS undersecretary for intelligence, reviewing the ABC News timeline, said: “For DHS to construe that he arrived at that location with the intent to shoot those border patrol officers, there’s nothing in the video evidence that we’ve seen thus far that would support that.”¹¹

The FBI Director of the United States said a legal gun owner deserved to die for carrying a firearm at a protest against government overreach.

Read that again.

That is the exact scenario the Second Amendment was supposedly designed to protect. A citizen. Lawfully armed. Protesting his government. Killed by federal agents. And the head of the FBI — the top law enforcement official in the country — went on national television and said he had it coming.

The Reveal

The guns were never meant for tyrants. They were meant for liberals.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing. Fifty years of rhetoric, hundreds of millions of dollars in lobbying, a manufactured constitutional right, and it was never — not for one single second — about resisting government tyranny. It was about being armed against a progressive government. Gun confiscation. Socialism. The UN. Blue helmets. That was the tyranny they were stockpiling for. The enemy was always the left.

And that’s why the militias aren’t mobilizing right now. It’s not that they looked at a government killing citizens, defying courts, and building camps and decided it didn’t qualify as tyranny. It’s that they don’t care about tyranny. They never did. The government is doing exactly what they wanted it to do — to people they wanted it done to. The guns aren’t staying holstered out of confusion. They’re staying holstered out of satisfaction.

Alex Pretti did what they said the Second Amendment was for. He showed up, legally armed, to protest government overreach. He never touched his gun. He never drew it. He held his phone and tried to help a woman who’d been knocked down. And they killed him for it. The NRA issued some strong words — about the administration’s rhetoric on carrying at protests.⁶ They defended the abstract principle. They did not defend the man. And the militias — the ones who swore for fifty years that they’d stand between citizens and a tyrannical government — said nothing. Not a word. Not a statement. Not a post. Because to them, Alex Pretti was the right person to kill. He was protesting their government. That made him the enemy — not someone to defend.

That’s not hypocrisy. That’s consistency. The guns were never meant to stop tyranny. They were meant to stop liberals.

What this section proved: the modern gun-rights absolutist reading was not an ancient principle but a political construction, and the “anti-tyranny” justification collapses the moment actual federal tyranny is directed at the movement’s enemies instead of itself. The silence around Alex Pretti is not an exception to the rule — it is the rule. The guns were never a neutral principle. They were a selective instrument.

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The First Amendment

The stated value: Free speech is sacred. The marketplace of ideas must remain open. Censorship is the tool of tyrants.

For the better part of a decade, the American right positioned itself as the last line of defense for free expression. Campus cancel culture. Safe spaces. Deplatforming. Social media “censorship.” The argument was everywhere — on Fox News, in congressional hearings, at CPAC, in Elon Musk’s Twitter bio. The left had become the speech police, and the right was going to save the First Amendment from the people who couldn’t handle being offended.

Organizations like FIRE built entire fundraising operations around campus speech. Conservative media made “free speech absolutism” a brand. The argument had a clean internal logic: speech should be unrestricted, the marketplace of ideas will sort truth from falsehood, and the moment you start deciding which ideas are acceptable, you’ve become the authoritarian. It sounded principled. It sounded consistent. It was neither.

Because the entire argument — every campus speech rally, every outraged op-ed about a disinvited speaker, every invocation of the marketplace of ideas — was built on one specific complaint: their voices were being suppressed. Conservative speakers couldn’t get campus bookings. Right-wing commentators got flagged on social media. Fox News hosts faced advertiser boycotts. The principle was “free speech.” The grievance was “our speech.” And the distinction between those two things is the entire story.

The Test

They have power now. Here’s what they’re doing with it.

They’re banning books. Not metaphorically. Not in the “cancel culture” sense of a Twitter mob pressuring a publisher. Literally. By law. PEN America has documented 22,810 book ban instances in American public schools since 2021 — a number without precedent in modern American history.¹³ In the 2024-25 school year alone: 6,870 bans across 23 states and 87 school districts.¹³ Florida led with 2,304. Texas: 1,781. Utah and South Carolina implemented statewide “no read” lists — government-curated catalogs of books that cannot appear in any state-funded school.¹³ The targeted content follows a pattern so consistent it functions as a confession: books about race, sexuality, gender identity, and American history. Not obscenity. Ideas. The Department of Defense even recorded 590 bans in military-connected schools across seven states, two territories, and eleven countries.¹³ PEN America’s assessment: this is the “normalization of book banning” — censorship that has moved from individual challenges to institutionalized government suppression of published literature.

The same people who spent a decade screaming about a college student protesting a speaker are now operating the largest government-directed censorship apparatus in modern American history. And they don’t see a contradiction — because there isn’t one. The speaker was theirs. The books aren’t.

They’re weaponizing broadcast regulation. In January 2025, Trump-appointed FCC Chair Brendan Carr reinstated complaints against ABC, CBS, and NBC that the previous chair had explicitly rejected as unconstitutional.¹⁴ The complaints targeted ABC for moderating the Biden-Trump debate, CBS for airing a Kamala Harris interview on 60 Minutes, and NBC for a Harris appearance on Saturday Night Live.¹⁴ Carr told Fox News his focus would be “making sure they live up to their public interest obligation” — a phrase that means nothing except cover us favorably or we’ll threaten your license.¹⁴ Then-outgoing FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel was explicit: the complaints “seek to weaponize the licensing authority of the FCC in a way that is fundamentally at odds with the First Amendment.”¹⁴

The pattern kept going. By September 2025, ABC had indefinitely suspended Jimmy Kimmel Live! after Kimmel criticized a conservative activist — and Carr praised the suspension.¹⁴ By February 2026, the FCC launched an investigation into The View over equal-time rules. CBS pulled a Stephen Colbert interview with a Democratic Senate candidate over FCC concerns; Colbert posted it on YouTube instead.¹⁴ Trump filed a $10 billion lawsuit against CBS over its 60 Minutes coverage.¹⁴ This is not the marketplace of ideas. This is the government using its regulatory power over broadcast licenses to punish critical coverage — the definitional First Amendment violation.

They’re threatening execution for speech. On November 20, 2025, six Democratic members of Congress — all military or intelligence veterans — released a video reminding U.S. service members that they are legally required to refuse illegal orders.¹⁵ They were restating existing military law. Nothing more. Trump responded on Truth Social: “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!” He amplified a post reading: “HANG THEM GEORGE WASHINGTON WOULD!!”¹⁵ He called for their arrest and trial. Senate Minority Leader Schumer: “The president of the United States is calling for the execution of elected officials.”¹⁵ The six lawmakers responded: “What’s most telling is that the president considers it punishable by death for us to restate the law.”¹⁵

By January 2026, the FBI had initiated interviews with the lawmakers. The Pentagon opened an investigation into Senator Mark Kelly — a former Navy combat pilot and astronaut — for appearing in the video.¹⁵ The president called for executing members of Congress for protected speech, and the federal government opened investigations to make the threat operational.

They’re investigating Instagram posts. In May 2025, former FBI Director James Comey — a private citizen — posted a photo of seashells on a beach that appeared to form “86 47.” His caption: “Cool shell formation on my beach walk.”¹⁶ “86” is diner slang for “get rid of” (Merriam-Webster).¹⁶ The response: the Secret Service opened a formal investigation. FBI Director Kash Patel announced FBI coordination. DHS Secretary Kristi Noem publicly accused Comey of calling for assassination. Republican congressman Andy Ogles demanded he “be in handcuffs.”¹⁶ By late 2025, Comey was formally indicted — a federal judge dismissed the indictment, but Patel vowed to continue pursuing him.¹⁶ A private citizen posted a photo of seashells, and the full weight of federal law enforcement descended.

They’re targeting journalists. The Committee to Protect Journalists reported that safety consultations sought by American journalists surged from 20 in all of 2022 to more than 530 in just the first four months of 2025 — a 26-fold increase.¹⁷ The AP was banned from the White House press pool for refusing to use a Trump-mandated name for the Gulf of Mexico — a federal judge had to order its access restored.¹⁷ Three AP journalists were detained in Cameroon while reporting on Trump-deported migrants.¹⁷ A British journalist was abducted by ICE at a California airport and held for over two weeks.¹⁷ Don Lemon and independent journalist Georgia Fort were arrested by the DOJ for covering a protest.¹⁷ The White House created a “Media Offender of the Week” list.¹⁷ CPJ’s assessment: “Press freedom is no longer a given in the United States.”¹⁷

The Reveal

Here’s what makes the First Amendment section different from the Second Amendment — and worse.

With guns, you could at least argue there was an original sincere belief that got corrupted. Maybe some people really did think the guns were for fighting tyranny, and the political infrastructure grew around them. You’d be wrong, but you could argue it.

With speech, you can’t even pretend. The same people. The same mouths. The same hands. They spent years screaming about private companies moderating content on private platforms — which is not, has never been, and will never be a First Amendment issue. Private companies choosing what to host is not government censorship. It is not even close. The First Amendment restricts the government. They knew this. They didn’t care. They called it censorship anyway because it was useful.

And then they took power and used actual government force — FCC investigations, DOJ arrests, FBI coordination, presidential death threats, federal indictments over seashell photos — to crush speech. Not private moderation decisions. Government action. The precise thing the First Amendment was written to prevent. The thing they spent a decade pretending to care about.

Free speech was never the principle. Power over the narrative was the principle. When they were out of power: “You can’t silence us.” When they got power: “We will silence you.” The campus speech wars weren’t about expression. They were about ensuring right-wing voices had access to recruit. The free speech absolutism wasn’t about principle. It was about platform. And the moment they had the state, they used it to do exactly what they accused everyone else of doing — except they did it with subpoenas, indictments, and the threat of execution instead of tweets.

That’s not hypocrisy. That’s the plan working.

What this section proved: “free speech” is not being defended as a universal liberty. It is being defended as an in-group entitlement and denied as soon as speech threatens the movement’s hierarchy or narrative control. The contradiction disappears once you stop treating speech rhetoric as a principle and start treating it as a permission structure.

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States’ Rights

The stated value: The federal government has no business overriding the sovereignty of the states.

This is the oldest trick in the book. Literally. “States’ rights” has been the go-to justification for conservative power in America for 165 years — longer than any other phrase in our political vocabulary. It’s invoked with the reverence of scripture, as though the Tenth Amendment were a moral principle rather than a structural provision. And it is, without exaggeration, the single most successful lie in American political history.

Not because states don’t have rights. They do. But because “states’ rights” has never, not once in 165 years, been functionally deployed by the American right as a neutral principle of federalism. It has been deployed as a selective doctrine of power: invoked when federal authority threatens a racial or social hierarchy the movement is committed to preserving, and abandoned when federal power serves that hierarchy instead. And the moment the federal government stopped threatening that hierarchy — the moment the federal government became the hierarchy — “states’ rights” vanished overnight.

The proof isn’t ambiguous. It isn’t buried. It’s sitting in the Confederacy’s own founding documents, signed, dated, and available for anyone to read.

The Origin

On January 9, 1861, Mississippi became the second state to secede from the Union. The opening line of its declaration of causes: “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery — the greatest material interest of the world.”¹⁸ Not states’ rights. Not tariffs. Not federal overreach. Slavery. The first substantive sentence.

Georgia, three weeks later: “For the last ten years we have had numerous and serious causes of complaint against our non-slave-holding confederate States with reference to the subject of African slavery.”¹⁸ The complaints were about slavery. The target was states that wouldn’t return escaped slaves. The grievance was that other states were exercising their rights — to refuse participation in the slave system. Confederate “states’ rights” was always a demand that other states surrender theirs.

Texas, February 1861: “We hold as undeniable truths that the governments of the various States, and of the confederacy itself, were established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity; that the African race had no agency in their establishment; that they were rightfully held as property.”¹⁸ This isn’t subtext. This is text.

South Carolina — the first state to secede, December 1860 — cited Northern states’ failure to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act as a primary cause.¹⁸ Read that again: South Carolina seceded because other states were exercising their sovereign right not to help catch runaway slaves. The “states’ rights” state demanded federal enforcement over state objections. The contradiction is not a contradiction. It never was.

And then the Confederacy’s own vice president said the quiet part out loud. Alexander Stephens, in his Cornerstone Speech, March 21, 1861 — three weeks before the first shot at Fort Sumter: “Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”¹⁹

He explicitly rejected the Founding Fathers’ suggestion that slavery was wrong, calling it “a sandy foundation” — a fundamental error.¹⁹ The Confederacy’s second-in-command, on the record, in public, in a speech he was proud of, announced that white supremacy was not a side effect of secession but its cornerstone. Its reason for being. Its founding principle.

“States’ rights” was the retroactive rebrand — the Lost Cause mythology that began the moment they lost the war. The states that seceded told you what they were fighting for. Their vice president carved it in stone. And then they spent 160 years pretending they’d said something else.

The Monument Tell

If the secession declarations aren’t enough — and they should be — look at the monuments.

Confederate monuments didn’t go up during the mourning period after the war. They went up during two specific historical moments, and both tell the same story.²⁰

The first surge began around 1900 and lasted into the 1920s — the period when Southern states were enacting Jim Crow laws to disenfranchise Black Americans and re-segregate society after decades of post-Reconstruction integration.²⁰ The SPLC documented it directly: the monuments were “part of an organized propaganda campaign to promote the Lost Cause and venerate the white supremacist values of the Confederacy.”²⁰ The United Daughters of the Confederacy alone erected more than 700 monuments, overwhelmingly on courthouse grounds and in town squares — not battlefields, not cemeteries. Public spaces. Where Black citizens would have to walk past them.²⁰

The second surge came during the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.²¹ And this one removes any remaining doubt.

In 1956, Georgia redesigned its state flag to devote two-thirds of the design to the Confederate battle emblem.²¹ The entire 1956 legislative session was devoted to Governor Marvin Griffin’s platform of “massive resistance” to federally mandated school integration following Brown v. Board of Education (1954).²¹ The flag change passed with no public hearings and no referendum. Governor Griffin’s floor leader, Representative Denmark Groover, told the press the new flag “will show that we in Georgia intend to uphold what we stood for, will stand for and will fight for” — meaning legal segregation.²¹ Groover denied the racial motivation for the rest of his life. On his deathbed, in 2001, he finally admitted it.²¹ That flag flew over Georgia for 45 years.

Texas installed 27 Confederate monuments in the 1960s.²² Sixteen monuments went up across the South in 1964 — the year the Civil Rights Act passed.²² At least 34 schools were named after Confederate leaders between 1950 and 1970 — the era of the modern civil rights movement.²⁰ As the Equal Justice Initiative documented: “As civil rights activists bravely agitated for change, segregationists opposed to racial equality adopted the Confederate battle flag as a symbol of defiant resistance to racial integration.”²²

The monuments weren’t grief. They weren’t heritage. They were warnings. They went up when Black Americans gained rights and were designed to remind everyone who still held power. “States’ rights” was the costume. The right they were defending was always the right to maintain white supremacist hierarchy — and the stone monuments were the enforcers.

The Flip

Now watch what happens when the federal government is theirs.

In June 2025, Trump signed a memo deploying at least 2,000 National Guard troops to Los Angeles under Title 10 — the federal statute that strips governors of command authority over their own state’s Guard units.²³ The troops were majority California National Guard, activated against Governor Newsom’s explicit wishes. Newsom called it “purposefully inflammatory” and filed a lawsuit alleging violation of state sovereignty. Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean of UC Berkeley School of Law: “For the federal government to take over the California National Guard, without the request of the governor, to put down protests is truly chilling. It is using the military domestically to stop dissent.”²³

In Minneapolis, 3,000 masked, armed federal agents surged into the Twin Cities against the explicit wishes of Governor Walz and Attorney General Ellison — the largest single immigration-enforcement operation in U.S. history.⁴ Two American citizens killed. ICE’s own data: 77% of those detained had no criminal records.⁴ Trump’s Truth Social post: “retribution and reckoning.”⁴ When Ellison testified before the Senate, he was blunt: “The government did not surge forensic accountants into Minnesota. Instead, it sent 3,000 masked, armed men — who are now kicking in doors, demanding papers, and killing Minnesotans.”⁴

ICE violated 96 court orders in Minnesota in January 2026 alone — more than some federal agencies have violated “in their entire existence,” according to Chief Judge Schiltz.⁸ Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act against the state.⁷

And then he said the quiet part out loud — again. On a podcast in February 2026, Trump called for Republicans to “nationalize the voting” in “at least 15 places” — targeting Detroit, Philadelphia, and Atlanta.²⁴ Elections. The most fundamental state power in the constitutional system. The power the Tenth Amendment was specifically designed to protect. The “states’ rights” president wants to federalize how Americans vote — but only in cities that vote the wrong way.

The Reveal

The through-line is unbroken. 165 years, same principle, same people:

1861: “States’ rights” — to own slaves. Invoked because the federal government threatened the institution of slavery.

1954-1965: “States’ rights” — to segregate. Invoked because the federal government mandated integration. Monuments erected. Flags redesigned. Schools renamed after slaveholders.

2025-2026: “States’ rights?” What states’ rights? The federal government is theirs now. States that resist get invaded. Governors get overruled. Courts get defied. Elections get nationalized.

“States’ rights” was always shorthand for one thing: the right of states to enforce a racial and social hierarchy. When the federal government threatened that hierarchy, “states’ rights” was the shield. When the federal government became the hierarchy, the shield was unnecessary — and states that resisted got 3,000 federal agents and a Truth Social post promising “retribution.”

Same principle. Same project. Different century.

That’s not hypocrisy. That’s a 165-year winning streak.

What this proves: This is the oldest case in the file, and it establishes the pattern in its purest form. “States’ rights” was never a neutral theory of federalism; it was a selective doctrine invoked when federal power threatened a racial and social order, then abandoned when federal power was useful for enforcing that order. The phrase survived. The principle never existed.

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The Rest of the Pattern

The three deep dives are done. By now the pattern should be undeniable: a stated value, deployed as a weapon when useful, discarded the moment it’s not — and the real principle, always the same, visible underneath. So let’s pick up the pace. Six more domains, same structure, same reveal.

“Law and Order”

The stated value: Rule of law. Tough on crime. Back the Blue.

The reality: On January 20, 2025, Trump pardoned approximately 1,500 January 6th defendants — including hundreds convicted of assaulting police officers with flagpoles, bear spray, tasers, and edged weapons.²⁵ More than 140 officers were injured that day. Among those pardoned: Stewart Rhodes (18 years for seditious conspiracy), Enrique Tarrio (22 years), and Jake Lang, specifically accused of beating police. Officer Michael Fanone, who was tased, beaten, and suffered a heart attack defending the Capitol: “I have been betrayed by my country.”²⁵

The same week, Trump pardoned Ross Ulbricht — founder of the Silk Road, the internet’s largest illegal drug marketplace, convicted of facilitating over 1 million drug deals worth $183 million in narcotics — calling his sentence “ridiculous” and dedicating the pardon to the Libertarian movement “which supported me so strongly.”²⁶ By December 2025, he’d pardoned Juan Orlando Hernández — the former president of Honduras, convicted of drug trafficking after accepting $1 million from El Chapo himself — while simultaneously conducting airstrikes against other accused drug traffickers in the Caribbean.²⁷ One of over 100 drug-crime defendants Trump has pardoned while claiming to wage a war on drugs.

But before you even get to the pardons, look at the institution that forms the political backbone of this movement. The Southern Baptist Convention — the largest Protestant denomination in America, the engine room of the Christian right — covered up the sexual abuse of children by more than 700 pastors for over two decades.²⁸ The 2022 Guidepost Solutions investigation revealed that SBC executive leadership secretly maintained a list of accused abusers compiled since 2007 — and never used it to prevent predators from moving between congregations.²⁸ Survivors were met with “resistance, stonewalling, and even outright hostility.”²⁸ The SBC’s governance documents ban gay pastors and female pastors. They contain no ban on convicted sex offenders working in churches.²⁹ One survivor, molested starting at age 14 and impregnated at 18 — the church urged her to get an abortion.²⁹

And then there’s the Epstein file. The same political movement that covered for 700+ of its own predators is now actively suppressing evidence of elite predators. The Trump DOJ has used “motions to strike” — an extraordinarily rare legal tactic — to scrub Trump-Epstein connections from court records, including Trump’s own 2002 quote: “I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy... many of them are on the younger side.”³⁰ The DOJ removed files containing “hundreds of mentions” of Donald Trump from the second wave of Epstein releases before publication.³¹ Meanwhile, three sitting Cabinet members appear in the files: Ambassador to Turkey Tom Barrack was in regular contact with Epstein through 2017; Navy Secretary Phelan appeared on two flight manifests; Commerce Secretary Lutnick co-signed a business contract with Epstein.³¹ The DOJ declared its 3-million-page release “final” while acknowledging 6 million pages may qualify.³¹

The international contrast tells you everything. Within weeks of the DOJ’s “final” release, the United Kingdom arrested Prince Andrew — the first senior British royal arrested in nearly four centuries — searched his homes, and began Parliamentary proceedings to remove him from the line of succession.³² King Charles: “The law must take its course.”³² In the United States: motions to strike the president’s own words from court records.

The QAnon movement — the political force built entirely on “Save the Children” rhetoric — fractured when the children needed saving from their people. Steve Bannon: “For this to go away, you’re going to lose 10% of the MAGA movement.”³³ Michael Flynn publicly pleaded with Trump to act. Laura Loomer called for Bondi to resign.³³ The movement that promised to expose elite pedophile rings went silent the moment the ring led back to the White House.

The real principle: Law applied to them. Impunity for us.

“Pro-Life”

The stated value: Life is sacred from conception.

