US Attorney General Pam #Bondi on Wednesday wa accused of engaging in a "cover-up" of the Jeffrey Epstein files and turning the Department of Justice into an "instrument of revenge" for Trump. Bondi, testifying before the House Judiciary Committee, defended the DOJ's handling of the records about the convicted sex offender at a fiery hearing attended by several Epstein victims. FRANCE 24's International Affairs Editor Kethevane Gorjestani explains. #USCongress#Epstein https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkuZqE37dD8
A petition signed by 300,000 people that demands Missouri's gerrymandered congressional map be put to voters has been submitted to the secretary of state. The Missouri Independent explains what happens next.
weird shit happening again in first week of september all over our planet regarding #UAPs & some sort of living creature growing from what seems like a potato shaped 'rock' falling from the sky. i don't know but it seems like some sort of invasion, if it's real.
this guy has collated all the latest videos going round on socials, debunking some.
uap hearings are also continuing in so-called #UScongress
If you are pro-Palestine, U.S. Congress is gunning for you. New legislation takes aim at those who support Palestinian freedom and liberation, under the guise of "combatting antisemitism." Video by @jamesgetspolitical #USCongress #HouseOfRepresentatives #Biden #BidenAdministration #Antisemitism #Zionism #AIPAC #IsraelLobby #ADL ...
Why was a known antisemite grilling Ivy League University presidents about...antisemitism? If Congresswoman Elise Stefanik and her colleagues are so concerned about antisemitism, maybe they should take a look in the mirror before trying to villainize protest chants. #USCongress #EliseStefanik #antisemitism #freepalestine ...
"It is actually a more dangerous time for Arabs and Muslims now in this country than it was post-9/11." According to Abed Ayoub, the national director of The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) , we are in an era of McCarthyite silence and repression when it comes to the support of Palestine in the U.S. #Palestine ...
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries is approaching the eight-hour mark in his filibustering speech blasting President Trump's megabill. Democratic sources told @AxiosNews that his goal was to ensure Republicans are forced to pass the bill during daylight hours, not during the night. Jeffries described the tax and spending bill as an "immoral document." "People will die. Tens of thousands, perhaps year after year after year, as a result of the Republican assault on the healthcare of the American people. I'm sad. I never thought I would be on the House floor saying, 'this is a crime scene,'" he said. Find Axios's summary at the first link, and @abc's liveblog at the second.
The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office says U.S. President Donald Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act would add $2.4 trillion to the country's deficit and leave 10.9 million more people uninsured. Here's more from @AssociatedPress.
A collection of my Fediverse blog posts about fascism and current events, published from April 13th to 15th, 2025. Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, I wrote a lot about the Trump regime, ICE, and nazi billionaires.
"If they get away with this, or even if they can just successfully use it to justify applying government pressure against an extremely large, well-funded news organization, there’s no limit to how far these nazis will take this. This is how a fascist regime transforms the entire media environment into pro-Trump, state news outlets and it won’t just stop with the Fox-ification of media orgs either."
One of the problems with doing antifascist analysis while the Trumpenreich appears to be going for the full Pinochet experience, is that whenever you're right about what these nazis are trying to do, it's no reason to celebrate. I wrote a bit about Pete Hegseth's recent testimony during a Congressional hearing and why what he described there means we might already be looking at the Klepto Kaiser's dictatorship in real time.
"To completely understand what Trump’s crusader Secretary of Defense is getting at here, you have to place it in the larger context of the regime’s fascist mass deportation project, and the conditions which administration officials, including President Trump himself have outlined to “justify” escalation and additional military involvement. Crucially, this includes accounting for the Trump regime’s ability to coordinate multiple security forces, including the ICE Gestapo, the Kash Patel-run FBI, and ideologically sympathetic local law enforcement agencies. With Hegseth’s proposal in place, and a little cooperation among Trump-loyal actors, the regime can both cause the inciting incidents that allow them to summon the Army to a given location, and then use those military forces to essentially enforce Trump’s (often illegal) policies even over the objections of local elected officials."
“Border controls are most severely deployed by those Western regimes that create mass displacement, and are most severely deployed against those whose very recourse to migration results from the ravages of capital and military occupations. . . We are all, therefore, simultaneously separated by and bound together by the violences of border imperialism.”
