Update: a 14-year-old U.S. citizen who was attending the Idaho horse race federal agents raided has described being zip-tied there. The American Civil Liberties Union filed a federal civil rights lawsuit today highlighting the mistreatment of families at the community event. Here's more from
@CBSNews.
The Trump administration has removed a large Rainbow Flag from the Stonewall National Monument at Christopher Park, New York. A spokesperson for the National Park Service told Gay City News that this change was made because government guidance dictates that "only the U.S. flag and other congressionally or departmentally authorized flags are flown on NPS-managed flagpoles, with limited exceptions." Community members are planning to hold a demonstration protesting the removal of the flag today (Feb. 10) at the Stonewall National Monument at 5 p.m. ET.
According to
@WSJ, the Trump administration plans to reverse the finding that says greenhouse gases threaten public health and welfare. This would remove regulatory requirements around emission standards for vehicles and reporting obligations for some industries. Here's the full story [gift link].
The town of Wilder, Idaho, may have thought its deep-red politics could insulate it from the Trump administration's immigration raids. It was wrong. Federal agents swarmed a horse track last October, rounding up more than 100 people and later deporting 75. The town has a population of just 1,725. “We rely on Hispanic labor,” said farmer Chris Gross. She added: “Nobody thought something like this could happen here.” Here's more from @. [gift link]
Substandard education, bad food and water, inadequate medical care, constant boredom, and the anguish of being ripped from their lives.
@ProPublica's Mica Rosenberg talked to the children of Dilley immigration detention center about what they are experiencing.
ICE officers aren't happy with the direction the agency is taking, according to posts on a forum with more than 5,000 members. Users are complaining about working hours, pay, leadership, lack of union protections and poorly trained new recruits, as well as the agency's "mission." “I'm all for removing illegals, but snatching dudes off lawn mowers in Cali and leaving the truck and equipment just sitting there? Definitely not working smarter,” wrote one user. Here's the full story from @.
"The Trump Administration has created an exclusion for new experimental reactors being built at sites around the U.S. from a major environmental law. The law would have required them to disclose how their construction and operation might harm the environment, and it also typically required a written, public assessment of the possible consequences of a #NuclearAccident.
"The exclusion announcement comes just days after NPR revealed officials at the Department of Energy had secretly rewritten environmental, safety and security rules to make it easier for the reactors to be built.
"The Department of Energy announced the change Monday in a notice in the Federal Register. It said the department would begin excluding advanced nuclear reactors from the #NationalEnvironmentalPolicyAct. The act requires federal agencies to consider the environment when undertaking new projects and programs.
"The law also requires extensive reporting on how proposed programs might impact local ecosystems. That documentation, known as an #EnvironmentalImpactStatement, and a second lesser type of analysis, known as an #EnvironmentalAssessment, provide an opportunity for the public to review and comment on potential projects in their community."
A United Arab Emirates royal known as the "Spy Sheikh" bought a half-billion-dollar stake in a Trump company. Months later, U.A.E. got access to American AI chips. Here's the full story from @ [gift link].
Union president Taylor Rehmet, a Democrat, beat Republican Leigh Wambsganss in a state Senate special election in Texas on Saturday. @ takes a look at how significant that might be.
The latest dump of documents related to Jeffrey Epstein includes allegations against Donald Trump, evidence that Elon Musk lied about his interactions with the convicted sex offender, and references to Bill Clinton. Here's more from @.
Behind the scenes of ICE's deportation flights. @'s Gillian Brockell writes about the private-equity-owned airline that profits off President Trump's war on immigrants.
Donald Trump made promises that he would increase affordability for Americans, but in a Cabinet meeting today, he seemed to suggest the opposite. Of current homeowners, he said: "We're not gonna destroy the value of their homes so that somebody who didn't work very hard can buy a home." Here's the full story from @.
Multiple reports say that a group of separatists from Alberta, Canada, has met with members of Donald Trump's administration, seeking money from the U.S. Treasury to help bankroll a new country. British Columbia Premier David Eby says this is treason. Here's more from @.
Inside the White House in the hours after Alex Pretti's shooting. "It is inconceivable to some of his allies that he would alter the underlying aim of the mission," write the team at NBC. "The reality is, you can’t stop what you’re doing," a former White House official told them. "This is the whole point of ICE existing in these cities, and Minnesota is not going to be the last state that ICE goes to. Oregon was next. We were not done. We need to keep going."