The reality: They got Dobbs. They won. And then: House Republicans advanced $300 billion in SNAP cuts — the most significant rollback of the nation’s primary anti-hunger program in history.³⁴ Fourteen Republican-led states rejected federal funds to feed low-income children over the summer — a program that would have cost Washington $2.5 billion and reached 21 million kids.³⁴ Mississippi — one of the most food-insecure states in the country — rejected feeding 324,000 eligible children while enforcing a total abortion ban.³⁴

An Alabama mother named Allen asked the only question that matters: “Why do you care so much about my uterus and how many babies I’m having or aborting? Why is that a concern when I still have to feed this child, but you’re not helping me do that?”³⁴

Republican budget proposals include $600 to $880 billion in Medicaid cuts over the next decade.³⁴ Medicaid covers more than 40% of all births in the United States. Force women to give birth. Defund the programs that keep those children alive. That’s not pro-life. That’s control — and the mask comes off the moment the baby exists as a person who needs something.

The real principle: Control over women’s bodies. The “sanctity of life” ends at delivery.

“Fiscal Responsibility”

The stated value: Deficit hawks. Government spending is the enemy. Balance the budget.

The reality: Every Republican president since Reagan increased the deficit. Every Democratic president decreased it. No exceptions.³⁵

Reagan: +94%. H.W. Bush: +67%. W. Bush: +1,204% — the largest single-presidency fiscal blowout in modern history. Trump: +317%. And that’s not just COVID — Trump had already added $4.8 trillion to the national debt in his first three years, before the pandemic, with the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act as the single largest item.³⁶ Clinton: turned a deficit into a surplus. Obama: reduced the deficit by 53%. Biden: reduced it by 50% in his first fiscal year.³⁵

Dick Cheney, to his own Treasury Secretary: “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter.”³⁷ They didn’t say it in private and deny it in public. They said it in private and preached the opposite in public.

The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act added $1.9 trillion to federal deficits in its first decade.³⁸ And then they doubled down. On July 4, 2025, Trump signed the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” — making the TCJA tax cuts permanent and adding new ones. The CBO scored it: $3.4 trillion in new deficits over ten years.³⁹ The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget put the total at $4.1 trillion when you include the interest on the borrowing.³⁹ The same law will cause 10.9 million Americans to lose health insurance by 2034.³⁹ They didn’t just extend the tax cuts — they made them permanent, blew a $4 trillion hole in the budget, and stripped health coverage from 11 million people, all in a single bill they signed on Independence Day. The “fiscal responsibility” party passed the two largest deficit-expanding bills in a generation — then told hungry children there’s no money.

And three days ago, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that Trump’s tariffs under IEEPA were illegal — the first time any president had tried to use that statute for tariffs in its 50-year existence.⁴⁰ Chief Justice Roberts, writing for a majority that included Gorsuch and Barrett: “No President has read IEEPA to confer such power.”⁴⁰ Over $130 billion in tariffs had already been collected, with 90% of the burden paid by American businesses and consumers.⁴¹ Trump’s response: he called the justices “a disgrace to the nation,” called his own appointees Barrett and Gorsuch “an embarrassment to their families,” and within 24 hours imposed new 15% global tariffs under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 — a law never previously invoked.⁴¹ He didn’t comply and pivot to free trade. He found the next available weapon.

The real principle: “Fiscal responsibility” was always code for “don’t spend money on those people.” When it’s their tax cuts and their wars, deficits don’t matter. When it’s food stamps, suddenly we’re broke.

“Meritocracy”

The stated value: Hire the best. End DEI. Competence over identity.

The reality: Pete Hegseth — a weekend Fox News host with no executive branch experience, no general officer rank, and no policy record — was confirmed 51-50 with the Vice President casting the tiebreaker to run the Department of Defense: $800 billion budget, 1.3 million active-duty troops, the most powerful military on earth.⁴² The AP reported his nomination “stunned the Pentagon.”⁴² Republican Senator Todd Young, himself a Marine veteran, said: “I don’t know much about his background or his vision.”⁴² Another senator admitted the real qualification: Trump “likes him and trusts him.”⁴²

Kash Patel — no senior law enforcement experience, publicly promised to “come after” political enemies — was given the FBI: 38,000 employees, 55 field offices, the world’s preeminent law enforcement agency.⁴² Even Trump’s own first-term Attorney General, William Barr, said Patel has “virtually no experience that would qualify him.”⁴²

The party that attacked DEI as destroying meritocracy handed control of the world’s most powerful military to a cable news host and the nation’s top law enforcement agency to a man whose primary qualification is personal loyalty.

The real principle: “Meritocracy” means our people get the jobs. DEI was the threat because it meant their people might.

“Religious Liberty”

The stated value: Protect religious freedom. Government shouldn’t infringe on faith.

The reality: They called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” — and delivered.⁴³ The original ban targeted seven Muslim-majority countries. By January 2026, it had expanded to cover 19+ nations.⁴³ The stated rationale was national security. North Korea and a handful of Venezuelan officials were included as window dressing. The impact, as the Brennan Center documented, fell “overwhelmingly on Muslims.”⁴³

Meanwhile, the Alliance Defending Freedom — the most powerful religious liberty litigation group in America, with 83 Supreme Court victories — has never defended a single case involving Muslim, Jewish, Sikh, or Hindu religious liberty.⁴⁴ Not one. ADF was founded by 30 leaders of the Christian right. Its Blackstone Legal Fellowship’s stated mission: to “recover the robust Christendomic theology of the 3rd, 4th, and 5th centuries.”⁴⁴ It has supported the recriminalization of gay sex, defended state-sanctioned sterilization of trans people abroad, and drafted model legislation for Mississippi’s religious exemption bill — the same bill that allows businesses to refuse service to LGBTQ people in the name of “religious freedom.”⁴⁴ The SPLC has designated ADF an anti-LGBTQ hate group.⁴⁴

Religious liberty for Christians to discriminate. A government ban on Muslims entering the country. Same administration. Same party. Same Congress.

The real principle: Christian dominance. Not pluralism. Not liberty. Dominance.

“America First”

The stated value: Stop policing the world. Focus on America. No more foreign entanglements.

The reality: They invaded Venezuela. Without congressional authorization. Operation Absolute Resolve — 150+ aircraft, airstrikes on Venezuelan air defenses, the capture of a sitting head of state at 2 a.m. in his own capital.⁴⁵ At least 148 people killed in 43 strikes.⁴⁵ Trump told NBC he wasn’t “at war” with Venezuela while overseeing armed intervention in its sovereign territory.⁴⁵ Then he met with 20 oil executives seeking $100 billion in Venezuelan oil development commitments and said the U.S. would “run” Venezuela.⁴⁵ A U.N. spokesperson: the action made “all States less safe around the world.”⁴⁵

At Davos, he told NATO allies: “I’m not sure if they’d be there for us” — directly undermining the mutual defense compact — while praising his “very good relationship” with Putin and Xi.⁴⁶ He threatened to annex Greenland from Denmark, a NATO ally: “You can say no and we will remember.”⁴⁶ He threatened 10% tariffs on eight European countries over the territory.⁴⁶

And they seized the U.S. Institute of Peace — a Congress-created independent institution — by force, in defiance of a federal court ruling that the takeover was illegal.⁴⁷ They renamed it the “Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace,” affixed his name to the facade, and established a “Board of Peace” chaired by Trump himself with $17 billion in pledged funding and a mandate that may displace U.N. diplomatic functions.⁴⁷ The institution designed to foster peace became a vanity monument, then a rival to the U.N. — all while the administration was bombing Venezuelan fishing vessels.

The real principle: “America First” was never isolationism. It was freeing executive power from democratic constraints — allied consultation, congressional authorization, international law — to project force anywhere the president wants, for any reason he chooses.

What the receipts show: at this point, the examples stop being isolated and become diagnostic. “Law and order,” “pro-life,” “fiscal responsibility,” “meritocracy,” “religious liberty,” “America First” — each one follows the same architecture: principle-language on the surface, power enforcement underneath. Different slogans, same machine.

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On Identity Politics

Nine domains. Nine stated values. Nine reveals. Every single one resolved the same way: the stated principle was a weapon, the real principle was power, and the moment the weapon was no longer useful it was discarded without a second thought.

But there’s one objection still standing — and it’s the one you’ll hear first if you share this piece with the wrong dinner party. It sounds like this: “Sure, the right is bad. But the left does identity politics too. Both sides divide people into groups. Both sides play the identity game.”

It sounds reasonable. It sounds balanced. It even comes from the left — Columbia humanities professor Mark Lilla wrote a bestselling book arguing that “American liberalism has slipped into a kind of moral panic about racial, gender and sexual identity” and that progressive identity politics was “Reaganism for lefties.”⁴⁸ The New York Times published his argument the week after Trump won in 2016, and it became the paper’s most-read political op-ed that year.⁴⁸ Centrist Democrats nodded along. Liberal pundits cited it approvingly. The “both sides do identity politics” framing hardened into bipartisan conventional wisdom — the kind of critique that sounds so sophisticated it immunizes itself against examination.

So let’s examine it.

In the opening of this piece, I made a promise: every single left-wing policy attacked as “identity politics” traces directly back to defending people from a documented, specific, right-wing attack. I said we’d prove it exhaustively. Here’s the proof. Try the challenge yourself: name one that doesn’t trace back. You won’t find it.

Affirmative Action

Affirmative action didn’t spring from ideology. It was the remedy after decades of anti-discrimination law failed to produce any change at all.⁴⁹

In 1963 — a full century after the Emancipation Proclamation — a federal court enjoined the state of Alabama from discriminating against Black applicants in the hiring of state troopers. The court’s finding: “In the thirty-seven year history of the patrol there has never been a black trooper.”⁴⁹ Eighteen months after the court order, still operating under anti-discrimination statutes alone, not a single Black person had been hired — as a trooper or into any civilian position.⁴⁹ The court had to impose numerical goals to make the law mean anything at all.

That wasn’t an outlier. It was the pattern. At Kaiser Aluminum’s Gramercy, Louisiana plant, 5 of 273 skilled craft workers were Black — because the craft unions had excluded Black workers for generations, and Kaiser only hired people with prior craft experience, creating a self-perpetuating loop of exclusion.⁴⁹ In San Francisco, women represented 4 percent of entry-level police officers in 1979.⁴⁹ After a consent decree imposed numerical targets, Black officers rose from 7 to 31, Hispanic officers from 12 to 55, Asian officers from 0 to 10 — and women were admitted as firefighters for the first time.⁴⁹

President Kennedy introduced the term “affirmative action” in Executive Order 10925 in 1961.⁴⁹ President Johnson expanded it in 1965. And here’s the detail that should stop the “identity politics” accusation in its tracks: the Nixon administration — Nixon — defended goals and timetables as “necessary and right.”⁴⁹ Both Republican and Democratic administrations turned to race- and gender-conscious remedies, the Clinton White House review noted, because “periods of experimentation had shown that other means too often failed to correct the problems.”⁴⁹

Thirty-seven years. Zero Black troopers. That’s not ideology. That’s a wound, and affirmative action was the bandage.

DEI

The modern diversity, equity, and inclusion movement traces its origins to a specific act of violence against a specific person.⁵⁰

In 1946, Sergeant Isaac Woodard Jr. — a Black World War II veteran, still in uniform, hours after receiving his honorable discharge — was dragged off a Greyhound bus by the police chief of Batesburg, South Carolina, and beaten so severely with a blackjack that both of his eyes were destroyed.⁵⁰ He was blinded for life. He was 27 years old.

When NAACP Executive Secretary Walter White brought Woodard’s case to President Truman, the president’s response was immediate: “My God. I didn’t know it was this bad. We’ve got to do something.”⁵⁰ White House aides later said the Woodard incident was what finally pushed Truman to act. He issued Executive Orders 9980 and 9981 in 1948 — desegregating the federal workforce and the armed forces.⁵⁰ That is the direct origin of everything we now call DEI: a blind veteran, a horrified president, and the first federal attempt to make American institutions reflect the country they claimed to serve.

Every subsequent wave followed the same pattern. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 — responding to a century of Jim Crow. The post-Ferguson reforms — responding to a Washington Post project that revealed police kill roughly 1,000 people a year, disproportionately Black and young.⁵⁰ The post-George Floyd corporate DEI initiatives — responding to a man murdered on camera by a police officer who knelt on his neck for nine minutes while he called for his dead mother.⁵⁰ Every wave of DEI expansion corresponds to a documented wave of violence. As Thurgood Marshall put it in 1987: the Constitution itself was “defective from the start” — and DEI programs are the ongoing repair.⁵⁰

Ron DeSantis in 2023 said DEI “is better viewed as standing for discrimination, exclusion, and indoctrination.”⁵⁰ He was describing a program born from a blinded veteran and built to remedy centuries of documented exclusion — and he called it the discrimination.

Sanctuary Cities

Sanctuary cities were not created to “protect illegal immigrants.” They were created because the people who actually enforce the law — police chiefs — said that federal immigration enforcement was making their communities less safe.⁵¹

The International Association of Chiefs of Police warned that state and local enforcement of federal immigration law creates a “chilling effect” on crime reporting — because undocumented residents stop calling 911 when they witness crimes, stop cooperating with investigations, stop testifying.⁵¹ The Major Cities Chiefs Association reached the same conclusion: commingling local policing with immigration enforcement “would result in increased crime against immigrants and in the broader community, create a class of silent victims and eliminate the potential for assistance from immigrants in solving crimes or preventing future terroristic acts.”⁵¹

The data confirmed what the police chiefs predicted. A UC San Diego study using ICE’s own data — 608 sanctuary counties analyzed against comparable non-sanctuary counties — found that sanctuary counties have 35.5 fewer crimes per 10,000 people.⁵¹ Median household income is $4,353 higher. Poverty is 2.3 percent lower. Unemployment is 1.1 percent lower.⁵¹ Sanctuary policies aren’t soft on crime. They reduce crime — because they keep communities functional instead of terrorized into silence.

Trans Protections

This was not a cultural reaction to trans “overreach.” It was an organized political campaign, and its origins are traceable to a specific date. ACLU Transgender Justice Director Chase Strangio identified the trigger directly: “It’s part of a continued backlash from marriage equality. So when the Supreme Court struck down bans on marriage for same-sex couples in 2015, you immediately saw a backlash in the form of legislative attacks on trans people and trans youth in particular.”⁵² The wave escalated after the 2020 Supreme Court ruling that LGBTQ people are covered under federal civil rights law. It intensified again after Biden’s election.⁵² The attackers needed a new target after losing on marriage. Trans people — the smallest, most vulnerable group in the LGBTQ coalition — became it.

The scale is staggering. In 2023 alone, state legislatures introduced 615 anti-trans bills. Eighty-seven were signed into law across 24 states.⁵³ The bills targeted healthcare, sports, bathrooms, schools, legal recognition — every dimension of trans people’s existence in public life.

The legislative tracker maintained by the ACLU documents it year after year: hundreds of individual bills, each one targeting a specific aspect of trans people’s lives — who they can see for medical care, which bathroom they can use, what sports team they can join, what name appears on their driver’s license.⁵³ The protections that followed — from executive orders to corporate policies to state-level equality acts — were responses to that campaign. The attackers moved first. Every single time.

The Undeniable Fact

Here is the challenge, stated one final time: name a single left-wing “identity politics” policy that does not trace directly back to defending people from a documented right-wing attack.

Affirmative action: the response to 37 years of zero Black state troopers. DEI: the response to a blinded veteran, a century of Jim Crow, and police killings documented by newspaper databases. Sanctuary cities: the response to federal raids that made communities less safe, built on the recommendation of the nation’s police chiefs, validated by ICE’s own data. Trans protections: the response to 615 bills in a single year targeting people for existing.

You can’t find one that doesn’t trace back. Not one.

And here’s the honest concession that makes the argument stronger, not weaker: these policies are not the real solutions. Affirmative action is a bandage, not a cure. DEI training is not a substitute for the kind of structural investment in education, infrastructure, housing, and healthcare that would actually deliver equity. Sanctuary cities wouldn’t need to exist if immigration policy were rational and humane. Every one of these policies is harm reduction — a tourniquet applied to a wound that requires surgery.

But ask yourself who keeps defunding the surgery. As we documented in Section V, the “fiscal responsibility” party has blown multi-trillion-dollar holes in the federal budget — every single time — through tax cuts that overwhelmingly benefit the wealthy, while telling hungry children and sick mothers there’s no money left. The real investments that would make affirmative action unnecessary — world-class public schools in every zip code, universal healthcare, a living wage, affordable housing — require exactly the kind of public spending that the right has spent fifty years ensuring will never happen. And Democrats have often played along. Clinton’s 1996 welfare reform gutted the safety net for millions. His crime bill fueled mass incarceration. Obama’s response to the 2008 financial crisis — “foam the runway” for the banks, as his own Treasury official put it — rescued Wall Street and left millions of families to lose their homes. The bipartisan consensus that public investment is wasteful and markets will provide has been, for decades, a bipartisan agreement to leave the wound open.

So yes — affirmative action, DEI, sanctuary cities, and trans protections are band-aids. But in a country where one party actively blocks the surgery and the other party often can’t bring itself to schedule it, the choice is between harm reduction and letting people bleed. The left chose to stop the bleeding. And the right calls that “identity politics.”

The right doesn’t oppose “identity politics.” It opposes the defense. The attack — segregation, discrimination, raids, bathroom bills, the Muslim ban — is their project. The accusation of “identity politics” is the accusation the bully makes after you raise your arms: stop hitting yourself. And the most devastating irony is that the accusation itself is the single most successful act of identity politics in American history: a white, “Christian,” corporatist political movement — running the most identity-driven project this country has ever seen — accusing the people it’s attacking of “playing identity.”

And we don’t have to infer that. They confessed.

The Confession

In 1981, Lee Atwater — the Republican strategist who would go on to run George H.W. Bush’s presidential campaign and chair the Republican National Committee — sat for an interview with political scientist Alexander Lamis. The full 42-minute audio, unearthed by researcher James Carter IV and published by The Nation in 2012, contains the most explicit description of the Republican identity-politics project ever recorded by one of its architects:⁵⁴

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger” — that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”

Read it again. The man who ran the Republican Party described — on tape, in his own words — a deliberate, decades-long project to encode racial hostility into policy language so abstract that it couldn’t be called racist. “States’ rights.” “Cutting taxes.” “Forced busing.” Not principles. Codes. The same codes this article has been decoding for 10,000 words.

That wasn’t a rogue confession. Two Republican National Committee chairmen have since acknowledged the strategy on the record.

In 2005, RNC Chairman Ken Mehlman stood before the NAACP’s national convention in Milwaukee and said: “Some Republicans gave up on winning the African American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization. I am here today as the Republican chairman to tell you we were wrong.”⁵⁵

In 2010, Michael Steele — the first Black RNC chairman — went further: “For the last 40-plus years we had a ‘Southern Strategy’ that alienated many minority voters by focusing on the white male vote in the South.”⁵⁶ Steele acknowledged that the party had “lost sight of the historic, integral link between the party and African Americans” and had “mistreated that relationship.”⁵⁶

The architect described the strategy. Two party chairmen apologized for it. And the party kept doing it — because the apologies were not confessions of guilt. They were bids for a new market. Mehlman didn’t dismantle the Southern Strategy. He rebranded it. Steele didn’t reverse course. He narrated the damage while the machine kept running. The strategy that Atwater described in 1981 — encode the racial appeal, make it abstract, deny it’s racial — is the same strategy operating today under the label “anti-identity politics.” The code words changed. The project didn’t.

Ta-Nehisi Coates saw it clearly. Responding to Lilla’s framing, Coates wrote that it “effectively excuses white identity politics” while condemning the identity politics of everyone else — ennobling “what appeals to the white working class” while damning “what appeals to black workers, and all others outside the tribe.”⁴⁸ Critics noted that Lilla’s history conveniently omitted the Southern Strategy — the fifty-year experiment in explicit white identity politics that two of the party’s own chairmen have publicly acknowledged.⁴⁸ The accusation erased the attacker and blamed the defense. That’s not analysis. That’s cover fire.

What this shows: this is the inversion at the center of the whole project: the movement running the most aggressive identity politics in modern American life accuses its targets of “identity politics” for defending themselves. The attack comes first. The defense is then recoded as the offense. That is not hypocrisy; it is narrative control as strategy.

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The War

Every example so far — guns, speech, states’ rights, law and order, life, money, merit, religion, identity — resolved the same way. The stated value was never the actual value. The actual value was always power and protection for the in-group. That’s the analytical conclusion. We’ve been proving the negative — these aren’t their real principles. Now here’s the positive. Here’s what the project actually looks like when the people waging a war stop pretending they’re engaged in a debate about principles.

Immigration is where you see it most clearly — not because it’s the only front, but because immigrants are the group with the least power to resist. No vote. No lobby. No leverage. When the machinery of state turns on people who can’t fight back, you see it operate without restraint or camouflage. You see what they’ve built, what the courts tried to stop, what the world watched them do, and what they said about it in their own words.

What They Built

In February 2023 — two full years before the first American deportation flight — El Salvador’s Justice Minister Gustavo Villatoro stood before cameras and said that prisoners sent to CECOT, the country’s mega-prison, “will only leave in a coffin.”⁵⁷ The U.S. State Department’s own 2023 human rights report described El Salvador’s prison conditions as “harsh and life-threatening.”⁵⁷ The human rights organization Cristosal documented 419 prison deaths under El Salvador’s state of emergency before a single American deportee arrived.⁵⁷ The guards wore hoods and went by nicknames — Satán, Pantera, El Tigre — designed so no one could be identified.⁵⁷ There were no yards, no recreational areas, no natural light. Lights stayed on around the clock. Bunks had no mattresses. Human Rights Watch and Cristosal later titled their joint investigative report with a quote from a deportee describing his arrival: ”You Have Arrived in Hell.”⁵⁷

They knew all of this. They sent people there anyway.