In a story that as far as I can tell represents a petulant fascist temper tantrum as a result of fallout over the clown-show authoritarian arrest of Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, noted sycophant Trump minion Alina Habba has announced criminal charges against US Congresswoman (D-NJ) LaMonica McIver. The regime is accusing the Congresswoman of assaulting two ICE agents during the lawful oversight visit she conducted on a sketchy, privately-run, recently reopened migrant detention facility called Delaney Hall; the very same visit that resulted in Trump's Gestapo arresting Baraka as part of the regime's attempts to intimidate opposition to their unlawful mass deportation campaign.
'Should Send a Chill Down the Spine of Every American': Trump DOJ Charges New Jersey Democrat
"In a statement, Interim U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey Alina Habba announced the charges against U.S. Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-N.J.), claiming the lawmaker "assaulted, impeded, and interfered with law enforcement" at GEO Group's Delaney Hall. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) awarded GEO Group a billion-dollar contract earlier this year to detain migrants there, even as the facility faced legal challenges and accusations of abuse.
McIver rejected the charges against her as "purely political," saying that "they mischaracterize and distort my actions" in an attempt to "criminalize and deter legislative oversight."
"We were fulfilling our lawful oversight responsibilities, as members of Congress have done many times before, and our visit should have been peaceful and short," said McIver. "Instead, ICE agents created an unnecessary and unsafe confrontation when they chose to arrest Mayor [Ras] Baraka."
Habba said Monday that her office has agreed to drop the trespassing charge against Baraka, who welcomed the decision while expressing solidarity with McIver."
Okay so I don't know if you remember the post I made about Baraka's arrest, but there are literally a bunch of links to video footage of the confrontation Habba is talking about and needless to say it doesn't show the Congresswoman assaulting anyone, let alone "body-slamming" anyone as at least one DHS official previously claimed. Even the government's own out of context video clip just shows some shoving in a crowd of people trying to protect the Mayor of Newark. In other words the Interim U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey is straight up lying about something we can all watch on video. This would of course be more shocking if the world hadn't gotten to know Habba during her time as a defense attorney for Downmarket Mussolini, in which is she routinely spat out easily disprovable lies in court. As an activist I can say from personal experience that this feels an awful lot like the standard bullshit charge cops who just roughed up some protesters press to keep the heat off long enough for the story to go away, and then quietly drop later. You can see that same pattern at work in the "trespass" charges laid against Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, which were ultimately dropped because the regime knows they don't have a leg to stand on when they're under oath.
With all that established however, I think it's important to understand that even if they ultimately drop the charges against McIver, as they did with Baraka, this is still an example of a fascist regime weaponizing the enforcement arm of the state, to target and intimidate their political opposition. Pam Bondi might not love the Justice Department's chances in a court of law, but a message is still being sent to opposition party politicians that if they try to interfere with the unlawful, openly fascist "whitening" of America, security forces will be deployed to stop them. This when combined with the regime's threatening rhetoric, and its day to day attempts to erode the oversight of the judiciary to do blatantly unconstitutional authoritarian bullshit, effectively creates an unstable political environment where opposition to the regime's program, even legal opposition, carries an impossible to properly calculate degree of personal risk to the critic. Whatever your opinion of the Democratic Party happens to be, I think we can all admit that putting their own asses on the line to protect dissidents and critics hasn't exactly been their forte since at least October 7th, 2023; although obviously Baraka, McIver, and Robert Menendez deserve full marks for doing so now.
Finally; I can't prove it, but for a fun thought experiment google up some pictures of Baraka, McIver, and Menendez and tell me if you can think of any obvious reasons a white nationalist government might charge only the two people they did. Yeah, looked about white to me too.
A couple of weeks ago on the other account, I wrote a very short thread about my increasing frustration with Very Serious PeopleTM asking if Trump really means it every time he starts rambling on about all the fascist shit he wants to do. In that post I mostly noted that Trump, a fascist, literally has no idea how to tell a joke, has at least tried to do all the nazi shit people thought he was joking about in the past, and fascist in general were not known for their sense of humor. Whether or not Trump is actually able to accomplish all the nazi crap he says he wants to do, is often a matter of debate. But if he says it, he means to give it a try.