The U.S. has officially left the Paris Agreement, the global pact to limit the increase in Earth's surface temperature to below 2 degrees celsius. President Trump signed the order for this on his first day in office, but the withdrawal takes a year to go into effect. Here's more from @.
Some members of the international games development community are staying away from the Game Developers Conference (GDC), set to take place in March, because of the political climate in the U.S. @'s Luke Plunkett spoke to nine past attendees about exactly why they've decided to give it a miss: Concerns for their personal safety, as well as a desire not to support anything taking place in the U.S.
A draft resolution obtained by @ and drawn up by the Board of Peace indicates that U.S. President Trump would have "sweeping powers over the future governance of the war-ravaged Gaza Strip and the well-being of its people." [gift link]
When Alex Pretti was fatally shot by federal agents on Saturday, he was already suffering from a broken rib after an encounter with ICE the week before, according to @.
In the hours after a man was shot in Minneapolis, but before his name was released, @'s creative director Kristen Radtke was working on coverage of the aftermath. Then his name was announced, Alex Pretti, and she realized he was her childhood best friend. She writes about how they met, when he was three and she was four, the things they did together, and the person he was. "As social media does its work putting bits and pieces together about each day of unfolding tragedy, more and more of us will realize that those pieces belong to someone we know."
The U.S. government isn't just targeting Minnesota on immigration. @ reports that the Departments of Health and Human Services and Education sent a joint notification today to the Minnesota Department of Education saying it had failed to comply with Title IX by allowing trans girls to compete in sports aligning with their gender.
This is probably fine, right? @ reports on how Trump's transportation department plans to use Google Gemini to draft regulations. The agency's remit includes practically all transportation safety. "We don’t need the perfect rule on XYZ. We don’t even need a very good rule on XYZ," said Department of Transportation general counsel Gregory Zerzan in a meeting. "We want good enough."
"In service to Canada, and our allies." After U.S. President Donald Trump claimed last week that allied countries had "stayed a little back, a little off the front lines" in Afghanistan, @ listed the names of the 158 members of the Canadian Armed Forces who never made it home.
Given the horrifying nature of the DOGE (you have no idea how much I loathe typing that) cuts by which Musk is effectively conduction a rolling shutdown of the US government, the Trump administration's attempts to either take control of, or bankrupt prominent American universities for blatantly ideological reasons, and news that Trump intends to sign an executive order to shut down the Department of Education, there's a conversation we have to start having now that I've run out of time to avoid.
I don't know how to say this without sounding like I'm employing conspiratorial hyperbole to at least some portion of the people reading this, but there really are a whole bunch of obscenely wealthy, mostly-white, mostly-Anglo nazis working together to transform our world into a dystopian fascist hellscape to increase their own power over us and preserve their way of life in the face of anticipated uprisings. And a lot of these guys, particularly those concentrated in the American tech sector, are extremely weird Bond movie villain types with horrifying ideas about how to run a society, but enough money to give them a try anyway. I get that to some of you that sounds exactly like a conspiracy theory, but let me assure you that these are all established facts, discussed sporadically in mainstream media outlets; even if those outlets are rarely willing to criticize rich people, or use the word "fascism" in order to explain what those facts mean.
These guys meet in the open to talk about shaping the future of our species in places like Davos and Aspen, they buy elections on live television, and then they go on podcasts to openly admit they want to end democratic rights, destroy regulatory authority over their activities, and transform the places we live into various types of dictatorships run by guys like them. I get that this is a lot to take in, but I should hope that watching a weird little nazi freak like Elon Musk spend $300M to elect Trump, immediately join the government, and start taking a chainsaw to every department that isn't the military or the fascist police state, might make it easier to consider the evidence in retrospect.
Look, this is a big subject; in my studies I've found the overt, direct influence of ideologically reactionary billionaires with fascist, dystopian, and religious agendas intersecting with topics like climate catastrophe, mass surveillance, reproductive rights and the natalism movement, what I would describe as a literally fucking cult for rich people in the TESCREAL movement, the anti-trans pogrom, the carceral state and forced labor, the assault on protest rights in the Pig Empire, climate change denialism, fascist internet influencers and "independent" media sources on the right, and of course elections and fascist political parties in the Pig Empire - that list is by no means exhaustive, these rich freaks have a lotta fingers in a lotta pies. If you want to understand what's going on with the Trump regime right now, why they're destroying what the right calls "the administrative state," why they're seizing control of higher education, and why expanding the powers of the fascist police state in case you get any ideas about stopping them however, then the conversation about weird fascist billionaires with horrible tech-nazi plans has to start somewhere. Let's start with the 2024 election, and the specific group of fascist tech bro billionaires that got Trump into power, and how their stated agendas line up perfectly with Project 2025 and match what we've seen the Trump regime do so far in disturbing ways.