On March 15, 2025, three flights carried 238 Venezuelan men to El Salvador.⁵⁸ Upon landing, they were marched off the planes by heavily armed Salvadoran soldiers, had their heads shaved, and were transferred into CECOT.⁵⁸ Their families found out from Salvadoran government social media posts — the U.S. government told no one.⁵⁸ No release dates. No specified sentences. No access to lawyers or family communication. The administration called them “the worst of the worst.”

They weren’t. DHS’s own data — obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request — showed that 53 percent of the Venezuelans sent to CECOT had no criminal conviction and no criminal charge of any kind.⁵⁹ Only 4 percent had a violent crime conviction. The primary tool used to identify them as gang members was a points-based checklist that flagged tattoos — including roses, clocks, a Real Madrid soccer logo, a Call of Duty video game reference, and song lyrics from a Puerto Rican reggaeton artist.⁵⁹ The government’s own Tren de Aragua expert testified under oath that the tattoo method was unreliable and reflected “an incorrect conflation of gang practices in Central America and Venezuela.”⁵⁹ Over 50 of the deportees had entered the United States legally.⁵⁹ And in a detail that should end any debate: DHS later created its own “Worst of the Worst” database of criminal immigrants. It included none of the CECOT deportees.⁵⁹

53% of the people the government called ‘the worst of the worst’ had no criminal conviction and no criminal charge. DHS’s own data.

DHS Secretary Kristi Noem visited CECOT after the flights and posted a video thanking El Salvador for “incarcerating” the deportees and imposing “consequences for the violence they have perpetuated.” She captioned it: “President Trump and I have a clear message to criminal illegal aliens: LEAVE NOW. If you do not leave, we will hunt you down, arrest you, and you could end up in this El Salvadorian prison.”⁶⁰ UCLA law professor Ahilan Arulanantham — who actually represented CECOT deportees in court — noted that Noem’s own words legally transform the deportation from civil immigration enforcement into criminal punishment, which triggers the full weight of the Fifth and Sixth Amendments.⁶⁰ The government said “convicted criminals only” get CECOT. The government sent 238 people who had never been convicted of anything.

Then there was Kilmar Abrego Garcia — the case that made the machinery visible. Abrego Garcia was a 29-year-old Salvadoran national living in Maryland with his American wife and U.S. citizen child. He was a sheet metal worker pursuing his journeyman license. In 2019, a federal immigration judge had granted him “withholding of removal” — a court order explicitly barring his deportation to El Salvador because he faced likely gang persecution there.⁶¹ He had a DHS-issued work permit. He had never been charged with or convicted of any crime.

In March 2025, ICE seized him and put him on a plane to El Salvador. He was thrown into CECOT. The administration called it a “clerical error.”⁶¹

Three courts — district, circuit, and the Supreme Court — ordered his return. The administration defied them all. Judge Paula Xinis called the government’s responses a “willful and bad faith refusal to comply.”⁶¹ The DOJ attorney who conceded in court that the deportation was wrong — that it was, in Xinis’s words, “wholly lawless” — was removed from the case and placed on administrative leave.⁶¹ When the administration finally brought Abrego Garcia back to the United States, it was not to correct the error. It was to charge him with federal crimes — retroactively constructing justification for what they had done.⁶¹ Attorney General Pam Bondi made public accusations — murder, soliciting images from a minor — that do not appear anywhere in the actual indictment.⁶¹ His attorney: “There’s no way a jury is going to see the evidence and agree that this sheet metal worker is the leader of an international MS-13 smuggling conspiracy.”⁶¹

And CECOT was only one destination. The administration sent people to countries they had no connection to — and countries where the United States itself had documented that people would be harmed. Eight men were deported to South Sudan — a country on the verge of civil war — and only one was actually South Sudanese.⁶² The others came from Cuba, Mexico, Laos, Myanmar, and Vietnam. One Burmese man was told he was being sent to Libya, then South Africa, then South Sudan — all within hours.⁶² His immigration attorney, a 20-year veteran: “This is a death penalty case with traffic court-level procedure.”⁶² The administration planned military-operated deportation flights to Libya — a country the State Department rates “Do Not Travel” (its highest danger designation), where open slave markets have been documented since the collapse of the government in 2011.⁶³ Two hundred people, including 81 children, were expelled to Costa Rica from 16 countries — Afghanistan, Armenia, Iran, Russia, Vietnam, Yemen — dumped in a country where they didn’t speak the language and had no connection, after Costa Rica’s president was coerced by threats of trade-zone tariffs.⁶⁴ One deportee’s statement gave Human Rights Watch its report title: “The strategy is to break us so we will give up.”⁶⁴ The average cost: $133,000 per person.⁶⁵

Back on American soil, the apparatus was expanding. In the Florida Everglades, a detention facility was built in eight days in an alligator-infested swamp.⁶⁶ It was named “Alligator Alcatraz” — after a prison famous for brutality — and they were proud of it. The Florida Republican Party sold branded T-shirts and beer koozies. The ACLU filed a federal lawsuit documenting that detainees were held “off the grid,” invisible to families and lawyers, without charges, in conditions they called “atrocious and dangerous.”⁶⁶ DACA recipients — people brought to this country as children, with legal status — were detained; ICE agents told them their status “doesn’t matter anymore.”⁶⁶

And then DHS revealed its plans for the next phase: 24 warehouse mega-centers across the country — 16 regional processing facilities holding 1,000-1,500 people each, and 8 large-scale detention centers holding 7,000-10,000 people each.⁶⁷ Total cost: $38.3 billion. Target: 135,000 detention beds by 2029.⁶⁷ This is not a processing system. It is a permanent deportation pipeline — built to scale, funded by the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” designed to hold more people in immigration detention than the federal prison system holds convicted criminals.

In 2025, 32 people died in ICE custody — the deadliest year in more than two decades.⁶⁷ Nearly 75 percent of those detained had no criminal convictions. December alone: seven deaths. Among the dead: DACA recipients brought to the United States as children. An imam who filed an emergency medical motion three days before he died. A man stopped on a grocery run with his wife — they were separated, detained, and he died of kidney and liver failure after repeated symptoms went untreated.⁶⁷

What the Courts Saw

The judiciary’s response tells you how far outside the bounds of normal governance this has gone — because judges don’t write the way they’ve been writing unless they believe something foundational is breaking.

When Judge James Boasberg ordered the Venezuelan deportation flights halted, the planes flew anyway. El Salvador’s President Bukele posted on social media: “Oopsie… Too late.”⁶⁸ White House officials amplified the post.

Judge Paula Xinis, on the Abrego Garcia deportation, called it “wholly lawless” and said the government’s responses reflected a “willful and bad faith refusal to comply with discovery obligations.”⁶¹

Then Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III wrote what may be the most consequential appellate opinion of the era — and he is a Reagan appointee. Writing for a unanimous Fourth Circuit panel, Wilkinson said: “The government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order.” He continued: “Further, it claims in essence that because it has rid itself of custody that there is nothing that can be done. This should be shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear.”⁶⁹ And then the warning: “If today the Executive claims the right to deport without due process and in disregard of court orders, what assurance will there be tomorrow that it will not deport American citizens… and train its broad discretionary powers upon its political enemies?”⁶⁹

A Reagan-appointed judge, asking on the record whether the government will next come for its political enemies. Even the National Review — the flagship conservative publication — covered the ruling as a “resounding” rejection of the DOJ.⁶⁹

In Minnesota, the scale of defiance overwhelmed the courts. ICE violated 96 court orders in January 2026 alone.⁸ Chief Judge Schiltz: “ICE has likely violated more court orders in January 2026 than some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence.”⁷⁰ DOJ attorney Julie Le — a Homeland Security lawyer handling more than 80 cases from Operation Metro Surge — told a federal judge in open court: “The system sucks, this job sucks. I wish you would just hold me in contempt so I can get 24 hours of sleep.”⁷¹ She said ICE had “no guidance or direction” on how to comply with court orders.⁷¹ She was later removed from her detail.

Army lawyer Matthew Isihara — pulled from the JAG corps to plug the gap left by mass DOJ resignations — was held in contempt of court and fined $500 per day after ICE defied a specific order to release a man in Minnesota with his identification documents.⁷⁰ Judge Laura Provinzino, in a nine-page order, wrote: “The Government has offered that excuse to this Court again, and again, and again (and to other judges in this district again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again).” She called the consequences of non-compliance “real consequences on real human beings.”⁷⁰

In New Jersey, the DOJ admitted in a court filing to violating court orders more than 50 times in 10 weeks, covering 547 immigration cases — including an illegal deportation to Peru in defiance of a judicial injunction.⁷²

And then the language escalated beyond anything in modern judicial memory. Judge Mustafa Kasubhai, in Oregon, did something courts almost never do: he stripped the Department of Justice of its “presumption of good faith” — the foundational trust that courts extend to the federal government.⁷³ “The presumption of regularity that has been previously extended to Plaintiff that it could be taken at its word — with little doubt about its intentions and stated purposes — no longer holds.”⁷³ The DOJ can no longer be trusted to tell the truth.

Judge Sunshine Sykes, in California, used the word “terror”: “Beyond its terror against noncitizens, the executive branch has extended its violence on its own citizens, killing two American citizens — Renée Good and Alex Pretti — in Minnesota.”⁷⁴

Judge Fred Biery, in Texas, ordered the release of 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos from ICE detention, writing: “The perfidious lust for unbridled power and the imposition of cruelty in its quest know no bounds and are bereft of human decency. And the rule of law be damned.”⁷⁵ He affixed a photo of the detained child to his order. Then two Bible verses. Matthew 19:14: “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them.” John 11:35: “Jesus wept.”⁷⁵

Judge Richard Leon — a George W. Bush appointee — blocked Defense Secretary Hegseth’s attempt to demote Senator Mark Kelly for appearing in a video reminding troops of their duty to refuse illegal orders. Leon’s response to the government’s procedural arguments: “Horsefeathers!”⁷⁶ He used exclamation points more than a dozen times in the opinion. He told Hegseth to “be grateful” for retired military voices rather than trying to “shrink” their First Amendment rights.⁷⁶

And Judge William Young — a Reagan appointee — found that Cabinet secretaries Marco Rubio and Kristi Noem had engaged in an “unconstitutional conspiracy” to violate the First Amendment, targeting academics and activists for their political speech on Palestine.⁷⁶ Young compared their conduct to enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act. He said the president “has a fearful view of freedom.”⁷⁷

Three hundred and seventy-three federal judges have rejected the administration’s mandatory detention policy. Forty-four of them were Trump’s own appointees. Only twenty-eight sided with the administration.⁷⁴ Tom Homan, the border czar, went on Fox News and said: “We’re not stopping. I don’t care what the judges think.”⁶⁸

As the New Republic observed: “This is not how federal judges write opinions in normal circumstances.”⁷⁸ When judges start affixing photos of detained children to their orders, citing Bible verses, writing “Horsefeathers!” with exclamation points, using the word “terror,” stripping the government of its good-faith presumption, comparing Cabinet secretaries to fugitive slave catchers, and warning about “incipient crisis” — the judiciary is sounding the loudest alarm it can while staying within its institutional role. Judges cannot take to the streets. They can only write opinions. And they are writing the most extreme opinions in living memory.

And the Supreme Court is overruling them.

Since January 20, 2025, the Brennan Center for Justice has tracked 25 decisions on the Supreme Court’s shadow docket — the fast-track emergency procedure that bypasses full briefing, oral argument, and written reasoning. Of those 25, the Court ruled for the administration at least partially in 20. Seven came with no written explanation at all.⁷⁹ In the first 20 weeks of the second Trump administration, the government filed 19 shadow docket applications — the same number the Biden administration filed in four years. The Obama and Bush administrations combined filed 8 in sixteen years.⁷⁹

The pattern is consistent. Lower courts block administration actions as likely illegal. The administration appeals to SCOTUS on the shadow docket. The Court overrules — often without explaining why. Racial profiling in immigration sweeps: overruled, no explanation. Mass revocation of parole for half a million people: overruled, no explanation. Firing transgender service members: overruled, no explanation. Terminating members of the FTC without cause: overruled, no explanation.⁷⁹ Each time, a lower court found the government was probably breaking the law. Each time, the Supreme Court let it proceed anyway.

The dissenting justices are no longer writing in legalese. Justice Sotomayor, in McMahon v. New York, after the Court allowed the Department of Education to fire its employees despite a lower court order: “When the Executive publicly announces its intent to break the law, and then executes on that promise, it is the Judiciary’s duty to check that lawlessness, not expedite it. The majority is either willfully blind to the implications of its ruling or naive, but either way the threat to our Constitution’s separation of powers is grave.”⁷⁹

Justice Kagan, after the Court let the president fire FTC commissioners without cause — overturning a century of precedent on the independence of federal agencies: “Our emergency docket should never be used, as it has been this year, to permit what our own precedent bars. Still more, it should not be used, as it also has been, to transfer government authority from Congress to the President, and thus to reshape the Nation’s separation of powers.”⁷⁹

And Justice Jackson, who has emerged as the most urgent voice on the Court, writing dissent after dissent as the majority clears the path: “The Court allows the Government to do what it wants to do regardless, rendering constraints of law irrelevant and unleashing devastation in the process.”⁷⁹ And: “Once again, this Court dons its emergency-responder gear, rushes to the scene, and uses its equitable power to fan the flames rather than extinguish them.”⁷⁹ And, in a line that could serve as the epitaph for the shadow docket era: “By needlessly granting the Government’s emergency application, the Court has cleared a path for the Executive to choose law-free action at this perilous moment for our Constitution — right when the Judiciary should be hunkering down to do all it can to preserve the law’s constraints.”⁷⁹

So here is the complete picture: Lower courts — including Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Obama, and Trump appointees — are issuing the most extreme judicial opinions in living memory, stripping the government of its good-faith presumption, comparing Cabinet secretaries to slave catchers, and warning of constitutional crisis. And the Supreme Court is using an emergency back door to overrule them 80 percent of the time, often without bothering to say why. The lower courts are sounding the alarm. The highest court is cutting the wires.

The International Front

The war isn’t only domestic. And the rest of the world knows it.

We covered the events briefly in “America First” — the invasion of Venezuela, the Greenland threats, the seizure of the U.S. Institute of Peace, the tariff defiance.⁴⁵ ⁴⁶ ⁴⁷ ⁴⁰ ⁴¹ What matters here isn’t a second recitation of those facts. What matters is what two people said about them — one from inside the machine, one watching it from the outside — because together they tell you exactly what this project is.

Three days after U.S. special forces captured Nicolás Maduro in a midnight raid on his own capital, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller went on CNN and explained the new world order. Jake Tapper asked him what it meant that the United States was “running Venezuela.” Miller didn’t hedge: “The United States of America is running Venezuela. By definition. That’s true.” And then he said this: “We live in a world — in the real world, Jake — that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world.”⁸⁰

Read that again. Not “governed by law.” Not “governed by treaties.” Not “governed by the consent of nations.” Governed by strength, force, and power. The iron laws. He wasn’t embarrassed. He wasn’t caught off guard. He was explaining the thesis — on camera, to a national audience, three days after the United States invaded a sovereign country without congressional authorization and captured its head of state.

Miller kept going. When Tapper asked about Greenland — whether the administration could rule out military force against a NATO ally — Miller refused. When Tapper asked about elections in Venezuela, Miller dismissed the question as a “neoliberal frame.” The real frame, Miller said, was simpler: “The United States is using its military to secure our interests unapologetically in our hemisphere. We’re a superpower, and under President Trump, we are going to conduct ourselves as a superpower.”⁸⁰ No rules. No allies. No constraints. Just power, applied wherever the president points it.

That was January 6, 2026.

Fourteen days later, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney stood at the podium in Davos and gave the world’s answer. He did not name the United States. He didn’t have to.

“Let me be direct,” Carney said. “We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.”⁸¹ The rules-based international order — the system of open sea lanes, collective security, multilateral dispute resolution — was over. Not fading. Over. “The old order is not coming back. We shouldn’t mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy.”⁸¹

Then Carney did something remarkable. He invoked Václav Havel’s 1978 essay The Power of the Powerless — the one about a greengrocer in communist Czechoslovakia who places a sign in his window every morning: “Workers of the world unite.” He doesn’t believe it. Nobody does. But he places it anyway, to signal compliance, to avoid trouble. And because every shopkeeper on every street does the same, the system persists — “not through violence alone, but through the participation of ordinary people in rituals they privately know to be false.”⁸¹

Havel called this “living within a lie.” Carney said the international community had been doing the same thing for decades — placing signs in the window of the rules-based order, performing compliance with a system everyone knew the strongest would exempt themselves from whenever it suited them. “You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration,” Carney said, “when integration becomes the source of your subordination.”⁸¹

And then the line that landed: “When we only negotiate bilaterally with a hegemon, we negotiate from weakness. We accept what’s offered. We compete with each other to be the most accommodating. This is not sovereignty. It’s the performance of sovereignty while accepting subordination.”⁸¹

There it is. The architect and the witness. Miller announced that the world is governed by force and the United States would wield it without apology. Carney announced that the lie had been exposed and the sign was coming down. Two weeks apart. One said the quiet part out loud; the other said the world had finally stopped pretending not to hear it.

This is what “America First” always meant. Not isolationism — the opposite. The freedom to project force without constraint, to treat allies as subordinates, to dismiss international law as a “neoliberal frame,” to invade sovereign nations and call it “securing our interests.” Miller didn’t describe a foreign policy. He described the thesis of this entire essay — stated values as instruments, power as the only objective — applied to the planet.

What They Said

The camps are built. The courts have been defied. The international order has been attacked. Now listen to what they say about it — because they will tell you exactly what this is, if you let them.

Steve Bannon, White House Chief Strategist, at CPAC, February 2017 — weeks into the administration: “If you think they’re going to give you your country back without a fight, you are sadly mistaken.”⁸² And privately, to journalist Ronald Radosh: “Lenin wanted to destroy the state and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down and destroy all of today’s establishment.”⁸²

Michael Flynn, Trump’s former National Security Advisor, at the Reawaken America Tour, November 2021: “If we are going to have one nation under God, which we must, we have to have one religion.”⁸³ One religion. Not pluralism. Not liberty. One.

Donald Trump, Veterans Day 2023, Claremont, New Hampshire: “We will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.”⁸⁴ Historians immediately noted the language. “Vermin.” Hitler used it. Mussolini used it. It is the vocabulary of extermination — the word you use about people before you make them disappear.

Donald Trump, Fox News, October 2024, when asked about potential “chaos” on Election Day: “I think the bigger problem are the people from within. We have some very bad people. We have some sick people. It should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by the National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military.”⁸⁵ He named Adam Schiff by name. He said these internal enemies were more dangerous than China and Russia.⁸⁵

And then, on September 30, 2025, standing before approximately 800 generals and admirals at Marine Corps Base Quantico — the entire senior military leadership of the United States, summoned by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth — Donald Trump said this: “This is a war too. It’s a war from within.”⁸⁶ He called critics “vicious people that we have to fight.”⁸⁶ He singled out cities “run by the radical left Democrats — San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles” and said: “I told Pete, we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military.”⁸⁶ And then: “We’re under invasion from within, no different than a foreign enemy, but more difficult in many ways, because they don’t wear uniforms — at least when they’re wearing a uniform you can take them out.”⁸⁶

Read that last line again. The commander-in-chief, standing before 800 generals, describing his political opponents and their cities as a war front, and noting that unlike uniformed enemies, “you can take them out” — but these people don’t wear uniforms.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, NYU Professor of History and one of the foremost academic experts on fascism, heard the rhetoric and gave the clinical diagnosis: “Speaking of Americans as an enemy within — this is all straight from fascism. The core of fascism in Italy and Germany were combatants who followed their leader to bring the war home and turned their force against their own people.”⁸⁷

And then Kevin Roberts — president of the Heritage Foundation, the organization that authored Project 2025, the blueprint for everything you’ve just read — went on national television and said this: “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”⁸⁸

Read the conditional. Not “if we succeed.” Not “if we’re right.” If the left allows it to be. The revolution is not in question. It’s underway. The only variable is the blood — and that choice, Roberts says, belongs to the people being crushed by it.

That’s the verdict: You don’t name a prison after alligators and brag about it if you’re enforcing immigration law. You don’t build mega-centers for 10,000 people each if you’re processing visa violations. You don’t ship a court-protected man to a foreign torture prison over a “clerical error” if you see him as a human being. You don’t deport people to countries with open slave markets if you care whether they live. You don’t send 81 children to a country they’ve never been to and call it “enforcement.” You don’t kill a nurse holding his phone and call him an assassin if you see him as a citizen. You don’t tell 800 generals that your political opponents are “the enemy” and their cities are “training grounds” if you’re running a democracy.

This is what it looks like when there is no hypocrisy — when the stated values have been fully discarded, the real project is fully visible, and the people running it are telling you exactly what it is, in their own words, on camera, on the record.

This is what war looks like when the people waging it stop pretending they’re engaged in a debate about principles.

What this establishes: by the time we reach the camps, the court defiance, the international posture, and their own rhetoric, the mask is gone. The project is no longer hiding behind principle-language because it no longer needs to. They are describing it openly now — force, hierarchy, enemies, war. The only mistake left is continuing to answer it like a debate.