What brought that outburst on, was an article about a democracy watchdog group warning that people weren't taking Trump's threats to circumvent term limits and run for (or make himself) president again in 2028 seriously enough, and that was a bad idea - a position I agree with wholeheartedly.
I'm bringing this up now because apparently the slightly less disgusting Cuomo had noted fascist propagandist Steve Bannon on his podcast this week; Bannon remains a very close ally of Trump and a big supporter of the regime even though he's not actually working in the government this time. During that discussion, Bannon revealed that the Trumpist political movement is actively working on ways to secure a third Trump term already:
'We're Working On It': Bannon Says Planning Underway for Trump 2028
"Appearing on journalist Chris Cuomo's NewsNation podcast, far-right mouthpiece Steve Bannon demurred when asked if he had ambitions to run for president himself, replying: "No, and I'm a firm believer that President Trump will run and win again in 2028, so I've already endorsed President Trump."
When Cuomo pressed Bannon on the existence of term limits that would bar Trump from seeking a third term, Bannon said, "We're working on it. I think we’ll have a couple of alternatives, let’s say that. We’ll see what the definition of term limit is."
"We've had greater long shots than Trump 2028 and we've got a lot of stuff we're working on there," Bannon added. "We're not prepared to talk about it publicly, but in a couple months I think we will be."
Setting aside the fact that this podcast episode should not exist, because Chris Cuomo shouldn't be inviting fascists on his show to normalize fascist ideology and openly lie on behalf of the Trump regime with only mild pushback, I watched the clip; aside from what's quoted here, the only real notable addition I would make is that Cuomo let Bannon duck a question about whether or not the fascists would try another insurrection to keep Trump in power by touting how popular the regime was, and implying Trump would simply win anyway. Let's just say this wasn't Chris's finest hour, even if he did avoid literally agreeing with the nazi propagandist on his show, about nazi shit, like California Governor Gavin Newsom did.
What Bannon didn't shy away from is revealing here, is that Trump absolutely intends to run again in 2028 and his minion strategists are working on a way to circumvent the 22nd Amendment of the US Constitution which would otherwise forbid that. As I've mentioned in a number of articles, we seem to be seeing a pattern of the fascist right transforming Trump's seemingly fantastical ravings, into a type of "unreality" enforced as if it were fact by the larger fascist movement, and then transformed into real and direct action by the regime itself. Given the reality that Trump has repeatedly mused about clearing the way for him to run for a third term in multiple public settings, and we now have a fascist propagandist who is closely allied with Trump revealing that the larger regime is "working on" making that a reality, I think we can safely dispense with the idea that these guys are joking.
So will the nazis get away with this? I mean, who knows; it's not easy to legally change the Constitution, but I have no idea if Trump even cares what the laws say anyway - his actions in power thus far suggest that he literally does not. Right now, the nazis seem to be in the planning and manufacturing popular support stage of this particular autocratic fuckery project, but I'd be inclined to take Bannon at his word when he says we'll be hearing more about it soon, because while Steve is a nazi liar, he rarely lies without a purpose. What I can say is that since Trump was sworn in as president, I can think of dozens and dozens of things he's done that Very Serious PeopleTM swore he couldn't do, and so far he appears to be getting away with the vast majority of it.
Whether it's acceptable to mention it in polite discourse or not, the fascist GOP's plan to formalize national targeted voter suppression based on fascist conspiracy theories designed to explain why a bloviating reality TV show nazi lost the 2020 US presidential election, is a form of election rigging. We've already discussed Der Führer's recent (blatantly illegal) executive order to do just that, but the Republican plan to fuck elections and create their own permanent Pork Reich is a multi-pronged assault. One of the key spearheads in this quest to, again, rig elections by disenfranchising millions of voters who are statistically more likely to support the opposition party, is the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, or Save Act, currently being cooked up in a GOP fascist-controlled Congress.
Republicans are quietly trying to disenfranchise millions of voters
"According to research by the Brennan Center for Justice, more than 21 million US citizens of voting age don’t have easy access to proof of citizenship documents, and only about half of American adults have a passport, while millions do not have access to paper copies of their birth certificates. Married women whose legal names do not match their birth certificates could be disenfranchised by the Save Act, and folks looking to obtain lost or misplaced birth certificates would face financial and logistical hurdles.