This thirty minute video is a few months old now, and was produced after Trump was elected, but before Der Führer took office. The video is fast paced, and informative; focusing on the activities and recorded statements of hyper-reactionary tech billionaires in the Trump regime's immediate orbit, and how those actions and stated intentions are expressed in Trump's fascist agenda. The presenter names names too, including Trump, JD Vance, Peter Thiel, Marc Andresson, Elon Musk, David Sacks, Brian Armstrong, Ben Horowitz, Balaji Srivisan, and an absolute freak named Curtis Yarvin, who extremely online folks may know as Mencius Moldbug. What the producer of the video couldn't possibly have known, but we know now, is how much of Trump's destructive, authoritarian, and quite frankly illegal attempts to reshape America into his personal fascist autocracy would align perfectly with a plan written by Peter Thiel's pet fascist "philosopher" and a man these right wing extremist, weirdo billionaires literally call "the prophet." No, I am not making that up. Like I said, it's a big conversation and one we're going to keep having on an ongoing basis now that Trump appears to be speedrunning Yarvin's how to build a dictatorship checklist. This should get you started:
Dark Gothic MAGA: How Tech Billionaires Plan to Destroy America by Blonde Politics
I think perhaps the most insulting aspect of deputy attorney general Todd Blanche's announcement that the Department of Justice was closing its investigation into Jeff Epstein and hadn't found enough evidence to investigate even one other person in connection with Epstein and Maxwell's crimes, is that leaked evidence had already proven Blanche was lying, even before the Department of Justice dumped 3.5M disingenuously (and illegally) redacted documents on the public.
A little over six weeks ago, the FBI accidentally leaked roughly 11,000 partially, and at times poorly redacted files from the DoJ investigation. These files have since been officially released, but at the time popular Youtuber Coffeezilla, worked with Drop Site News and something called JMail to grant the public access to these files. Coffeezilla then published a short (11:23) video on his personal channel, going over precisely what folks like Attorney General Pam Bondi, deputy AG Todd Blanche, and even FBI Director Kash Patel (under oath) have told you doesn't exist - evidence that back in 2019, the FBI, including its Crimes Against Children Human Trafficking Unit, was investigating and making contact with 10 separate people they considered co-conspirators in Epstein and Maxwell's crimes. Thanks to poor redaction work by a DoJ then already in violation of the law (more on this in a moment) we even have two names, the previously mentioned Jean-Luc Brunel, and former Victoria's Secret CEO Les Wexner - a very prominent figure in the entire Epstein saga who I'm sure we'll discuss more at some point later.
As Coffeezilla points out in this video, these redactions themselves are evidence of the Trump administration's criminality, because the only redactions they're legally allowed to make are those that protect Epstein's victims, and yet the DoJ is blotting out the names of powerful people the FBI considered Epstein's co-conspirators, as recently as six or seven years ago. Co-conspirators, are by definition, not victims. Rounding out the video, Coffeezilla talks a little bit about what a lying slime-ball Todd Blanche is, his extremely suspicious decision to move Maxwell to a more comfortable "Club Fed" prison, and Trump's openly stated obsession with protecting not Epstein's victims, but the rich and powerful men who associated with him long after he'd been exposed as a pedophile rapist and human trafficker.
Please let me assure you that as far as I can tell, literally nothing about the Trump administration's Epstein files redaction policies has changed between this accidental leak, and their recent 3.5M file Epstein files dump. In other words, the Trump regime Department of Justice was already guilty of a crime, and engaging in an obvious coverup before they even released this last batch of files, and it is categorically impossible for the release of more files, also illegally curated and redacted as part of a massive coverup for what certainly appear to be wealthy and powerful pedophile rapists, to exonerate either the President or his corrupt as hell Justice Department. They're criminals, they're engaging in an open coverup, and the President's entire administration is protecting not only wealthy friends of Jeff Epstein, but folks who helped him carry out his heinous crimes against trafficked women and children.