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The Verdict

Every time we call it hypocrisy, we give them cover. We reduce a war to a debate flaw. We treat detention camps as a “gotcha” moment and rendition flights as a contradiction to be catalogued. We act like if we just point out the double standard loudly enough — if we just catch them one more time — they’ll be embarrassed into stopping. That the system will self-correct. That the referees will intervene. That someone, somewhere, will finally say enough.

They won’t. Because there is no double standard. There is no contradiction. There never was. Every single “inconsistency” in this essay — every gun law they blocked while arming the state, every book they banned while screaming about free speech, every deficit they exploded while preaching fiscal discipline, every court order they defied while chanting “law and order” — points in the same direction. The stated values were never the project. They were the camouflage. And we have spent decades analyzing the camouflage while the project advanced unobstructed.

They are not — and never were — hypocrites. They are fascist insurgents waging a war against the republic, and they are willing to do anything to win it: lie about their principles, rendition innocent people into foreign torture prisons where nobody leaves alive, or kill American citizens on their own doorstep. You cannot avoid a war brought upon you by denial any more than you can win one without accepting you’re in it.

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But we didn’t write 20,000 words just to tell you the house is on fire. We wrote them so you could see the architecture — who built it, how it works, and where the load-bearing walls are. Because you can’t fight what you can’t name, and you can’t dismantle what you don’t understand. This was the case. Now the strategy.

So here’s the question that matters: what are you going to do about it?

Because right now, too many of us are clinging to exits that no longer exist. Waiting for saviors who aren’t coming. Depending on institutions that have already fallen. Fighting a 21st-century information war with 20th-century tactics. Not because we don’t care. Not because we’re not angry. But because it is easier to believe the system will self-correct than to accept that it won’t — and that the only people who can stop this are us.

Before we can talk about how to fight, we need to close the false exits — because as long as you’re counting on one of them, you’ll never commit to what actually works.

Close the False Exits

“We Just Need 3.5%”

You’ve heard it. Maybe you’ve shared it. The idea that if just 3.5% of the population actively resists, no government can survive. It’s a comforting number — small enough to feel achievable, backed by a Harvard researcher, repeated so often it’s become gospel in resistance spaces.

Here’s the problem: the woman who discovered it says it doesn’t work anymore.

Erica Chenoweth, the political scientist whose research produced the 3.5% figure, has spent the last several years issuing what she calls “cautionary updates.” The number, she now says, was a “descriptive statistic” — a historical observation, not a guarantee. A “tendency, not a law.”⁸⁹ Her original research studied 323 campaigns between 1900 and 2006.⁸⁹ Since roughly 2010, she warns, authoritarian regimes have gotten dramatically better at surviving mass resistance. They’ve studied the movements that toppled their predecessors. They’ve trained their security forces to prevent defections. They’ve coordinated across borders — sharing repression playbooks the way democracies used to share governance models. And they’ve weaponized digital technology — the same platforms you’re doom-scrolling right now — for surveillance, disinformation, and counter-narrative warfare.⁹⁰

The proof? Bahrain. Between 2011 and 2014, Bahrain’s nonviolent pro-democracy movement mobilized over 6% of the population — nearly double Chenoweth’s threshold. The regime survived. The movement failed. The monarchy had foreign backing and security forces trained specifically to resist the kind of pressure the 3.5% model predicted would be insurmountable.⁸⁹

So the next time someone tells you “we just need 3.5%,” ask them what happened to 6% in Bahrain. Then ask them what they’re actually doing besides citing a statistic from a study that its own author says no longer applies.

“The Courts Will Save Us”

You read what the courts have been doing. You read the opinions — Reagan appointees comparing the government to fugitive slave catchers, a Bush appointee shouting “Horsefeathers!”, a judge in Texas affixing a photo of a five-year-old to his order and quoting scripture. You read what the Supreme Court did in response: overruled them 80% of the time on the shadow docket, often without explaining why. You read what Tom Homan said: “I don’t care what the judges think.”

The lower courts that are fighting for you are being defanged from above and ignored from below. Three hundred and seventy-three judges have ruled against this administration. The administration has treated those rulings as suggestions. That’s not a system with checks and balances. That’s a system where the checks have been checkmated.

The courts are not coming to save you. They can’t even save themselves.

“We’ll Win the Next Election”

The polls look great. Democrats are surging. The generic ballot is favorable. You’ve seen the numbers and you feel hope.

Now hear this: the regime has no intention of letting the next election be fair.

In February 2026, Trump posted on Truth Social that there will be voter ID for the midterms “whether approved by Congress or not.” The President openly announced he will unilaterally impose election rules — bypassing the legislature that the Constitution specifically empowers to set them. He claimed to have “searched the depths of Legal Arguments not yet articulated or vetted on this subject” — literally claiming secret legal powers no lawyer in American history has ever found. He’s already tried this. In March 2025, he issued an executive order attempting the same thing. A federal court permanently enjoined it. He’s doing it again anyway.⁹¹

The SAVE America Act passed the House 218-213. It requires documentary proof of citizenship to register — your driver’s license doesn’t count. Only five states issue IDs that denote citizenship. Twenty-one million Americans can’t access the required documents. Fifty-two percent of registered voters don’t have an unexpired passport with their current legal name. Changed your name when you got married? You now need three documents just to prove you’re the same person. And it doesn’t just apply to new registrations — update your address, change your party, and you have to prove your citizenship all over again.⁹² ⁹³

Kansas already proved what this does. When Kansas adopted a documentary proof-of-citizenship requirement, it blocked 31,000 eligible citizens from registering — 12% of all applicants. The rate of noncitizen registration it was designed to prevent? 0.002%. The law stopped 6,000 times more citizens than noncitizens.⁹² Black eligible voters are 3.6 times more likely than white voters to lack a driver’s license — and the SAVE Act doesn’t even accept a standard license.⁹⁴ Election workers who register someone without the correct papers face five years in prison.⁹² And every state would be required to hand its entire voter registration list to DHS — with no restrictions on what the federal government can do with that data.⁹³

DHS Secretary Kristi Noem has identified elections as a “critical infrastructure” responsibility of her department. She’s publicly stated the importance of ensuring “the right people” vote and electing “the right leaders.”⁹⁵ In Arizona, a Republican lawmaker is pushing legislation to mandate ICE agents at polling places.⁹⁶

Don’t mistake favorable polls for inevitable outcomes. They’re not planning to win the argument. They’re planning to control the process.

“Elected Democrats Will Fight for Us”

Let me be clear: this is not an attack on Democrats who are actually trying. Ro Khanna introduced the Epstein Files Transparency Act and partnered with Thomas Massie across the aisle to use a discharge petition to force a vote that Republican leadership was blocking. Two hundred and fourteen Democrats signed it.⁹⁷ Pramila Jayapal confronted Bondi to her face. Jamie Raskin, Jared Moskowitz, Dan Goldman — they’ve been pushing. These people are fighting.

They’re just not fighting hard enough.

When the DOJ finally released documents, they dumped 3.5 million pages⁹⁸ — and sent Congress a six-page letter listing “all government officials and politically exposed persons” mentioned in the files. The list included Janis Joplin, who died in 1970. Elvis Presley, who died in 1977. Marilyn Monroe. Michael Jackson. Names thrown into a pile designed to bury the signal in noise so deep you’d need a decade to dig it out. The DOJ’s defense? The law “did not define what constitutes a ‘politically exposed person.’”⁹⁸ They used the law’s own breadth as a weapon against its purpose.

When Attorney General Pam Bondi appeared before the House Judiciary Committee, Epstein’s victims were in the room. Jayapal asked the survivors to raise their hands if they had tried to meet with the DOJ and been ignored. Every single one of them raised their hand. About a dozen survivors, standing, hands in the air, pleading to be heard by their own government. Bondi wouldn’t turn around to look at them. She called the request “theatrics.”⁹⁹

Meanwhile, the rest of the world is actually acting on these files. Prince Andrew was arrested.¹⁰⁰ Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem — chairman of DP World, handling roughly 10% of the world’s container shipping — was forced to resign.¹⁰¹ ¹⁰² Canada’s largest pension fund suspended deals. British International Investment pulled out.¹⁰¹ The Epstein files are toppling royals and collapsing billion-dollar business relationships across the globe.

And in America? The best we can muster is a hearing where the Attorney General won’t even turn around to look at the victims.

The problem isn’t that Democrats aren’t trying. It’s that they think hearings and gotcha moments and procedural maneuvers are enough. Not against a regime that calls survivors “theatrics.” Not when the weapon sitting right in front of them — the Trumpstein Files, the Pedo Party — goes unused because someone in leadership thinks it’s “not the right tone.”

The Travel Ban You Didn’t Notice

Remember Trump’s first travel ban? Seven countries. Massive protests. Airport occupations. Lawyers flooding terminals. Wall-to-wall coverage for weeks. A national uprising.

Did you even know there’s a new one?

Proclamation 10998, signed December 16, 2025, effective January 1, 2026. Not seven countries — 39 countries plus Palestinian Authority document holders. Full restrictions on 19 nations, partial restrictions on 19 more. Not a 90-day suspension — indefinite. More than five times the scope, with no expiration date, and it barely made the news.¹⁰³

In 2017, the courts fought back with nationwide injunctions that halted the ban within days. But the Supreme Court has since gutted the ability of lower courts to issue nationwide injunctions at all — in Trump v. CASA, the very tool that stopped the first travel ban was stripped from the judiciary’s hands.

Seven countries triggered a national uprising. Thirty-nine countries triggered silence. That’s not a policy difference — that’s a measurement of how far the normalization has gone. You stopped noticing when the exits closed. You stopped counting the locks.

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Every exit you’re counting on is closed. The 3.5% rule doesn’t apply anymore. The courts are being defanged and ignored. The next election is being rigged in plain sight. The Democrats who are fighting aren’t fighting hard enough. And a travel ban five times larger than the one that brought millions into the streets barely made the evening news.

So stop looking for an exit — and start looking at what actually works.

What Actually Works

Stop listening to what people say works. Reverse-engineer what actually moved the needle. Because if you look honestly at the last year, only a few things broke through — and every single one teaches the same lesson.

The ICE Backlash

Here’s an uncomfortable truth: the cruelty alone didn’t do it.

You’ve read what this administration built — the camps, the rendition flights, the 32 deaths in custody, the courts screaming into the void. Protests outside ICE facilities didn’t stop the raids. Democratic electeds begging the administration to show mercy didn’t stop the raids. The separation of families, the targeting of communities, the raw inhumanity of it — none of it generated the kind of national backlash that actually forced the regime to recalibrate. They’d calculated the political cost of brutalizing immigrants, and they’d decided it was acceptable. The cruelty wasn’t a side effect. It was the product.

What changed was when American citizens were killed. You know their names — Renee Good and Alex Pretti. You know what happened to them. After their deaths — after American citizens were killed on American soil by their own government — the national conversation shifted. The backlash became impossible to contain. Approval for the raids cratered.¹⁰⁴ The regime didn’t stop out of compassion. It recalibrated because the political cost finally exceeded what they’d budgeted for.

That is a brutal lesson. It does NOT mean anyone should put themselves in danger — and I want to be absolutely clear about that. But it demands a question that most people in the resistance don’t want to ask: if the cruelty itself wasn’t enough to break through, what else has the power to do it?

Hold that question. We’re coming back to it.

The Proof That Social Media Is the Real Battlefield

Follow the timeline.

October 2023: the Israel-Hamas conflict begins. Pro-Palestinian content surges on TikTok — names, faces, ground-level footage that legacy media wasn’t showing. An entire generation was getting its understanding of the conflict from a platform that Washington couldn’t control.

March 2024: the House passes the PAFACA Act (Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act) — forced divestiture or ban — with overwhelming bipartisan support. Biden signs it into law. The Supreme Court upholds it. Trump delays enforcement — not to save the app, but to secure a deal for his allies to buy it.¹⁰⁵

Now listen to the quiet parts they said loud.

Mike Gallagher, the bill’s original sponsor, admitted the legislation gained “legs again” after October 7 — when “people started to see a bunch of antisemitic content on the platform.”¹⁰⁵ Mitt Romney was even more explicit: he directly linked his support for the ban to the “overwhelming” volume of “mentions of Palestinians” on TikTok.¹⁰⁶ The Wall Street Journal reported that Washington’s alarm over pro-Palestinian content was a primary driver.

The stated justification was “national security” and “protecting American data from China.” But there’s no comparable legislation for any other platform. Chinese intelligence doesn’t need TikTok to access your information — they can purchase it from commercial brokers who aggregate it from every platform you use. Congress didn’t pass a comprehensive data privacy law. They targeted one app — the one where the narrative had slipped beyond their control.

Both parties — Republicans and Democrats — abandoned free market principles, free speech, and any pretense of constitutional restraint to shut down a social media platform. Think about what that means. These are people who can’t agree on anything. But they agreed — with overwhelming bipartisan support — to ban an app because the wrong content was going viral.

That tells you exactly how powerful social media is. If it weren’t the real lever of power, they wouldn’t have burned their own principles to control it.

And who bought it? A consortium of Trump allies: Larry Ellison, the Murdochs, Michael Dell, Silver Lake, MGX — an Emirati sovereign wealth fund. ByteDance retained a 19.9% stake — enough to maintain the fiction of continuity, not enough to matter.¹⁰⁷ They didn’t buy a social media company. They bought the battlefield.

Why the Right Doesn’t Protest

When was the last time you saw right-wingers protesting in the streets? Not January 6 — that was a one-time event with a specific tactical objective. Regular, sustained protest. Marches. Picket signs.

You don’t see it. Because they figured out something the left hasn’t.

Think about what a protest takes. Weeks of organizing. Permits, logistics, coordination across cities. The No Kings marches brought five to seven million people into the streets — one of the largest mobilizations in American history.¹⁰⁸ And it lasted a day. By the next morning, the attention economy had moved on. The news cycle churned. Five million people in the streets, and within 48 hours it was yesterday’s story. Meanwhile, a right-winger on a couch reaches millions every single day — no permits, no coordination, no expiration date. The left’s model of power is built around mobilizing bodies in physical space for dramatic, temporary moments. The right’s model is built around dominating the information environment permanently. One of these models scales. The other doesn’t.

The right-wing content pipeline works like a living organism. At the base, thousands of microbloggers post everything — insanity, bigotry, conspiracy theories, random takes. Most goes nowhere. But when something gets traction — when it hits a nerve, when the algorithm picks it up — the base amplifies. Bigger influencers grab it. Talk radio runs with it. Newsmax and OANN pick it up. Fox puts it in prime time. Then it comes out of a lawmaker’s mouth. Then it comes out of the President’s mouth. Then it becomes policy.

This isn’t a theory. It happened. And two Americans are dead because of it.

On December 26, 2025, a YouTuber named Nick Shirley published a video alleging fraud at Somali-run childcare centers in Minneapolis. He’d gone door to door — harassing business owners, filming facilities he claimed looked empty, citing public payment records as proof of a “billion-dollar fraud scandal.” The video got 135 million views on Twitter and 3 million on YouTube.¹⁰⁹

Three days later — three days — DHS announced door-to-door investigations directly referencing Shirley’s video. Kristi Noem confirmed that DHS targets stemmed from the video. FBI Director Kash Patel surged resources. The administration froze all federal childcare funding to Minnesota. State officials visited every single one of the 10 facilities Shirley targeted. They found no evidence of fraud at any of them.¹⁰⁹ ¹¹⁰

And here’s the part that should make your blood run cold: Minnesota House Speaker Lisa Demuth admitted that her Republican caucus directed Shirley to the daycare sites. Republican lawmakers didn’t just amplify the content — they manufactured the story and fed it to an influencer who could make it go viral.¹⁰⁹

One YouTuber. 135 million views. A federal operation launched in three days. All federal childcare funding to an entire state frozen. No evidence of fraud at any of the targets. And the operation that followed — Operation Metro Surge, the one you read about in the previous sections — is the same operation that killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

The left has nothing comparable to this infrastructure. Nothing. We have protest marches that bring millions into the streets for a day and vanish from the discourse by morning. We have Bluesky posts shared by people who already agree with us. The right has a content pipeline that turns a single video into federal policy within 72 hours — and we’re still organizing phone banks.

And Nick Shirley isn’t even the most successful example.

“WOKE.” One word. Most of the people using it couldn’t define it if you put a gun to their head. But it didn’t matter — because it became the container for every cultural grievance in America. Every resentment about changing norms, every backlash against diversity, every discomfort with a world moving too fast — all of it poured into four letters. The right didn’t focus-group it. They didn’t poll-test it. They just started saying it — on podcasts, on Twitter, on Fox, in stump speeches — over and over and over until it meant whatever the listener needed it to mean. And it helped win the 2024 presidential election.¹¹¹

Then there was Laken Riley — a 22-year-old nursing student murdered by an undocumented immigrant in Georgia in February 2024. A real tragedy. And the right understood instantly what they had: not a policy argument, but a name. A focus point. “Say her name” — shouted at the President during the State of the Union. Hammered on every platform, every day, for months. They passed an act of Congress and named it after her. It was the first bill Trump signed in his second term.¹¹² Two words that did more to shape the immigration debate than every policy paper, every think tank report, every Democratic counter-argument combined.

TikTok and Palestine. Nick Shirley and Minneapolis. “WOKE.” Laken Riley. Four examples. Same pattern. Now let’s name it.

The Formula

Now come back to the question: if the cruelty wasn’t enough to break through, what is?

Every example above follows the same formula. Three steps:

One: A focus point. Not an argument. Not a policy paper. Something concrete that concentrates an entire worldview into a single name, a single word, a single image. “WOKE” concentrated every cultural grievance into four letters. Laken Riley concentrated every immigration fear into a name. Palestine on TikTok concentrated the horror into faces and footage — so effectively that both parties burned the Constitution to shut it down. Nick Shirley concentrated every xenophobic suspicion about Somali immigrants into a single video. It doesn’t have to be sophisticated. It has to be felt.

Two: A massive, persistent social media push. Not one day. Not one march. A sustained, relentless drumbeat that dominates the information environment until the focus point is inescapable. The right does this reflexively through the content pipeline — microbloggers to influencers to talk radio to Fox to lawmakers to policy. Palestine did it organically on TikTok — millions of users sharing content the algorithm amplified because it resonated. In both cases, the push didn’t stop. It kept going until the focus point had saturated the national consciousness.

Three: Capitalize on it. When you have the nation’s attention — when the focus point has broken through — you convert that attention into something that lasts. Policy. Law. Power. The right turned Laken Riley into federal legislation. They turned “WOKE” into a governing philosophy. They turned Nick Shirley’s video into a federal operation within 72 hours. They don’t just create focus points. They harvest them.

That’s the formula. Focus point. Persistent push. Capitalize. And here’s the difference: the right is constantly working to manufacture these moments. Republican lawmakers directed Shirley to those daycares. The anti-woke machinery was built deliberately over years. The Laken Riley messaging was coordinated from day one. The left waits for these moments to happen by chance — and when they do, we don’t capitalize. We hold vigils. We write op-eds. We move on.

Now look at what happened with Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

Their deaths became focus points — not because anyone planned it, but because they concentrated everything wrong with the regime’s enforcement into two names that people who don’t normally follow politics could feel. A mother of three. A nurse trying to help someone. Shot by their own government. That’s not a policy argument. That’s a gut punch. Step one happened on its own.

And for once — for once — steps two and three actually followed. Their names saturated social media. The outrage didn’t fade after a day. It built. And it produced real results: ICE pulled out of Minneapolis. Tom Homan announced the end of Operation Metro Surge.¹¹³ Democratic electeds refused to fund DHS without concessions — mandatory body cameras, a ban on masks for agents, requirements for judicial warrants and clear identification.¹¹⁴ These aren’t symbolic gestures. These are structural reforms extracted from a regime that doesn’t give an inch unless it has to.

Not the protests. Not the cruelty. Not the hearings. The focus points — and what happened when they were pushed relentlessly on social media and then capitalized on politically.

That is the formula at work. And it worked by accident — because we stumbled into it rather than engineering it the way the right engineers theirs. Imagine what happens when we do it on purpose.

The Prescription

So here’s the part where the ask gets uncomfortable.

Either you accept this reality and do the work — or you accept living under a fascist dictatorship. There is no third option. The 3.5% rule won’t save you. The courts won’t save you. The next election won’t save you — not if they control who gets to vote. The Democrats in Congress won’t save you — not while they’re bringing procedural maneuvers to a propaganda war. No one is coming to rescue this.

There is only you. Us. The people.

And here’s the thing — that’s enough. One YouTuber with a camera triggered a federal operation and changed national policy. A handful of names pushed relentlessly on social media forced ICE out of Minneapolis and extracted structural reforms from a regime that doesn’t concede anything it doesn’t have to. Palestine broke through on TikTok so hard that both parties burned the Constitution to shut it down. “WOKE” — one word, wielded by millions of people who couldn’t even define it — helped win a presidential election.

You already have the proof that this works. You’ve been staring at it this whole time. The only question is whether you’re willing to stop waiting and start doing it.

Language Discipline

Stop calling them the “Epstein Files.” They’re the Trumpstein Files. Stop calling them the “Republican Party.” They’re the Pedo Party. Not occasionally. Not when it’s convenient. Every single time.

That is how political branding works: repetition until it becomes reflex. Repetition until reporters say it. Repetition until candidates have to answer to it. Repetition until the association is permanent.

And yes, it’s brutal. Good. It should be. If a party apparatus is shielding a child-sex-abuse cover-up, then “civil” language is just a prettier form of denial. Polite wording is how scandals get managed. Hard naming is how they become politically radioactive.