The Save Act would restrict voters’ ability to register to vote online and through the mail while also severely limiting the ability of non-partisan civic organizations to conduct voter registration drives, which have been crucial to civic engagement for more than a century. That’s because, despite voters’ ability to register to vote at the DMV and registration efforts by political parties, data shows that voter registration drives from non-partisan organizations can account for about one-fifth of voter registration applicants – roughly equal to the political power of California, Florida and Texas combined. We simply cannot sit back and allow Congress or the White House to destroy the infrastructure of our elections by disenfranchising so many voters."
Look, I know Trump's unhinged fascist conspiracy theories about the 2020 election make most liberals very leery about uttering the words "rigging elections" but at some point you have to accept that you can't stop reality from being real, just because naming the beast makes you squeamish. Targeted voter suppression by the GOP has become so normalized that in a recent(ish) battle over election maps that clearly sought to minimize the political power of African American voters, GOP operates defended themselves from charges of racial bias by saying they weren't restricting voters because they're Black, but rather because they vote Democrat. This is election rigging, by a fascist regime, headed up by a would-be King who keeps musing about violating the Constitution to seek a third term, and it's probably time to be honest with ourselves about what that actually means - an attempt to permanently install the US Republican brand of fascism in our society by preventing free and fair elections (such as those exist, in America.)
I mean let's cut the crap here for a second okay? The Save Act specifically targets voter registrations drives because the fascist GOP is openly arguing that registering people to vote, is somehow rigging elections. Let that sink in for a minute folks; a fascist regime is trying to rig elections through nationalized voter suppression because, and they essentially admit this, if everyone gets to vote they might lose power. The fact that this type of thinking and rhetoric is considered "normal" for the right wing party in America doesn't prove these guys aren't fascist, just that America has been embracing, normalizing, and ignoring fascism for a very long time before Donald Trump ran for office.
Two days ago, at the Treasury Department, Rep. Maxwell Frost asked a crowd of his Congressional colleagues and hundreds of protesters: "Are we the minority or are we the opposition?" He spoke to @TeenVogue about taking on Trump, and what he's willing to risk to obstruct the new administration.
Hooray! It’s Friday! We made it! And we made this #NewstodonFriday thread too, with a dash of science, a soupçon of tech, the inevitable slug of politics, and a spoonful of sweet stories to make the medicine go down. All the newsrooms featured here are independent and have their own active fediverse accounts. Please follow them, click on the stories, boost them, subscribe, donate and otherwise support if you can.
The U.S. Constitution gives Congress sole authority over the federal budget, but in a 2023 campaign video, Donald Trump said he has a plan to circumvent that.
@ProPublica looks at what would happen if Trump asserted a power to kill congressionally approved programs, the Nixon-era law he would be contravening, and how a similar power grab over military aid to Ukraine led to his first impeachment.
If you are pro-Palestine, U.S. Congress is gunning for you. New legis... ( video.mondoweiss.net )
If you are pro-Palestine, U.S. Congress is gunning for you. New legislation takes aim at those who support Palestinian freedom and liberation, under the guise of "combatting antisemitism." Video by @jamesgetspolitical #USCongress #HouseOfRepresentatives #Biden #BidenAdministration #Antisemitism #Zionism #AIPAC #IsraelLobby #ADL ...
Why was a known antisemite grilling Ivy League University presidents ... ( video.mondoweiss.net )
Why was a known antisemite grilling Ivy League University presidents about...antisemitism? If Congresswoman Elise Stefanik and her colleagues are so concerned about antisemitism, maybe they should take a look in the mirror before trying to villainize protest chants. #USCongress #EliseStefanik #antisemitism #freepalestine ...
"It is actually a more dangerous time for Arabs and Muslims now in th... ( video.mondoweiss.net )
"It is actually a more dangerous time for Arabs and Muslims now in this country than it was post-9/11." According to Abed Ayoub, the national director of The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) , we are in an era of McCarthyite silence and repression when it comes to the support of Palestine in the U.S. #Palestine ...