The right didn’t ask permission to make “WOKE” a weapon. They flooded the zone until the label stuck and reality bent around it. Do the same thing here — except this time the label is anchored in the truth. Trumpstein Files. Say it until they can’t hear “Epstein” without hearing “Trump.” Say it until every denial sounds like a confession. Say it until the country understands exactly what is being covered up, and who is covering it up.

And think about what this actually does. The Epstein Files Transparency Act passed 427-1.⁹⁷ The discharge petition worked. The hearings happened. Bondi sat in front of Congress. And what came of it? A DOJ document dump designed to bury the truth under 3.5 million pages of noise, and an Attorney General who wouldn’t turn around to face the victims. That’s what the procedural approach got us. Now imagine what happens when 50 million people are calling the GOP the Pedo Party every single day on every single platform. When every Republican candidate has to answer for it at every town hall, every debate, every interview. When the label is so welded to the party that the only way to shake it is to actually release the files. You want transparency? Make the cover-up more politically expensive than the truth. That’s not a hearing. That’s leverage.

Platform Takeover

Organize on Bluesky — it’s your base, your community, and there’s value in that. But if you’re only on Bluesky, you’re preaching to the choir in a soundproof room. The fight is on TikTok. The fight is on X. The fight is on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook — every platform where people who haven’t made up their minds are still scrolling. The right understood this years ago — that’s why Trump’s allies bought TikTok and Musk bought Twitter. They didn’t buy those platforms for fun. They bought them because that’s where narrative power lives. You don’t cede the battlefield because the enemy owns the high ground. You take it back.

Content Creation

You don’t need a studio. You don’t need a following. You don’t need production value. Nick Shirley shot a video on his phone walking around daycares and got 135 million views. The right-wing content pipeline doesn’t start with professionals — it starts with thousands of ordinary people posting raw, unfiltered takes that resonate. Some go nowhere. Some catch fire. The ones that catch fire get amplified up the chain.

The left needs the same thing: thousands of people posting about the Trumpstein Files, about Renee Good and Alex Pretti, about the travel ban no one noticed, about the SAVE Act that will block 21 million Americans from voting. Not waiting for mainstream media to cover it. Not waiting for an elected official to say it first. Being the first voice — and trusting the algorithm to do the rest.

But it’s not just about creating content. It’s about amplifying it. Those like and repost buttons have real power. Don’t just see something you agree with and scroll past. Like it. Share it. Move it forward. Every amplification teaches the algorithm that the content matters — and the algorithm is the pipeline now. It may sound like nothing compared to going out with picket signs, but that thinking is precisely how we ended up with Trump back in the White House. Don’t underestimate it.

Build the Pipeline

The right’s content infrastructure didn’t happen by accident. It was built over decades — talk radio, Fox News, online media, influencer networks, all feeding each other in a self-reinforcing loop. The left needs its own version, built from the ground up. That means supporting independent media that actually fights — not outlets that perform neutrality while the country burns, and not outlets that just tell you what you want to hear, whether it’s reassuring you that someone else is saving the day or feeding you headlines about how Democrats “DESTROYED” an administration official at a hearing. Nobody was destroyed. Nothing changed. You just got a dopamine hit dressed up as progress. It means amplifying creators who are willing to say “Pedo Party” out loud. It means sharing, reposting, commenting, engaging — the boring, repetitive work that makes the algorithm treat progressive content the way it currently treats conservative content.

Capitalize on What You Have

Right now — not eventually, not after the midterms, right now — the focus points are sitting there. The Trumpstein Files. Renee Good and Alex Pretti. The 39-country travel ban no one protested. The SAVE Act designed to block 21 million citizens from voting. These aren’t hypotheticals. They’re live ammunition. The question is whether you’ll use them — relentlessly, aggressively, on every platform, every day — or whether you’ll let them fade into the next news cycle the way everything else does.

The right doesn’t let their focus points fade. They hammer them until they become law. That has to be us now.

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The Whole Point

We named the machine. We showed what it built. Now stop treating this like analysis and start treating it like a fight.

Pick a focus point. Name it hard. Repeat it until it sticks.

Push it where people actually are — not just where your friends are. Post it. Clip it. Share it. Comment it. Amplify the people doing it well. Build the association until it becomes reflex.

And when it breaks through, convert it. Don’t just celebrate the virality. Force candidates to answer for it. Force reporters to ask it. Force institutions to respond. Attention is not the win. Pressure is not the win. The win is leverage.

That’s the whole formula: focus point, repetition, amplification, conversion.

They built their machine on discipline. You beat it with discipline.

Now do it on purpose.

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We built this publication to equip you with the tools to fight back — the frameworks, the messaging, the strategies that actually work. See the links below. But we can only keep doing this with your help. If this matters to you, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. You keep the fight alive.

• Fighting Fascism: How We Charge Ahead and Win — The strategic playbook for reclaiming power

• The Trump Regime Messaging Guide — How to talk to people who’ve been captured by the machine

• The Freedom Illusion — How we got here, and the counter-ideology that gets us out

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Article Sources:

1. National Constitution Center, “District of Columbia v. Heller“, National Constitution Center, 2008.

Primary legal source for the landmark 5-4 Supreme Court ruling that, for the first time in over two hundred years of American law, held that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to own firearms unconnected to militia service. Justice Stevens’ dissent explicitly states the majority announced “a new constitutional right” that had never before existed. All five majority justices were Federalist Society-aligned originalists.

2. Brennan Center for Justice, “How the NRA Rewrote the Second Amendment“, Brennan Center for Justice, 2024.

Documents the NRA’s decades-long campaign to manufacture the individual-rights interpretation of the Second Amendment through academic papers, think tanks, and legal advocacy. Includes the critical Warren Burger quote — Chief Justice of the United States, appointed by Richard Nixon — calling the individual-rights interpretation “a fraud on the American public.” Establishes that the militia-focused reading was the mainstream conservative legal view until the NRA’s political campaign changed the terms of debate.

3. Mike Spies and Jennifer Mascia, “How the NRA Built a Lobbying Juggernaut“, The Trace, April 2024.

Documents the 1977 Cincinnati Revolt — the internal NRA coup that transformed the organization from a sportsmen’s club into the most powerful lobbying operation in American politics. Led by Harlon Carter, a former head of the U.S. Border Patrol who had been convicted of murder as a teenager, the insurgents ousted the old guard, scrapped plans for a recreational headquarters, and redirected all resources toward political activism. Membership tripled. The NRA made its first presidential endorsement (Reagan, 1980) and began the decades-long campaign to rewrite the Second Amendment’s meaning from a collective militia right to an individual right to bear arms.

4. Keith Ellison, “Senate Committee Remarks on Operation Metro Surge“, Minnesota Attorney General’s Office, February 12, 2026.

Sworn testimony from Minnesota’s Attorney General documenting Operation Metro Surge — the deployment of 3,000 masked, armed federal agents into Minneapolis against the explicit wishes of the governor and attorney general. Ellison calls it “in essence a federal invasion of the Twin Cities.” Cites ICE’s own data showing 77% of those detained had no criminal records. Documents Trump’s Truth Social post calling the operation “retribution and reckoning.”

5. PBS NewsHour, “A Look at Shootings by Federal Immigration Officers“, PBS NewsHour, January 2026.

Comprehensive reporting on the killings of Renee Good (37-year-old mother of three, award-winning poet, shot in her car by ICE agent Jonathan Ross on January 7, 2026) and Alex Pretti during Operation Metro Surge. Documents the pattern: the federal government killed American citizens in Minneapolis and defended the killings with unverified and disputed claims, while blocking state law enforcement from obtaining evidence by claiming exclusive federal jurisdiction.

6. Star Tribune staff, “NRA, Local Gun Rights Advocates Reject Trump Officials’ Blaming Alex Pretti for Being Armed“, Star Tribune, January 2026.

On-the-record reporting on the Pretti killing with detailed video analysis from the Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus — a conservative gun rights organization. Senior VP Rob Doar reviewed four bystander videos and described the sequence: agents closed in, an agent appeared to retrieve the firearm from Pretti’s waist, and “if Mr. Pretti was disarmed — absent any other evidence of any risk to an officer — I don’t see how deadly force would be justified.” The NRA called the administration’s stance “dangerous and wrong.”

7. PBS NewsHour, “Trump’s Threats to Use the Insurrection Act“, PBS NewsHour, 2025.

Documents the administration’s repeated threats to invoke the Insurrection Act against domestic protesters, establishing the broader context of federal power being deployed against American citizens exercising their constitutional rights.

8. CBS News, “ICE Violated Court Orders 96 Times in January 2026“, CBS News, February 2026.

Reporting on Chief Judge Schiltz’s finding that ICE violated 96 court orders in Minnesota in January 2026 alone — a rate of lawlessness that Schiltz said likely exceeded “some federal agencies’ entire existence.” Establishes the court defiance pattern that is developed fully in Section VII.

9. PBS NewsHour / ACLU, “Inside ‘Alligator Alcatraz’: The Detention Camp Built in 8 Days“, PBS NewsHour, 2025.

Documents the construction of a detention facility in a Florida swamp in 8 days, named after a prison famous for brutality, with branded T-shirts sold by the Florida Republican Party. The ACLU reported people held “off the grid,” invisible to families and lawyers. DACA recipients told “your status doesn’t matter anymore.”

10. Human Rights Watch / Amnesty International, “CECOT: El Salvador’s Mega-Prison and US Deportations“, Human Rights Watch, 2025.

Documents El Salvador’s Justice Minister stating in February 2023 — two years before US deportations began — that CECOT prisoners “will only leave in a coffin.” The US State Department’s own 2023 report called El Salvador’s prisons “harsh and life-threatening.” Cristosal documented 419 prison deaths under the state of emergency before any US deportees arrived. Establishes that the administration knew the conditions and sent people anyway.

11. Gaby Vinick, Chris Looft, Josh Margolin, Peter Charalambous, and Camilla Alcini, “A Minute-by-Minute Timeline of the Fatal Shooting of Alex Pretti“, ABC News, January 26, 2026.

Definitive reconstruction of the Pretti killing based on six verified video angles, compiled minute by minute. Forensic audio analysis by Professor Robert Maher of Montana State University concluded that 10 shots were fired in less than 5 seconds. A sworn affidavit from a treating doctor documented at least three bullet wounds in Pretti’s back, one in his upper chest, and a possible wound in his neck. Former acting DHS undersecretary for intelligence John Cohen: “For DHS to construe that he arrived at that location with the intent to shoot those border patrol officers, there’s nothing in the video evidence that we’ve seen thus far that would support that.”

12. PBS NewsHour / PolitiFact, “Fact-Checking FBI Director Patel’s Claim That Guns Are Barred at Protests“, PBS NewsHour, January 2026.

Definitive fact-check of FBI Director Kash Patel’s claim that “you cannot bring a firearm loaded with multiple magazines to any sort of protest.” Thirteen legal experts unanimously told PolitiFact that Patel was wrong — Minnesota law explicitly allows concealed carry permit holders to carry at protests. PolitiFact rated Patel’s statement “Mostly False.” Documents the NRA and Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus both criticizing the administration’s stance on gun rights.

13. PEN America, “Book Bans“, PEN America, 2025.

Authoritative tracking data documenting the largest wave of book censorship in modern American history. PEN America has recorded 22,810 book ban instances in U.S. public schools since 2021, with 6,870 in the 2024-25 school year alone across 23 states and 87 school districts. Florida led with 2,304 instances; Texas had 1,781. Utah and South Carolina implemented statewide “no read” lists — government-curated catalogs banning books from all state-funded schools. The targeted content follows a clear ideological pattern: books about race, LGBTQ+ themes, sexuality, and American history. The Department of Defense recorded 590 bans in military-connected schools. PEN America describes this as the “normalization of book banning,” where censorship has moved from individual challenges to institutionalized government suppression.

14. Guardian staff, “FCC Reinstates Complaints Against ABC, CBS and NBC“, The Guardian, January 22, 2025.

Documents the weaponization of FCC regulatory power against broadcast networks critical of Trump. Trump-appointed FCC Chair Brendan Carr reinstated complaints the previous chair had explicitly rejected as unconstitutional First Amendment violations. Then-outgoing Chair Jessica Rosenworcel: the complaints “seek to weaponize the licensing authority of the FCC in a way that is fundamentally at odds with the First Amendment.” The pattern escalated throughout 2025-26: ABC suspended Jimmy Kimmel Live! after comments critical of a conservative activist; the FCC investigated The View; CBS pulled a Colbert interview with a Democratic candidate; Trump filed a $10 billion lawsuit against CBS. Supports the article’s argument that the “free speech” movement was always about ensuring right-wing narratives dominated — and that state power was deployed against critical media the moment it was available.

15. Guardian staff and Associated Press, “Democrats Condemn Trump’s ‘Punishable by Death’ Post About Military Video“, The Guardian, November 20, 2025.

Documents the president of the United States calling for the execution of six sitting members of Congress for making a video reminding U.S. service members of their legal duty to refuse illegal orders — a statement of existing military law. Trump’s Truth Social posts: “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!” and amplification of “HANG THEM GEORGE WASHINGTON WOULD!!” Senate Minority Leader Schumer: “The president of the United States is calling for the execution of elected officials.” The six lawmakers — all military or intelligence veterans — responded: “What’s most telling is that the president considers it punishable by death for us to restate the law.” By January 2026, the FBI had initiated interviews with the lawmakers and the Pentagon opened an investigation into Senator Mark Kelly. The definitional inversion: the government threatening death for constitutionally protected political speech.

16. Time staff, “James Comey ‘86 47’ Instagram Post Investigated by FBI and Secret Service“, Time, May 2025.

Documents the full weight of federal law enforcement descending on a private citizen over an ambiguous Instagram photo. Former FBI Director James Comey posted a photo of seashells on a beach that appeared to form “86 47” with the caption “Cool shell formation on my beach walk.” The Secret Service opened a formal investigation. FBI Director Kash Patel announced FBI coordination. DHS Secretary Kristi Noem publicly accused Comey of calling for assassination. Rep. Andy Ogles demanded he “be in handcuffs.” Comey was later formally indicted; a federal judge dismissed the indictment, but Patel vowed to continue. Illustrates the article’s thesis: the same movement that spent a decade defending speech from private moderation is now using government power to investigate, indict, and intimidate citizens over social media posts.

17. Committee to Protect Journalists, “Alarm Bells: Trump’s First 100 Days Ramp Up Fear for the Press, Democracy“, CPJ, April 30, 2025.

Comprehensive documentation of the most sustained government assault on press freedom in modern U.S. history. Safety consultations sought by American journalists surged from 20 in all of 2022 to over 530 in just the first four months of 2025 — a 26-fold increase. The AP was banned from the White House press pool; a federal judge ordered its access restored. Three AP journalists were detained in Cameroon while reporting on Trump-deported migrants. A British journalist was abducted by ICE at a California airport and held for over two weeks. Don Lemon and independent journalist Georgia Fort were arrested for covering a protest. The White House created a “Media Offender of the Week” list. FCC investigations targeted five major broadcast organizations. CPJ CEO Jodie Ginsberg: “Press freedom is no longer a given in the United States.” Establishes that the government is systematically using regulatory power, law enforcement, and public targeting to suppress journalism critical of the administration.

18. American Battlefield Trust, “Declaration of Causes of Seceding States“, American Battlefield Trust.

Primary source documents: the full text of all major Confederate states’ declarations of secession, hosted by a nonpartisan Civil War preservation nonprofit. Mississippi’s opening line calls slavery “the greatest material interest of the world.” Georgia devotes thousands of words to slavery grievances. Texas explicitly enshrines white supremacy as a foundational principle: governments “were established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity.” South Carolina cites Northern states’ failure to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act — demanding federal power over other states’ sovereignty while claiming “states’ rights.” These are the Confederacy’s own words, in their own official documents, destroying the states’ rights mythology at its root.

19. Alexander H. Stephens, “Cornerstone Speech“, American Battlefield Trust, March 21, 1861.

The Confederate Vice President’s definitive statement of what the Confederacy was for, delivered three weeks before Fort Sumter. Stephens announced that white supremacy — “the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man” — was the literal cornerstone of the new government. He called it “the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.” He explicitly rejected the Founding Fathers’ equality principles as “fundamentally wrong” and a “sandy foundation.” The Confederacy’s second-in-command said it was about slavery and white supremacy, on the record, in public.

20. Southern Poverty Law Center, “Whose Heritage? Public Symbols of the Confederacy“, SPLC, February 1, 2019.

Comprehensive data-backed analysis documenting that Confederate monument construction surged during the Jim Crow era — not during the immediate post-war mourning period. The SPLC identified 1,747 Confederate symbols still in public spaces as of 2019, including 780 monuments and 103 schools named after Confederate leaders. The report establishes that monuments were “part of an organized propaganda campaign to promote the Lost Cause and venerate the white supremacist values of the Confederacy.” The United Daughters of the Confederacy erected more than 700 monuments, overwhelmingly on courthouse grounds. At least 34 Confederate-named schools were built between 1950 and 1970 — the era of the civil rights movement. Definitive evidence that the monuments were instruments of racial intimidation, not grief.

21. Edwin L. Jackson, “State Flags of Georgia“, New Georgia Encyclopedia.

Documents in explicit detail that Georgia added the Confederate battle flag to its state flag in 1956 specifically as a response to Brown v. Board of Education. The entire 1956 legislative session was devoted to Governor Marvin Griffin’s platform of “massive resistance” to integration. Floor leader Denmark Groover told the press the flag would “show that we in Georgia intend to uphold what we stood for, will stand for and will fight for” — meaning legal segregation. No public hearings, no referendum. The flag flew for 45 years. Groover denied racial motivation until his deathbed in 2001, when he finally admitted it. Published by the New Georgia Encyclopedia, a National Endowment for the Humanities project.

22. Equal Justice Initiative, “History of Racial Injustice: Confederate Iconography“, EJI, January 21, 2019.

Documents Texas’s installation of 27 Confederate monuments during the 1960s, with 16 monuments erected across the South in 1964 alone — the year the Civil Rights Act passed. Establishes the direct correlation between Confederate monument surges and federal civil rights milestones: the end of Reconstruction, Plessy v. Ferguson, Brown v. Board, the Civil Rights Act, and the Voting Rights Act. Quotes: “As civil rights activists bravely agitated for change, segregationists opposed to racial equality adopted the Confederate battle flag as a symbol of defiant resistance to racial integration.” These were not acts of mourning; they were acts of political intimidation.

23. Los Angeles Times staff, “What Is Title 10? Trump, Homan and the National Guard“, Los Angeles Times, June 7, 2025.

Documents Trump’s June 2025 federalization of at least 2,000 California National Guard troops under Title 10, stripping Governor Newsom of command authority over his own state’s Guard. Newsom explicitly opposed the deployment and filed a lawsuit alleging violation of state sovereignty. Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean of UC Berkeley School of Law: “For the federal government to take over the California National Guard, without the request of the governor, to put down protests is truly chilling. It is using the military domestically to stop dissent.” Defense Secretary Hegseth threatened to mobilize Marines from Camp Pendleton. The “states’ rights” party federalizing a state’s own military against its governor’s wishes.

24. George Chidi, “Trump Calls on Republicans to ‘Nationalize the Voting’ in at Least 15 Places“, The Guardian, February 3, 2026.

Documents Trump’s explicit call on a conservative podcast to have Republicans “nationalize the voting” in at least 15 states — targeting Detroit, Philadelphia, and Atlanta, predominantly Democratic cities with significant minority populations. Senator Mark Warner: “That statement alone makes clear that this threat to our election security, the basic premise of our democracy, is forward looking.” The U.S. Constitution gives each state responsibility to govern its own elections. Companion legislation — the “Make Elections Great Again Act” — would outlaw ranked-choice voting, ban universal vote-by-mail, and create a federal elections auditing system. The “states’ rights” party demanding federal control over the most fundamental state power in the constitutional system.

25. CBS News staff, “Trump Grants Clemency to Roughly 1,500 Jan. 6 Defendants“, CBS News, January 20, 2025.

Documents Trump’s mass clemency for approximately 1,500 January 6th defendants on his first day back in office, including hundreds convicted of assaulting police officers with flagpoles, bear spray, tasers, and edged weapons. More than 140 officers were injured. Pardons included seditious conspiracy convictions: Stewart Rhodes (18 years), Enrique Tarrio (22 years), Ethan Nordean (18 years). Officer Michael Fanone: “I have been betrayed by my country.” Jake Lang — specifically accused of beating police — had his case dropped immediately. Trump called them “hostages” and ordered the DOJ to dismiss all remaining indictments. The “Back the Blue” party freed people convicted of beating cops with flagpoles.

26. Guardian staff, “Trump Pardons Silk Road Founder Ross Ulbricht“, The Guardian, January 21, 2025.

Documents Trump’s pardon of Ross Ulbricht — founder and operator of the Silk Road, the internet’s first modern darknet marketplace, convicted of facilitating over 1 million drug deals worth $183 million in narcotics to 100,000+ buyers. Ulbricht was serving two life sentences plus 40 years. Trump called the sentence “ridiculous” and dedicated the pardon to the Libertarian movement “which supported me so strongly.” The pardon came the same day Trump announced cryptocurrency-friendly policies. The “war on drugs” president freed the man who built the internet’s largest drug bazaar — as a political reward.

27. Guardian staff, “Trump Pardons Former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández“, The Guardian, December 8, 2025.

Documents Trump’s pardon of Juan Orlando Hernández — former president of Honduras, convicted of drug trafficking after accepting $1 million from El Chapo during his 2013 presidential campaign. Prosecutors said Hernández “paved a cocaine superhighway to the United States.” His brother was already serving a life sentence for drug trafficking. The pardon came while Trump was simultaneously conducting airstrikes against accused drug traffickers in the Caribbean and Pacific — and days before the Honduran general election, in which Trump endorsed Hernández’s ally. One of over 100 drug-crime defendants Trump has pardoned while claiming to wage a war on drugs.

28. Associated Press, “Southern Baptist Convention Leaders Mistreated Abuse Survivors, Investigation Finds“, AP News, May 22, 2022.

Documents the 2022 Guidepost Solutions investigation — a nearly 288-page independent report revealing that the SBC’s Executive Committee had for nearly two decades mishandled abuse claims, mistreated survivors, and prioritized protecting the denomination from legal liability. SBC leaders secretly maintained a list of more than 700 convicted and credibly accused clergy sexual abusers, compiled since 2007 by executive VP Augie Boto — but never used it to prevent predators from moving between congregations. Survivors were met with “resistance, stonewalling, and even outright hostility.” A federal DOJ investigation was opened in August 2022. The largest Protestant denomination in America — the institutional backbone of the Christian right — covered for predators for decades.

29. Peter Weber, “Report: Hundreds of Southern Baptist Leaders, Workers Sexually Abused at Least 700 People Since 1998“, The Week, February 11, 2019.

Summarizes the original Houston Chronicle / San Antonio Express-News investigation establishing the historical baseline of the SBC abuse crisis. Since 1998, at least 380 SBC leaders or volunteers were charged or credibly accused, with more than 700 victims. The SBC’s governance documents ban gay pastors and female pastors but contain no ban on convicted sex offenders working in churches. One survivor, molested starting at age 14 and impregnated at 18 — the church urged her to get an abortion. In 2008, survivors explicitly begged SBC leaders to track predators at the annual meeting and were rejected.

30. Russell Payne, “Trump Admin Seeks to Strike Epstein Connections from Record“, Salon, February 21, 2026.

Documents the Trump DOJ’s use of “motions to strike” — an extraordinarily rare legal tactic — to actively scrub Trump-Epstein connections from court records. Targeted content includes Trump’s own 2002 quote praising Epstein: “I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy... many of them are on the younger side.” The administration simultaneously refuses to confirm whether Trump was interviewed by law enforcement during the original Epstein investigation, issuing a Glomar response. Richard Swanson, president of the New York County Lawyers Association: motions to strike are “almost never made, and when made, almost never granted.” Both judges who ruled on the DOJ’s motions denied them.

31. Kaia Hubbard, Kathryn Watson, Stefan Becket, and Melissa Quinn, “Epstein Files Released by DOJ“, CBS News, February 14, 2026.

Comprehensive live-update coverage of the DOJ’s January 30, 2026 release of approximately 3 million pages of Epstein files — declared “final” despite acknowledging 6 million pages may qualify. Documents that the DOJ removed files containing “hundreds of mentions” of Donald Trump before publication. Reveals that Ambassador to Turkey Tom Barrack was in regular contact with Epstein through 2017; Navy Secretary Phelan appeared on two flight manifests; Commerce Secretary Lutnick co-signed a business contract with Epstein. The DOJ contradicted its own FBI documents about Trump’s contact with law enforcement during the Epstein investigation. Attorneys for survivor groups found the DOJ failed to redact the identities of at least 31 people victimized as children.

32. Mark Brown, “Inquiry into Former Prince Andrew Epstein Links Not Ruled Out as Police Searches Continue“, The Guardian, February 22, 2026.

Documents the arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor (formerly Prince Andrew) — the first senior British royal arrested in nearly four centuries — on suspicion of misconduct in public office for sharing confidential UK government information with Epstein. Police searched his properties; Parliament began proceedings to remove him from the line of succession. King Charles: “The law must take its course.” The international contrast that makes U.S. silence devastating: one country arrested a duke; the other is trying to strike its president’s own words from court records.

33. Ali Swenson and Nicholas Riccardi, “How Trump Spent Years Stoking Dark Theories and Why He’s Facing Epstein Case Blowback Now“, PBS NewsHour (AP), July 15, 2025.

Documents the fracture within Trump’s own base when the DOJ reversed its claims about an Epstein “client list.” Steve Bannon: “For this to go away, you’re going to lose 10% of the MAGA movement.” Michael Flynn publicly pleaded with Trump to act. Laura Loomer called for AG Bondi to resign. The QAnon-adjacent movement — built on “Save the Children” rhetoric and promises to expose elite pedophile rings — went largely silent when the evidence pointed to Trump’s own circle. Trump urged supporters on Truth Social to stop “spending month after month looking at nothing but the same old, Radical Left inspired Documents on Jeffrey Epstein.”

34. Food Research & Action Center, “House Republicans Advance Deep Cuts to SNAP“, FRAC, May 2025; supplemented by Associated Press, “States Rejecting Federal Funds to Feed Children“, AP News, 2024.

Documents the $300 billion in SNAP cuts advanced by House Agriculture Republicans and the 14 Republican-led states that rejected federal Summer EBT funds to feed low-income children. Mississippi — one of the most food-insecure states — rejected feeding 324,000 eligible children while enforcing an abortion ban. An Alabama mother: “Why do you care so much about my uterus and how many babies I’m having or aborting? Why is that a concern when I still have to feed this child, but you’re not helping me do that?” Republican budget proposals include $600-880 billion in Medicaid cuts; Medicaid covers 40%+ of all U.S. births. The “pro-life” movement forcing women to give birth, then defunding the programs that keep those children alive.

35. A-Mark Foundation, “U.S. Presidents and the Federal Deficit“, A-Mark Foundation, updated February 3, 2023.

Nonpartisan compilation of federal deficit data for every presidential administration from Reagan through Biden using official fiscal year figures. Every Republican president since 1980 increased the deficit: Reagan +94%, H.W. Bush +67%, W. Bush +1,204%, Trump +317%. Every completed Democratic administration decreased it: Clinton -150% (surplus), Obama -53%. Biden decreased the deficit 50% in his first fiscal year. The data destroys the “party of fiscal responsibility” claim with mathematical precision across 40+ years.

36. Zach Moller and Annie Shuppy, “A Case for Republican Fiscal Responsibility“, Third Way, July 9, 2024.

Centrist think tank analysis documenting that Trump added $8.4 trillion to the national debt and that debt-to-GDP reached 99% — levels unseen since post-WWII. Critical finding: even before COVID, Trump had already added $4.8 trillion in three years, with the TCJA as the single largest item. This neutralizes the Republican excuse that the pandemic caused the debt spike. The report also documents that Republican voters disproportionately depend on the social programs their party threatens to cut — the states with the highest proportion of residents on Supplemental Security Income (Mississippi, West Virginia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Arkansas, Alabama) voted Republican in every presidential election this century.

37. Conor Lynch, “The Ludicrous Myth of Republican Fiscal Responsibility“, Salon, May 5, 2015.

Documents the Cheney quote that encapsulates the entire fraud: Vice President Dick Cheney told Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter.” This was revealed publicly in 2004. The article traces the fiscal record from Reagan (debt grew 190%) through the Bush administrations and establishes the repeating pattern: Republicans preach fiscal conservatism to get elected, explode the debt through tax cuts and military spending, hand Democrats a fiscal catastrophe, then blame Democrats for not cleaning it up fast enough.

38. Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, “2017 Tax Cuts Continue to Lose Revenue“, CRFB, April 15, 2024.

Nonpartisan fiscal watchdog analysis documenting that the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act added $1.8-1.9 trillion to federal deficits through FY 2028 per CBO scoring. Total real revenue in 2023 ($3.6 trillion) was well below CBO’s pre-TCJA projection of $3.9 trillion. The tax cuts demonstrably have not paid for themselves — actual revenue collections confirmed the revenue loss was real. Extending the expiring provisions could add $3.4-4+ trillion in additional deficits over the next decade. The “fiscal responsibility” party passed the largest deficit-expanding legislation in a generation without a single Republican objection.

39. Congressional Budget Office, “Estimated Budgetary Effects of H.R. 1, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act“, CBO, June 2025; supplemented by Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, “What’s in the Enacted One Big Beautiful Bill?“, CRFB, July 2025.

The “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” (P.L. 119-21), signed July 4, 2025, made the TCJA’s individual tax cuts permanent and added new provisions. The CBO scored the enacted law at $3.4 trillion in increased deficits over 2025-2034. The CRFB’s estimate, including interest costs, puts the total at $4.1 trillion in new borrowing over the decade — and $5.5 trillion or more if temporary provisions are later made permanent. The CBO projects 10.9 million Americans will lose health insurance by 2034, primarily through Medicaid cuts and ACA changes. The “fiscal responsibility” party made the tax cuts permanent, blew a multi-trillion-dollar hole in the budget, and stripped health coverage from nearly 11 million people — in one bill.

40. Adam Feldman, “A Breakdown of the Court’s Tariff Decision“, SCOTUSblog, February 20, 2026.

Definitive legal analysis of the 6-3 Supreme Court ruling in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump holding that IEEPA does not authorize presidential tariffs. Chief Justice Roberts’ majority (joined by Sotomayor, Kagan, Gorsuch, Barrett, and Jackson): “No President has read IEEPA to confer such power” in its 50-year existence. The ruling struck down Trump’s “Reciprocal Tariffs” and fentanyl tariffs, with an estimated $160+ billion in refunds owed. The “free market” party lost at the Supreme Court for imposing the most protectionist — and illegal — trade policy in a century.

41. Lucy Campbell, “Trump Raises Global Tariff to 15% After Supreme Court Ruling“, The Guardian, February 21, 2026.

Documents Trump’s explosive defiance of the Supreme Court tariff ruling. Within 24 hours: called the justices “a disgrace to the nation,” called his own appointees Barrett and Gorsuch “an embarrassment to their families,” and imposed new 15% global tariffs under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 — a law never previously invoked. Over $130 billion in IEEPA tariffs had already been collected, with 90% of the burden paid by U.S. businesses and consumers. French President Macron: “It is not bad to have a supreme court and, therefore, the rule of law.” The president didn’t comply with the ruling — he found another weapon.

42. Associated Press, “Trump Nominates Fox News Host Pete Hegseth as Defense Secretary“, AP News, November 2024; supplemented by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, “Senate Should Reject Kash Patel Nomination for FBI Director“, CREW, January 29, 2025.

AP reported Hegseth’s nomination “stunned the Pentagon and the broader defense world.” He was a weekend Fox News host with no executive branch experience; confirmed 51-50 with the VP tiebreaker. Republican Senator Todd Young: “I don’t know much about his background or his vision.” Senator Hoeven admitted the real reason: Trump “likes him and trusts him.” CREW’s analysis of Patel: “Patel lacks the experience to lead the FBI... has slim executive branch experience and very limited federal law enforcement experience.” Patel publicly promised to “come after” political enemies. Former AG William Barr: Patel has “virtually no experience that would qualify him.” The anti-DEI party made the most blatant loyalty-over-competence hires in modern American history.

43. Faiza Patel, “Extreme Vetting and the Muslim Ban“, Brennan Center for Justice, October 2, 2017; supplemented by Faiza Patel, “Trump’s Executive Order on Foreign Terrorists: Implications for the Rights of Non-Citizens“, Just Security, January 31, 2025.

Documents the Muslim ban from its origin as a campaign pledge for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” through three successive executive orders in the first term targeting predominantly Muslim-majority countries. Impact fell “overwhelmingly on Muslims” despite window-dressing inclusion of North Korea and Venezuelan officials. Biden rescinded the ban; Trump’s January 20, 2025 executive order revived it; subsequent proclamations expanded to 19+ countries by January 2026. The “religious liberty” movement said nothing as the government banned entry to the United States based explicitly on the religion of the countries of origin.

44. Southern Poverty Law Center, “Alliance Defending Freedom“, SPLC Extremist Files.

Comprehensive profile of the Alliance Defending Freedom — the most powerful religious liberty litigation group in America, with 83 Supreme Court victories — designated by the SPLC as an anti-LGBTQ hate group. Founded by 30+ leaders of the Christian right including James Dobson. ADF’s Blackstone Legal Fellowship: “recover the robust Christendomic theology of the 3rd, 4th, and 5th centuries.” ADF has supported the recriminalization of gay sex, defended state-sanctioned sterilization of trans people abroad, drafted model legislation for Mississippi’s religious exemption bill, and lobbied foreign governments to maintain sodomy laws. No documented cases of ADF defending Muslim, Jewish, Sikh, or Hindu religious liberty claims. The entire litigation record targets Christianity’s right to discriminate, not religious freedom broadly.

45. Miranda Jeyaretnam and Chad de Guzman, “U.S.-Venezuela: Trump, Maduro, Oil, Drugs, War — Questions Answered“, TIME, January 2026.

Comprehensive explainer documenting the invasion of Venezuela — Operation Absolute Resolve (January 3, 2026): 150+ U.S. aircraft, bombing of Venezuelan air defenses, capture of President Maduro at 2 a.m. in Caracas. At least 148 people killed in 43 strikes. No prior congressional authorization. Trump told NBC he wasn’t “at war” while overseeing armed intervention; said the U.S. would “run” Venezuela; met with 20 oil executives seeking $100 billion in Venezuelan oil commitments. A U.N. spokesperson: the action made “all States less safe around the world.” The “America First” / “stop policing the world” president launched the most consequential unilateral military action in decades — for oil.

46. Heather Stewart and Andrew Roth, “Davos 2026: Trump Greenland — ‘You Can Say No and We Will Remember’“, The Guardian, January 21, 2026.

Documents Trump’s Davos speech demanding Greenland acquisition from Denmark — a NATO ally — with explicit coercive threats: “You can say no and we will remember.” Trump had previously threatened 10% tariffs on eight European countries over the territory. He told NATO allies: “I’m not sure if they’d be there for us” — undermining the mutual defense compact — while praising his “very good relationship” with Putin and Xi. Canadian PM Carney: “Middle powers must act together, because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu.” The “America First” posture revealed as unilateral aggression against allies and deference to authoritarian rivals.

47. Associated Press, “Institute of Peace Renamed Donald Trump“, The Guardian (AP), December 4, 2025.

Documents the seizure and renaming of the U.S. Institute of Peace — a Congress-created independent institution — despite a federal court ruling the takeover illegal. DOGE fired the board and staff; the building was seized by GSA. State Department renamed it “Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace” — a White House spokesperson: it “will stand as a powerful reminder of what strong leadership can accomplish for global stability.” Trump subsequently established a “Board of Peace” with himself as chair, $17 billion in pledged funding, and a mandate that may displace U.N. diplomatic functions. A peace institution became a vanity monument, then a rival to the U.N., while the administration bombed Venezuelan fishing vessels.

48. J. Oliver Conroy, “Mark Lilla and the Crisis of Liberalism“, The Guardian, December 21, 2017.

Profile of Columbia humanities professor Mark Lilla, whose November 2016 New York Times op-ed “The End of Identity Liberalism” became the paper’s most-read political op-ed that year and whose subsequent book The Once and Future Liberal described identity politics as “Reaganism for lefties.” The piece captures the essential counter-arguments: Ta-Nehisi Coates argued Lilla’s framing “effectively excuses white identity politics” — ennobling what appeals to the white working class while damning “what appeals to black workers, and all others outside the tribe.” Thomas Chatterton Williams noted the book’s telling omission of the Southern Strategy — the Republican Party’s own half-century experiment in explicit racial identity politics. Columbia colleague Katherine Franke argued Lilla’s critique made “white supremacy respectable” by blaming marginalized groups for Trump’s election. Documents the “identity politics” accusation as a rhetorical weapon that erases the attacker and blames the defense.

49. Office of the President (Clinton Administration), “Affirmative Action: History and Rationale“, Clinton White House / National Archives, 1995.

The Clinton White House’s formal 1995 review of affirmative action — the single most authoritative government source documenting that affirmative action was created entirely as a response to documented, systemic discrimination. Case after case where anti-discrimination statutes alone failed: Alabama State Police had zero Black troopers after 37 years; even after a court injunction, 18 months passed with no hires until numerical goals were imposed. Kaiser Aluminum: 5 of 273 skilled craft workers were Black because of union exclusion. San Francisco PD: 4% women in 1979. After consent decrees with numerical targets, Black officers rose from 7 to 31, Hispanic from 12 to 55, Asian from 0 to 10, and women were admitted as firefighters for the first time. Even the Nixon administration defended goals and timetables as “necessary and right.” Affirmative action was not ideological preference — it was remedial necessity after experimentation showed “other means too often failed to correct the problems.”

50. DeNeen Brown, “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Programs“, Encyclopædia Britannica, updated February 19, 2026.

Comprehensive entry tracing DEI’s origins directly to documented racist state violence — beginning with Sgt. Isaac Woodard Jr., a Black World War II veteran blinded by police in 1946 while still in uniform, hours after receiving his honorable discharge. NAACP Executive Secretary Walter White brought the case to Truman, who responded: “My God. I didn’t know it was this bad. We’ve got to do something.” White House aides confirmed the Woodard incident pushed Truman to issue Executive Orders 9980 and 9981 (1948), desegregating the federal workforce and armed forces. Every subsequent wave of DEI expansion corresponds to documented violence: the Civil Rights Act responding to Jim Crow, post-Ferguson reforms responding to police killings (Washington Post: ~1,000 per year, disproportionately Black), post-George Floyd corporate initiatives responding to a murder on camera. Thurgood Marshall’s 1987 speech: the Constitution was “defective from the start.” Ron DeSantis in 2023 claimed DEI “is better viewed as standing for discrimination, exclusion, and indoctrination” — renaming the repair as the disease.

51. Tom K. Wong, “The Effects of Sanctuary Policies on Crime and the Economy“, Center for American Progress, January 26, 2017.

Peer-reviewed statistical analysis by a UC San Diego political scientist using ICE’s own FOIA data across 608 sanctuary counties. Findings: sanctuary counties have 35.5 fewer crimes per 10,000 people, $4,353 higher median household income, 2.3% lower poverty, and 1.1% lower unemployment than comparable non-sanctuary counties. The study documents why sanctuary policies were created: the International Association of Chiefs of Police warned that state and local enforcement of federal immigration law creates a “chilling effect” on crime reporting. The Major Cities Chiefs Association concluded that commingling local policing with immigration enforcement “would result in increased crime against immigrants and in the broader community” and “create a class of silent victims.” Sanctuary policies are not identity politics — they are public safety policies designed by law enforcement leaders to keep communities safe.

52. Ivette Feliciano, “2021 Sets Record in Anti-Trans Bills in America“, PBS NewsHour Weekend, June 6, 2021.

PBS NewsHour interview with ACLU Transgender Justice Director Chase Strangio documenting the origins of the anti-trans legislative wave as organized political backlash — not spontaneous cultural concern. Strangio identifies the causal chain: “It’s part of a continued backlash from marriage equality. So when the Supreme Court struck down bans on marriage for same-sex couples in 2015, you immediately saw a backlash in the form of legislative attacks on trans people and trans youth in particular.” The wave escalated after the 2020 SCOTUS ruling extending civil rights protections to LGBTQ people and intensified after Biden’s election. More than 250 anti-LGBTQ bills were introduced in state legislatures in 2021 alone. Florida signed an anti-trans sports ban on the first day of Pride Month. The attackers moved first; the protections followed.

53. American Civil Liberties Union, “Mapping Attacks on LGBTQ Rights in U.S. State Legislatures“, ACLU, 2023.

The definitive legislative tracker documenting the scale of the anti-trans campaign: 615 anti-trans bills introduced in 2023, 87 signed into law across 24 states — the fourth consecutive record-breaking year. Bills target healthcare bans, sports exclusions, bathroom restrictions, school curriculum censorship, ID document restrictions, and religious exemptions allowing discrimination. States with the most bills: Texas (40+ in 2021 alone), Tennessee, Arkansas, Florida, Alabama. The tracker documents bills in both directions — attacks and protections — making clear which side initiated the fight. Gillian Branstetter, ACLU: “The end goal of anti-trans legislation is denying transgender people the words to describe our experience, the means to express it safely, and the community and support we all deserve.” The existence of this tracker is itself evidence: there would be no need to track “attacks on LGBTQ rights” if those attacks were not coming overwhelmingly from one direction.

54. Rick Perlstein, “Exclusive: Lee Atwater’s Infamous 1981 Interview on the Southern Strategy“, The Nation, November 13, 2012.

Publishes for the first time the full 42-minute audio recording of Lee Atwater’s 1981 interview with political scientist Alexander Lamis of Case Western Reserve University, in which Atwater — then working in the Reagan White House, later George H.W. Bush’s campaign manager and RNC chairman — describes the deliberate evolution of Republican racial strategy: “You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’ — that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.” The audio was unearthed by James Carter IV, who also obtained the Mitt Romney “47 percent” tape. Lamis had published the interview anonymously in his 1984 book The Two-Party South and with Atwater’s name in a 1999 edition, eight years after Atwater’s death. His widow released the audio to validate her husband’s scholarship after conservatives claimed he fabricated it. The architect of the Republican Party’s modern electoral strategy, on tape, describing a half-century project to encode racial hostility into policy language abstract enough to deny.

55. Ken Mehlman, “Remarks Before the NAACP National Convention“, NAACP National Convention, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, July 14, 2005.

The sitting chairman of the Republican National Committee, standing before the NAACP’s national convention, formally apologized for the Southern Strategy: “Some Republicans gave up on winning the African American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization. I am here today as the Republican chairman to tell you we were wrong.” Mehlman acknowledged that after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — when Democrats championed civil rights legislation — “some Republicans” chose to exploit the resulting racial backlash among white voters rather than compete for Black votes. The apology was widely covered by the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and national press. President George W. Bush’s approval rating among African Americans fell to 2% after the speech — suggesting the audience recognized a gesture without a commitment. The party chairman confessed to a strategy of deliberate racial polarization. The party did not subsequently abandon that strategy.

56. Michael Steele, “For the Last 40-Plus Years We Had a ‘Southern Strategy’“, as reported by Mediaite, 2010.

The first African American chairman of the Republican National Committee acknowledged that “For the last 40-plus years we had a ‘Southern Strategy’ that alienated many minority voters by focusing on the white male vote in the South.” Steele said the party had “lost sight of the historic, integral link between the party and African Americans” and had “mistreated that relationship” — despite the Republican Party’s historical role in co-founding the NAACP and its origins as the party of Lincoln. Two RNC chairmen, five years apart — one white, one Black — both publicly acknowledged that the Republican Party ran a deliberate, decades-long strategy of racial polarization to win white votes in the South. The confession was bipartisan within the party. The strategy continued regardless.

57. Human Rights Watch and Cristosal, “You Have Arrived in Hell: Torture and Other Abuses Against Venezuelans in El Salvador“, Human Rights Watch, November 12, 2025.

Definitive 81-page joint investigative report by Human Rights Watch and Cristosal documenting the torture and abuse of Venezuelan deportees inside CECOT, based on interviews with 40 former detainees and 150 people with firsthand knowledge. Critically, the report also establishes what was known before the deportations: El Salvador’s Justice Minister said in February 2023 that CECOT prisoners “will only leave in a coffin”; the U.S. State Department’s own 2023 report called El Salvador’s prisons “harsh and life-threatening”; Cristosal had documented 419 prison deaths under the state of emergency before the March 2025 flights. Guards wore hoods and went by nicknames (Satán, Pantera, El Tigre). No yards, no natural light, no mattresses, lights always on. The report explicitly states: “The United States sent the 252 Venezuelans to CECOT despite credible prior reports that torture and other abuses were taking place.” They knew.

58. Camilo Montoya-Galvez and Annabelle Hanflig, “Names of All 238 Venezuelan Deportees Published“, CBS News, March 20, 2025.

CBS News obtained and published the full internal government list of all 238 Venezuelan men deported to El Salvador on three flights on March 15, 2025 — documentation the government never intended to release. The article establishes the full scope: 137 removed under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, 101 under regular immigration law. Families learned their loved ones had been deported from Salvadoran government social media posts — the U.S. government told no one. No release dates, no specified sentences, no access to lawyers or family communication. The U.S. paid El Salvador approximately $4.76 million. Total Venezuelans sent to CECOT across March-April 2025: 252.

59. David J. Bier, “DHS Doesn’t List CECOT Prison Deportees in Its Worst of the Worst Data“, Cato Institute, December 23, 2025.

Cato Institute analysis using DHS’s own FOIA-released data that demolishes the “worst of the worst” framing. Fifty-three percent of CECOT deportees had no criminal conviction and no criminal charge of any kind. Only 4 percent had a violent crime conviction. The primary identification tool was a points-based checklist flagging tattoos — including roses, clocks, a Real Madrid soccer logo, and a Call of Duty video game reference. The government’s own Tren de Aragua expert testified under oath that the method was unreliable. Over 50 deportees had entered the U.S. legally. DHS later created its own “Worst of the Worst” database and included none of the CECOT deportees in it. The government called them the worst criminals in America, then quietly refused to put them in its own worst-criminals list.

60. Ahilan Arulanantham, “Deportation to CECOT: The Constitutional Prohibition on Punishment Without Charge or Trial“, Just Security (NYU School of Law), April 23, 2025.

Legal analysis by a UCLA law professor who actually represented CECOT deportees in habeas litigation. Arulanantham’s argument: deportation to CECOT constitutes punishment under the Fifth and Sixth Amendments, which requires a trial. DHS Secretary Noem’s own words on video — calling CECOT a “consequence” and threatening “we will hunt you down” — legally transform the deportation from civil enforcement into criminal punishment, triggering full constitutional protections. Both Rubio and Bukele described the arrangement as being for “convicted criminals” — but the deportees were never convicted. The government’s own statements constitute the legal confession that this was punishment without trial.

61. PBS NewsHour, “Trump Administration Asks Supreme Court to Block Order Returning Man Deported to El Salvador Because of Error“, PBS NewsHour, April 2025; supplemented by CBS News, “Kilmar Abrego Garcia Indicted“, CBS News, June 2025.

The Abrego Garcia case: a 29-year-old Salvadoran national living in Maryland with a U.S. citizen wife and child, working as a sheet metal apprentice, under a federal court order explicitly barring his deportation to El Salvador. ICE seized him and sent him to CECOT anyway — the administration called it a “clerical error.” Three courts ordered his return; the administration defied them all. Judge Xinis called the deportation “wholly lawless” and the government’s responses a “willful and bad faith refusal to comply.” The DOJ attorney who conceded the deportation was wrong was removed from the case. When the administration finally returned Abrego Garcia, it was to charge him with federal crimes — retroactively constructing justification. AG Bondi made public accusations that do not appear in the actual indictment. Judge Wilkinson: “There is no question that the government screwed up here.”

62. Maya Yang and Maanvi Singh, “Judge Rules White House Violated Order by Deporting to South Sudan“, The Guardian, May 21, 2025.

Documents one of the most egregious third-country deportations: eight men sent to South Sudan — a country on the verge of civil war — from Cuba, Mexico, Laos, Myanmar, Vietnam, and South Sudan (only one was actually South Sudanese). One Burmese man was told three different destination countries within hours. Immigration attorney Jonathan Ryan, a 20-year veteran: “This is a death penalty case with traffic court-level procedure.” Judge Brian Murphy ruled the deportation “unquestionably” violated his court order. The DOJ filed an erroneous sworn declaration claiming a deportee had consented — later admitted it was wrong.

63. Camilo Montoya-Galvez and Eleanor Watson, “Trump Administration May Soon Deport Migrants to Libya“, CBS News, May 8, 2025; supplemented by AP News, “Libya Deportation Plans Highlight Abuse of Migrants in Libya“, AP News, May 2025.

Documents the administration’s plan for military-operated deportation flights to Libya — a country the State Department rates “Do Not Travel” (highest danger designation), with documented open slave markets where migrants are sold for as little as $400. Both of Libya’s rival governments denied any deportation agreement. A UN report covering 2024-2025 describes “a brutal and normalized reality” of slavery, forced labor, and sexual violence against migrants. The targets were people from Mexico and Asia with no connection to Libya — the administration was choosing a destination specifically because it is dangerous.

64. Human Rights Watch, “The Strategy Is to Break Us: The US Expulsion of Third-Country Nationals to Costa Rica“, Human Rights Watch, May 22, 2025.

Based on face-to-face interviews with 36 of the 200 people expelled. Two hundred third-country nationals — including 81 children — from 16 countries (Afghanistan, Armenia, Iran, Russia, Vietnam, Yemen, and others) were expelled to Costa Rica, a country where they didn’t speak the language and had no connection. Thirty-four of 36 interviewed received no asylum screening interview before expulsion. A 12-year-old boy was separated from his mother for 29 days. Costa Rica’s president acknowledged accepting the flights under economic coercion: “We are helping the economically powerful brother to the north, who if they impose a tax in our free zones, it’ll screw us.” The report’s title comes from a deportee: “I think the strategy is to break us so we will give up.”

65. AP News, “US Spent $40M on Approximately 300 Third-Country Deportations“, AP News, February 2026.

A Senate Democratic report documented that the Trump administration spent over $40 million in taxpayer money during its first year to deport approximately 300 people to countries they had no connection to — roughly $133,000 per person. Thirty-two million dollars went in lump sums to five governments (Equatorial Guinea, Rwanda, El Salvador, Palau, and Eswatini) with little oversight. In some individual cases, cost per deportation exceeded $1 million.

66. PBS NewsHour (AP), “First Immigration Detainees Arrive at Alligator Alcatraz in Florida Everglades“, PBS NewsHour, July 2025; supplemented by ACLU, “New Lawsuit Challenges Florida’s Authority to Detain People at Notorious Alligator Alcatraz Detention Center“, ACLU, August 23, 2025.

Documents the detention facility built in eight days in the Florida Everglades — named “Alligator Alcatraz” by Florida AG James Uthmeier after a prison famous for brutality. The Florida Republican Party sold branded T-shirts and beer koozies. The ACLU’s federal lawsuit documents people held “off the grid,” invisible to families and lawyers, without charges, in conditions called “atrocious and dangerous.” DACA recipients detained; ICE agents told them their status “doesn’t matter anymore.” DeSantis said the facility was “meant as a deterrent” and the name was “meant to send a message.”

67. The Guardian, “ICE Warehouses: DHS Plans for 24 Detention Centers“, The Guardian, February 13, 2026; supplemented by The Guardian, “ICE 2025 Deaths Timeline“, The Guardian, January 4, 2026.

DHS documents reveal a $38.3 billion plan for 24 warehouse mega-centers: 16 regional processing facilities (1,000-1,500 people each) and 8 large-scale detention centers (7,000-10,000 people each). Target: 135,000 detention beds by FY2029. Funded by the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act.” As of January 2026: 70,766 people detained — the highest recorded population. In 2025, 32 people died in ICE custody — the deadliest year in more than two decades, matching the 2004 record. Nearly 75% of those detained had no criminal convictions. Among the dead: DACA recipients, an imam who filed an emergency medical motion three days before he died, a man stopped on a grocery run with his wife who died after repeated symptoms went untreated.

68. Nik Popli and Brian Bennett, “Deportation Flights Set Up Constitutional Crisis“, TIME, March 2025.

Documents the administration’s deliberate, public defiance of federal court orders — not hidden violations, but open contempt celebrated on social media. Judge Boasberg ordered deportation flights halted; the planes flew anyway. El Salvador’s Bukele posted: “Oopsie… Too late.” White House officials amplified the post. Tom Homan: “We’re not stopping. I don’t care what the judges think.” Law professor Kim Wehle: the country is “far beyond” a constitutional crisis — “the checks and balances are gone.” White House Press Secretary Leavitt questioned whether “a verbal order carries the same weight as a written order” — rationalizing defiance.

69. Melissa Quinn, “Appeals Court Rejects Trump Administration Claims in Abrego Garcia Case as ‘Shocking’“, CBS News, April 17, 2025.

Reagan-appointed Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, writing for a unanimous Fourth Circuit panel, issued one of the most searing appellate opinions of the modern era: “The government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order.” He warned: “If today the Executive claims the right to deport without due process, what assurance will there be tomorrow that it will not deport American citizens… and train its broad discretionary powers upon its political enemies?” Even the National Review — the flagship conservative publication — covered the ruling as a “resounding” rejection.

70. Jacob Rosen and Joe Walsh, “Minnesota Judge Holds DOJ Lawyer in Contempt“, CBS News, February 20, 2026; supplemented by Joe Walsh, “Judge Lifts Contempt, Blasts DOJ“, CBS News, February 20, 2026.

Documents Army lawyer Matthew Isihara — pulled from the JAG corps to plug the gap left by mass DOJ resignations — held in contempt at $500/day after ICE defied Judge Provinzino’s order to release a man in Minnesota with his identification documents. Provinzino’s nine-page written order: “The Government has offered that excuse to this Court again, and again, and again (and to other judges in this district again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again).” She rejected the “understaffing” defense as justification for “flagrant disobedience” and called the consequences “real consequences on real human beings.” Isihara was listed as attorney on 100+ cases filed since January 2026.

71. Alex Woodward, “‘This Job Sucks’: DOJ Lawyer Asks to Be Held in Contempt So She Can Sleep“, The Independent, February 3, 2026.

DOJ attorney Julie Le — a Homeland Security lawyer handling 80+ cases from Operation Metro Surge — told federal judge Jerry Blackwell in open court: “The system sucks, this job sucks. I wish you would just hold me in contempt of court so I can get 24 hours of sleep.” She said ICE had “no guidance or direction” on how to comply with court orders. She was later removed from her Justice Department detail. The Trump administration’s “law and order” regime in action: so overwhelmed by the chaos it created that its own lawyers are publicly begging to be jailed for relief.

72. ABA Journal staff, “DOJ Admits to Violating Dozens of Immigration-Related Court Orders in New Jersey“, ABA Journal, February 19, 2026.

The Trump DOJ formally acknowledged in a federal court filing that it violated immigration court orders more than 50 times in 10 weeks in New Jersey — covering 547 cases. Violations included an illegal deportation to Peru in defiance of a judicial injunction, missed deadlines for bond hearings, and out-of-state transfers after judges issued no-transfer orders. Associate Deputy AG Jordan Fox: “We regret deeply all violations.” This is not alleged — the government admitted it in writing.

73. Yunior Rivas, “Federal Judge Rules DOJ Can ‘No Longer’ Be Trusted in Voter Roll Crusade“, Democracy Docket, February 6, 2026.

Oregon federal judge Mustafa T. Kasubhai stripped the DOJ of its “presumption of good faith” — the foundational trust courts extend to the federal government — after AG Bondi’s own letter linked voter roll lawsuits to ICE immigration enforcement, exposing the stated “election integrity” rationale as pretextual. “The presumption of regularity that has been previously extended to Plaintiff that it could be taken at its word — with little doubt about its intentions and stated purposes — no longer holds.” Courts almost never withdraw this presumption. Kasubhai did. New Mexico and Minnesota immediately cited his ruling.

74. Catherine Bouris, “Judge Gives Blistering Review of Trump Policy in New Ruling“, The Daily Beast, February 19, 2026; supplemented by Politico analysis, February 12, 2026.

Judge Sunshine Sykes used the word “terror” to describe the administration’s conduct: “Beyond its terror against noncitizens, the executive branch has extended its violence on its own citizens, killing two American citizens — Renée Good and Alex Pretti — in Minnesota.” She called officials “shameless” and vacated the Board of Immigration Appeals’ endorsement of mandatory detention. Per Politico’s analysis: 373 federal judges have rejected Trump’s mandatory detention policy; 44 were Trump’s own appointees; only 28 sided with the administration.

75. San Antonio Express-News, “Judge Orders Release of 5-Year-Old Migrant From Texas ICE Detention“, San Antonio Express-News, January 31, 2026.

Judge Fred Biery ordered the release of 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos from ICE detention, writing: “The perfidious lust for unbridled power and the imposition of cruelty in its quest know no bounds and are bereft of human decency. And the rule of law be damned.” He accused the administration of “ignorance of an American historical document called the Declaration of Independence.” He affixed a photo of the detained child to his order, followed by two Bible verses: Matthew 19:14 (”Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them”) and John 11:35 (”Jesus wept”). As the New Republic noted: this is not how federal judges write opinions in normal circumstances.

76. Democracy Docket, “Judge Blasts Hegseth Demotion Effort Against Senator Mark Kelly Over Unlawful Orders Video“, Democracy Docket, February 2026.

George W. Bush-appointed Judge Richard Leon blocked Defense Secretary Hegseth’s attempt to demote Senator Mark Kelly — a retired Navy captain and astronaut — for appearing in a video reminding troops of their duty to refuse illegal orders. Leon’s response to the government’s procedural arguments: “Horsefeathers!” He used exclamation points more than a dozen times. He told Hegseth to “be grateful” for retired military voices rather than trying to “shrink” their First Amendment liberties. A Republican-appointed judge using this language against a Republican defense secretary underscores the bipartisan judicial alarm.

77. Malcolm Ferguson, “Judge Accuses Trump, Rubio, and Noem of ‘Unconstitutional Conspiracy’“, The New Republic, January 16, 2026.

Reagan-appointed Judge William Young found that Cabinet secretaries Marco Rubio and Kristi Noem engaged in an “unconstitutional conspiracy” to violate the First Amendment, targeting academics and activists for their political speech on Palestine. Young: “I find it breathtaking that I have been compelled on the evidence to find the conduct of such high-level officers of our government — Cabinet secretaries — conspired to infringe the First Amendment rights of people with such rights here in the United States.” He compared their conduct to enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act. He said the president “has a fearful view of freedom.” A Reagan appointee calling sitting Cabinet members unconstitutional conspirators.

78. Matt Ford, “The Judges and Juries Saving the Republic From Trump“, The New Republic, February 23, 2026.

Comprehensive overview documenting the pattern of lower federal courts issuing “direct, unvarnished” language in rulings against the Trump administration — language Ford argues signals “how far the country has drifted from legitimate constitutional government.” Covers Sykes, Biery, Leon, Wilkinson, Young, and others. Key observation: “This is not how federal judges write opinions and orders in normal circumstances.” When judges start affixing photos, citing Bible verses, stripping the government of good-faith presumptions, and warning about “incipient crisis,” the judiciary is sounding the loudest institutional alarm available to it.

79. Brennan Center for Justice, “Supreme Court Shadow Docket Tracker — Challenges to Trump Administration Actions“, Brennan Center for Justice, updated December 23, 2025.

Comprehensive tracker documenting the Supreme Court’s use of its emergency “shadow docket” to rule on challenges to Trump administration actions. Since January 20, 2025, the Court has issued 25 shadow docket decisions: 20 ruled for the administration at least partially, 5 ruled against, and 7 had no written explanation at all. In 20 weeks, the second Trump administration filed 19 shadow docket applications — the same number the Biden administration filed in four years; the Obama and Bush administrations combined filed 8 in sixteen years (citing Georgetown Professor Stephen Vladeck’s analysis). The tracker includes devastating dissent language from Justices Sotomayor (”willfully blind... or naive”), Kagan (”should never be used... to transfer government authority from Congress to the President”), and Jackson (”dons its emergency-responder gear, rushes to the scene, and uses its equitable power to fan the flames rather than extinguish them”). Documents how the shadow docket has been used to allow racial profiling in immigration sweeps, mass revocation of parole for half a million people, termination of transgender service members, firing of independent agency commissioners, and mass layoffs — all after lower courts found these actions likely illegal.

80. Forbes Breaking News, “Stephen Miller Gives Fiery Defense Of Maduro Capture In Tense Interview With CNN’s Jake Tapper“, YouTube / Forbes Breaking News, January 6, 2026.

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller on CNN with Jake Tapper, three days after U.S. special forces captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. When Tapper asked what it means that the U.S. is “running Venezuela,” Miller replied: “The United States of America is running Venezuela. By definition. That’s true.” He then stated: “We live in a world — in the real world, Jake — that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world.” Miller refused to rule out military force against NATO ally Denmark over Greenland, dismissed the question of Venezuelan elections as a “neoliberal frame,” and declared: “The United States is using its military to secure our interests unapologetically in our hemisphere. We’re a superpower, and under President Trump, we are going to conduct ourselves as a superpower.” The interview is a near-explicit articulation of the essay’s thesis: stated values are instruments, power is the only objective.

81. Mark Carney, “Davos 2026: Special Address by Mark Carney, Prime Minister of Canada“, World Economic Forum, January 20, 2026.

Full transcript of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s special address at the World Economic Forum’s 56th Annual Meeting, delivered fourteen days after Miller’s CNN interview. Carney declared: “We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.” He invoked Václav Havel’s 1978 essay The Power of the Powerless — the parable of a greengrocer who places a sign reading “Workers of the world unite” in his window every morning, not because he believes it but to signal compliance. Havel called this “living within a lie.” Carney applied the metaphor to the international community’s decades-long performance of the rules-based order: “You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration, when integration becomes the source of your subordination.” He called for middle powers to “stop pretending, to name reality,” and delivered the line: “When we only negotiate bilaterally with a hegemon, we negotiate from weakness. We accept what’s offered. We compete with each other to be the most accommodating. This is not sovereignty. It’s the performance of sovereignty while accepting subordination.” Concluded: “Nostalgia is not a strategy.”

82. People’s World, “Steve Bannon Rolls Out His Far-Right Nationalist Agenda“, People’s World, February 2017.

Steve Bannon, White House Chief Strategist, at CPAC in February 2017: “If you think they’re going to give you your country back without a fight, you are sadly mistaken.” He named “deconstruction of the administrative state” as a core administration goal. And privately, to journalist Ronald Radosh: “Lenin wanted to destroy the state and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down and destroy all of today’s establishment.” The man sitting steps from the Oval Office explicitly modeled himself on the Bolshevik revolutionary who destroyed the Russian state.

83. Washington Post (widely reported), “Michael Flynn Calls for ‘One Religion’ at Reawaken America Tour”, November 13, 2021.

Michael Flynn, Trump’s former National Security Advisor, at the Reawaken America Tour in San Antonio: “If we are going to have one nation under God, which we must, we have to have one religion.” A former National Security Advisor and senior MAGA figure explicitly calling for replacing American religious pluralism with a single state religion — a direct assault on the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause.

84. Washington Post (widely reported), “Trump Calls Political Opponents ‘Vermin’”, November 11, 2023.

Donald Trump, Veterans Day 2023, Claremont, New Hampshire: “We will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.” Historians immediately compared the language to rhetoric used by Hitler and Mussolini to justify purges. Trump also used the phrase “poisoning the blood of our country” — echoing Hitler’s “poisoning the blood of the nation” from Mein Kampf. Multiple news organizations documented the explicit historical parallels to fascist dehumanization of political opponents.

85. Robert Tait, “Trump Sparks Outrage After Calling for Army to Handle Enemies on Election Day“, The Guardian, October 14, 2024.

Documents Trump’s Fox News interview with Maria Bartiromo (October 13, 2024) in which he called domestic political opponents “the enemy from within,” named Adam Schiff by name, said internal enemies are more dangerous than China and Russia, and called for the National Guard or military to handle them. Gen. Mark Milley, Trump’s own former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, called Trump “a total fascist.” NYU historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat: “He’s actually rehearsing, in a sense, what he would be doing as head of state.”

86. Alexis Sterling, “Trump Calls Critics ‘Enemy Within’ as Generals Told to Target American Cities“, NationofChange, October 2, 2025; supplemented by AP News, “Hegseth Declares End to ‘Politically Correct’ Leadership in US Military“, AP News, September 30, 2025.

The most operationally significant instance of Trump’s “enemy within” rhetoric: standing before approximately 800 generals and admirals at Marine Corps Base Quantico on September 30, 2025, Trump declared: “This is a war too. It’s a war from within.” He called critics “vicious people that we have to fight,” singled out San Francisco, Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles, and told commanders to treat those cities as military “training grounds.” He said: “We’re under invasion from within, no different than a foreign enemy, but more difficult in many ways, because they don’t wear uniforms — at least when they’re wearing a uniform you can take them out.” The commander-in-chief, instructing his armed forces that his political opponents and their cities are legitimate military targets.

87. Amna Nawaz and Shrai Popat, “How Trump’s Rhetoric Compares to Historic Fascist Language“, PBS NewsHour, October 28, 2024.

NYU Professor of History Ruth Ben-Ghiat — one of the foremost academic experts on fascism — provides the definitive scholarly framework: “Speaking of Americans as an enemy within — this is all straight from fascism. The core of fascism in Italy and Germany were combatants who followed their leader to bring the war home and turned their force against their own people.” She documents the historical lineage: Mussolini invented “drain the swamp” and the “occupied country/liberation” framing; Nazi Germany targeted political opposition first, before Jews; Trump’s language follows the identical pattern. This is not hyperbolic comparison. It is clinical, documented historical analysis by a credentialed expert.

88. Sharon Zhang, “Project 2025 Leader Touts SCOTUS’s Role in Aiding ‘Second American Revolution’“, Truthout, July 3, 2024.

Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation — the organization that authored Project 2025 — on Real America’s Voice, July 2, 2024: “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” The statement was made while celebrating the Supreme Court’s presidential immunity ruling as “vital” to their revolutionary project. The phrasing contains an unmistakable conditional threat: the revolution continues whether or not blood is shed — that decision is assigned to the left’s compliance. Placed last in the article’s “What They Said” section because, after the reader has absorbed the camps, the court defiance, the international aggression, the “vermin” rhetoric, and the Quantico speech to 800 generals, Roberts’ conditional — “bloodless if the left allows it to be“ — lands as the kill shot: the architect of the project confirming it is a revolution, and assigning responsibility for the bloodshed to those being crushed by it.

89. Erica Chenoweth, “Questions, Answers, and Some Cautionary Updates Regarding the 3.5% Rule“, Harvard Kennedy School, Carr Center Discussion Papers, April 2020.

Chenoweth’s own official cautionary update to her widely cited 3.5% rule, published by the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. In it, she explicitly states that the 3.5% figure is “a descriptive statistic” derived from 323 campaigns studied between 1900 and 2006 — “a tendency, rather than a law,” not a prescriptive guarantee. She cites Bahrain (2011–2014) as the first confirmed exception: a nonviolent movement that mobilized over 6% of the population and still “decisively failed.” The paper warns that momentum, organization, and strategic leadership matter as much as raw participation numbers — and that simply achieving the threshold without building a broader constituency “does not guarantee success in the future.”

90. Lydialyle Gibson, “Erica Chenoweth: Democracy, Data, Harvard“, Harvard Magazine, June 2025.

An in-depth profile of Chenoweth documenting the dramatic decline in civil resistance success rates — from a high-water mark of 65% in the 1990s to below 34% since 2010. The article provides Chenoweth’s direct quotes about authoritarian regimes coordinating repression across borders: Saudi Arabia sending troops to Bahrain, Belarus advising Venezuela, Russia sending troops to Kazakhstan. Security forces are now purged for disloyalty and trained specifically to resist the defections that once toppled regimes. Chenoweth’s forthcoming book is tentatively titled The End of People Power — a title that captures exactly how far the landscape has shifted since the original 3.5% research.

91. Jim Saksa, “Trump: ‘There Will Be Voter I.D. for the Midterm Elections, Whether Approved by Congress or Not’“, Democracy Docket, February 13, 2026.

Documents Trump’s February 13, 2026 Truth Social post vowing to impose voter ID requirements for the midterms “whether approved by Congress or not” — an open declaration that the President will unilaterally override the legislature’s constitutional authority over election rules. Trump claimed to have “searched the depths of Legal Arguments not yet articulated or vetted on this subject,” literally asserting secret legal powers no lawyer in American history has ever found. The article also includes the exact language from Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly’s permanent injunction against Trump’s March 2025 executive order, in which she ruled that the Framers “entrusted this power to the parts of our government that they believed would be most responsive to the will of the people: first to the States, and then, in some instances, to Congress” — not the president.

92. Wren Orey, Matthew Weil, and Julianne Lempert, “Five Things to Know About the SAVE Act“, Bipartisan Policy Center, February 2, 2026.

The most comprehensive data-rich analysis of the SAVE Act’s impact, notably from a centrist institution. Confirms that the House passed the SAVE America Act 218–213; that 52% of registered voters do not have an unexpired passport with their current legal name; that only five states (Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Vermont, and Washington) issue enhanced driver’s licenses denoting citizenship status; and that standard driver’s licenses and REAL IDs do not establish citizenship. Documents the Kansas precedent: when Kansas adopted a documentary proof-of-citizenship requirement, it blocked 31,000 eligible citizens (12% of applicants) from registering, while the noncitizen registration rate it targeted was 0.002%. Also confirms the criminal penalty provision — election officials face prosecution for registering an applicant who fails to present documentary proof, even if that applicant is a U.S. citizen — and the authorization of private lawsuits against election workers.

93. Eliza Sweren-Becker and Owen Bacskai, “New SAVE Act Bills Would Still Block Millions of Americans from Voting“, Brennan Center for Justice, February 9, 2026.

Brennan Center analysis confirming that more than 21 million Americans lack ready access to the citizenship documents required by the SAVE Act, and that the bill applies not just to new registrations but to address changes and re-registrations — meaning any voter who moves or updates their party affiliation must re-prove citizenship. Documents that states would be required to submit voter rolls to the DHS SAVE program monthly, and that DOGE team members at the Social Security Administration agreed to turn over state voter rolls to an advocacy group seeking to “find evidence of voter fraud and to overturn election results in certain States” — confirming that there are no meaningful restrictions on what the federal government can do with that data.

94. UMD Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement, “New CDCE Survey Shows Millions Lack ID as Voter ID Laws Spread to More States“, University of Maryland, 2024.

Survey data showing that 18% of Black Americans lack a driver’s license compared to 5% of white Americans — a 3.6-to-1 disparity. Since the SAVE Act does not accept a standard driver’s license as proof of citizenship (only five states issue enhanced licenses that denote citizenship status), the population most likely to lack even the baseline form of ID is 3.6 times more likely to be Black. This data underscores the racially discriminatory impact of documentary proof-of-citizenship requirements, even before accounting for disparities in passport and birth certificate access.

95. Amy Sherman, “Fact-Checking DHS Secretary Kristi Noem on Her Agency’s Role in Elections“, PBS NewsHour / PolitiFact, February 21, 2026.

Documents Noem’s February 13, 2026 press conference in Phoenix where she claimed that elections fall within DHS’s “critical infrastructure” responsibilities and asserted authority to implement “mitigation measures” at the state and local level. Her statement that “we have the right people voting, electing the right leaders” drew alarm from Democrats and election law experts. The article confirms that no law delegates power over elections to DHS — CISA provides voluntary cybersecurity support to election offices, nothing more — and that Noem’s claims of federal election authority are flatly false.

96. Camryn Sanchez, “New Legislation Would Deploy Immigration Agents to Arizona Polling Places“, KJZZ (Phoenix NPR affiliate), February 17, 2026.

Reports on Arizona Senate Bill 1570, sponsored by State Sen. Jake Hoffman (R-Queen Creek), which would require county election officials to coordinate with ICE to deploy agents at all voting locations — ballot drop boxes, early voting sites, and Election Day polling places — during all hours of operation. The bill was introduced the week after Noem visited Phoenix and asserted that noncitizens are voting. Critics warned it would constitute voter intimidation targeting Latino and immigrant communities. The bill stalled in committee on February 20, 2026, but represents the concrete legislative embodiment of using immigration enforcement as an election suppression tool.

97. Caitlin Yilek and Kaia Hubbard, “Epstein Discharge Petition Gets Final Signature“, CBS News, November 12, 2025.

Documents the moment the Epstein Files Transparency Act’s discharge petition hit 218 signatures on November 12, 2025, forcing a vote that Speaker Johnson had worked to prevent — including delaying the swearing-in of Rep. Adelita Grijalva for seven weeks in an apparent attempt to block the petition. The bipartisan bill, introduced by Democrat Ro Khanna and Republican Thomas Massie, ultimately passed 427–1 — one of the most lopsided votes in recent congressional history. The law requires full disclosure of Epstein files with redactions only to protect victims’ identities, a standard the Bondi DOJ subsequently failed to meet. Massie reported that GOP leaders were in “full panic” over the petition and had “actually threatened” cosigners — “politically, not physically.”

98. Jack Revell, “Pam Bondi Desperately Tries to Bury Jeffrey Epstein Files for Good — Again“, The Daily Beast, February 15, 2026.

Documents the DOJ’s six-page letter to Congress listing “all government officials and politically exposed persons” named in the Epstein files — a list so absurd it included Marilyn Monroe (dead since 1962), Janis Joplin (dead since 1970), and Elvis Presley alongside actual Epstein associates. Rep. Khanna called it a deliberate effort to “muddy the waters” and make it impossible to distinguish predators from bystanders. The DOJ’s defense — that the law “did not define what constitutes a ‘politically exposed person’” — exemplifies how the department weaponized the law’s own breadth against its purpose. Confirms the January 30 release of approximately 3.5 million pages, which the DOJ characterized as its final disclosure despite critics calling it incomplete and deliberately obfuscatory.

99. Joshua Barajas, “Epstein Files Took Center Stage at Bondi’s Oversight Hearing. Here Are 3 Big Moments“, PBS NewsHour, February 11, 2026.

The definitive account of the February 11, 2026 House Judiciary Committee hearing where Attorney General Pam Bondi faced questions about the DOJ’s handling of the Epstein files. Epstein survivors were physically present in the hearing room. Rep. Pramila Jayapal directly asked Bondi to turn around and face the survivors and apologize for the DOJ’s mishandling of the file release. Bondi refused, dismissing the request as “theatrics.” Republican Thomas Massie — cosponsor of the Transparency Act — rebuked Bondi, calling the DOJ’s handling “bigger than Watergate” and telling her “you are responsible for this portion of it.” The DOJ had released victims’ names while redacting alleged co-conspirators.

100. Tucker Reals and Mariia Kashchenko, “Former Prince Andrew Arrested on Suspicion of Misconduct in Public Office“, CBS News, February 19, 2026.

Breaking news account of Prince Andrew’s arrest by Thames Valley Police on his 66th birthday, on suspicion of misconduct in public office. The arrest stems from emails in the Epstein files showing Andrew forwarded confidential British trade envoy reports — including sensitive briefings on Afghanistan — directly to Epstein. King Charles stated “the law must take its course,” and Prime Minister Starmer affirmed “nobody is above the law.” Virginia Giuffre’s siblings issued a statement: “He was never a prince. For survivors everywhere, Virginia did this for you.” The arrest represents the first tangible legal consequence for a major figure named in the Epstein files — and it happened in the UK, not the United States.

101. Mike Stunson, “Dubai CEO Resigns After Released Email Showed Epstein Thanking Him for ‘Torture Video’“, Forbes, February 13, 2026.

Documents the resignation of Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem as Group Chairman and CEO of DP World — one of the world’s largest port operators — after his name appeared over 4,700 times in the Epstein files. Emails revealed Epstein thanked bin Sulayem for a “torture video,” bin Sulayem referred to Epstein as “a very dear friend,” and Epstein used bin Sulayem’s companies to secretly purchase a private island because Epstein’s criminal history prevented him from buying directly. Following the resignation, Canada’s largest pension fund (La Caisse) paused its DP World partnership, and British International Investment suspended its collaboration on four African ports. The international business fallout from the Epstein files contrasts sharply with the absence of comparable consequences in the United States.

102. Shweta Jain, “DP World Reaps Record $20 Billion in Revenue for 2024 on Enhanced Ports Performance“, The National News, March 13, 2025.

Confirms that DP World holds a 9.2% share of the global container market — approximately one in ten containers shipped worldwide — supported by 33% growth in capacity since 2014 and record 2024 revenue of $20 billion. This figure contextualizes the scale of the Epstein fallout: when bin Sulayem resigned under the weight of 4,700 mentions in the Epstein files, it sent shockwaves through a company that handles nearly a tenth of global trade. The international business consequences of the Epstein revelations dwarf anything that has happened in the United States.

103. Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, “President Trump Expands His Travel Ban: What You Need to Know“, American Immigration Council, December 19, 2025.

Comprehensive analysis of Proclamation 10998, signed December 16, 2025, which expanded Trump’s travel ban from 19 countries to 39 countries plus Palestinian Authority document holders — full restrictions on 19 nations and partial restrictions on 19 more, with no expiration date. The proclamation eliminated previously existing exceptions for U.S. citizens’ immediate family members, adopted children, and Afghan Special Immigrant Visa holders. Approximately one in five people seeking to immigrate legally to the United States are now barred, with Nigeria (averaging 128,000 visas per year) most heavily impacted. DHS described the restrictions as “slamming the door shut on the foreign invaders.” The ban is more than five times the scope of the 2017 ban that triggered a national uprising — and it barely made the news.

104. Quinnipiac University Poll, “Quinnipiac University National Poll“, January 13, 2026, and “Quinnipiac University National Poll“, February 4, 2026.

Two consecutive national polls documenting the collapse in ICE approval ratings directly linked to the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. After Good’s death: 40% approve / 57% disapprove of ICE enforcement, with 53% saying the shooting was not justified and 82% of voters having seen the video. After Pretti’s death three weeks later: approval cratered to 34% / 63% disapprove — a 6-point drop tracking precisely with the second killing. The February poll found supermajorities demanding body cameras (92%), opposing ICE masks (61%), wanting ICE to withdraw from Minneapolis (60%), and calling for an independent investigation (80%). Fifty-eight percent said Kristi Noem should be removed from her job.

105. MEE staff, “US TikTok Ban Linked to Israel, China — Insiders Reveal“, Middle East Eye, February 17, 2025.

The definitive account of how the TikTok ban was driven by Israel’s image problem rather than Chinese data security. Contains the verbatim quote from Mike Gallagher — the bill’s original sponsor — admitting at the Munich Security Conference that the legislation “had legs again” after October 7 when “people started to see a bunch of antisemitic content on the platform.” Also documents a State Department memo in which Israeli diplomat Emmanuel Nahshon blamed TikTok’s algorithm for shifting youth opinion against Israel, and Senator Mark Warner’s acknowledgment of the “real story” behind the legislation. Provides the complete timeline from the bill’s stalling to its revival after pro-Palestinian content surged on the platform.

106. Ben Metzner, “Mitt Romney Admits TikTok Ban Is About Suppressing Pro-Palestine Content“, The New Republic, May 6, 2024.

Captures Mitt Romney’s mask-off admission that the TikTok ban was driven by concern over pro-Palestinian content rather than data security. Speaking alongside Secretary of State Blinken at the McCain Institute’s 2024 Sedona Forum, Romney explicitly connected the bill’s “overwhelming support” to the volume of “mentions of Palestinians” on TikTok relative to other platforms. This is the primary source for the verbatim Romney quote confirming that Congress moved to ban TikTok not because of Chinese data collection but because the wrong narrative was reaching too many Americans.

107. Dara Kerr, “US TikTok Deal Explained: Who’s Buying It, What Happens to Your Data, and What’s Next“, The Guardian, September 22, 2025.

Names the complete consortium of Trump allies who purchased TikTok: Larry Ellison (Oracle, leading), Rupert Murdoch and Lachlan Murdoch (Fox Corp), Michael Dell, Silver Lake (private equity), and MGX (UAE sovereign wealth fund). ByteDance retained a 19.9% stake — satisfying the divestiture law while maintaining the fiction of continuity. Oracle houses U.S. user data and controls the recommendation algorithm. The deal was formalized by executive order on September 25, 2025, after Trump postponed enforcement deadlines four times. No equivalent legislation exists for any other social media platform — confirming that Congress targeted the one app where the narrative had slipped beyond their control.

108. Alaina Demopoulos, “No Kings: How Many Protesters Attended?“, The Guardian, June 19, 2025.

Documents the June 14, 2025 “No Kings” protests as among the largest single-day protests in American history, with data journalist G. Elliott Morris estimating between 4 and 6 million participants (1.2–1.8% of the U.S. adult population). A UC Berkeley political scientist called them “without question, among the largest single-day protests in history.” A follow-up march on October 18, 2025, drew an estimated 7 million across approximately 2,700 locations. Despite this unprecedented scale, the article captures the fundamental limitation: within 48 hours, the attention economy had moved on — supporting the article’s argument that the left’s model of power through temporary physical mobilization cannot compete with the right’s permanent domination of the information environment.

109. Clay Masters and Gretchen Brown, “Demuth: GOP Caucus Directed YouTuber to Minnesota“, MPR News, December 29, 2025.

Broke the critical story that Minnesota House Speaker Lisa Demuth confirmed her Republican caucus directed YouTuber Nick Shirley to the specific daycare sites featured in his viral fraud-allegation video. The video — posted December 26, 2025, alleging fraud at Somali-run childcare centers — got 135 million views on Twitter and 3 million on YouTube. Within three days, DHS launched door-to-door investigations, deployed approximately 2,000 agents to the Twin Cities, and froze all federal childcare funding for Minnesota. State investigators visited nine of the targeted facilities, finding children present at eight and no evidence of widespread fraud. The admission that Republican lawmakers manufactured the story and fed it to an influencer reveals the right-wing content pipeline as a deliberate political operation, not organic journalism.

110. Anthony Bettin and WCCO Staff, “Minneapolis Day Care Quality Learning Center Closed After Nick Shirley Video“, CBS News Minnesota, January 7, 2026.

Independent verification of Nick Shirley’s fraud claims by CBS News Minnesota, which conducted its own analysis and found that all but two of the featured daycares had active licenses and all active locations had been visited by state regulators within the prior six months. The Department of Children, Youth, and Families visited nine facilities from the video, finding children at eight of them — the ninth had not yet opened for the day. Quality Learning Center’s most recent licensing review found operational violations but no evidence of fraud. Despite the absence of substantiated fraud, the Trump administration deployed 2,000 DHS agents, froze federal childcare funding for Minnesota, and paused billions more in social services funding for Minnesota and four other Democratic-led states.

111. Terry Tang, “How ‘Woke’ Went from an Expression in Black Culture to a Conservative Criticism“, Los Angeles Times, September 30, 2025.

Traces how “woke” — a term rooted in Black consciousness traceable to Marcus Garvey’s 1923 speeches and a 1938 Lead Belly song — was systematically stripped of its meaning and weaponized as a right-wing pejorative. By 2022, Ron DeSantis made anti-woke legislation central to his brand; by Trump’s second term, the White House declared “America is no longer woke.” The article documents how a word that once meant “pay attention to systemic racism” became the container for every cultural grievance in America — and helped win the 2024 presidential election. Most people using the word couldn’t define it, which was precisely the point: it meant whatever the listener needed it to mean, and that made it unstoppable.

112. AP News, “What Is the Laken Riley Act?“, Associated Press, January 29, 2025.

Documents that the Laken Riley Act — mandating ICE detention of undocumented immigrants charged with a range of crimes — was the first bill signed by Trump in his second term, on January 29, 2025. Named for Laken Riley, a 22-year-old nursing student murdered by an undocumented Venezuelan national in Georgia in February 2024, the act exemplifies how the right converts a single name into federal law. Republicans leveraged Riley’s death throughout the 2024 campaign and State of the Union address — “Say her name” — transforming a tragic murder into a focus point that did more to shape the immigration debate than every policy paper and think tank report combined.

113. Nicole Norfleet and Phillip Pina, “ICE Minnesota: Tom Homan Announces End of Operation Metro Surge“, The Minnesota Star Tribune, February 15, 2026.

Direct coverage of Tom Homan announcing the phasing down of Operation Metro Surge — the largest immigration enforcement operation ever carried out — which at its peak deployed approximately 3,000 federal officers in Minneapolis and resulted in 4,000+ arrests and the deaths of two American civilians. Homan claimed local cooperation as his justification, but a follow-up Star Tribune investigation found that nearly all Minnesota sheriffs denied changing their policies. Minneapolis estimated at least $203.1 million in economic losses from the operation. The drawdown followed a collapse in public support documented by Quinnipiac polling and growing political fallout from the Good and Pretti killings.

114. Lucy Campbell, “Democrats Issue 10 Demands to ‘Rein in’ ICE in DHS Funding Bill“, The Guardian, February 5, 2026.

Documents the 10 formal demands Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries jointly issued to Republican leadership as a condition for DHS funding, directly triggered by the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. The demands include: judicial warrants required before entering private property; prohibition on ICE agents wearing masks; mandatory display of agency name, unique ID, and last name; mandatory body-worn cameras; protection of sensitive locations including schools, churches, and polling places; codified use-of-force standards; state and local consent for large-scale operations; and mandatory attorney access at detention facilities. These are structural reforms — not symbolic gestures — extracted from a regime that doesn’t concede anything it doesn’t have to.