By the end of 2028, experts expect somewhere between 6,500 to 7,000 data centers scattered across America.

For decades, the nations aging electrical grid has had billions of dollars poured into it under fear of nationwide blackouts.

Just as the country is pelted by severe storms leaving millions of families without power, a grandfathered newspaper quietly drops an ominous warning to Americans that an 18-month+ long blackout is imminent, as the electric grid is on the brink of total, catastrophic collapse.

Now nuclear safety regulations that stood for decades are being dismantled to supply more power to data centers. Leaving the people who stand to profit from the rapid creation of nuclear reactors determining what is safe as existing nuclear safety panels are gutted.

This leaves us asking — are we supposed to blindly trust that these for-profit entities will never sacrifice public safety for financial gain?

And who exactly is financially gaining?

AN 18-MONTH LONG NATIONWIDE BLACKOUT?

On August 18th, 2026, the New York Times posted an article titled, “The Blackout That Could Devastate America” with excruciating detail on how a coordinated attack on America’s aging power grid would plunge the U.S. into darkness for 18+ months.

The article went far beyond saying the grid could be attacked — much like the German power grid was this month — instead it gives specifics.

It lists which nine “critical substations” would need to be targeted, which physical components to target, and how to recognize them visually, and even walks through a previous grid attack in detail, including how the perpetrators carried it out, escaped before police understood what had happened, and remain unidentified to this day.

The timing of this report aligns with several systematic failures of American water and power critical infrastructure — from severe weather to cyberattacks — that have directly affected millions of people.

While this happens, Cuba is still facing nationwide blackouts and electric rationing. The crisis isn’t a grid failure; the Cuban government has no choice but to deliberately ration power as it can’t secure enough fuel to keep its thermoelectric power plants running as the U.S. continues its oil blockade and physically intercept Venezuelan tankers headed for the island.

The majority of oil used by Cuba (61%) comes from Venezuela. EIA data for the week ending August 21, 2026, show the United States importing 662,000 barrels of Venezuelan crude every day. Their access to life-sustaining electricity is being actively circumvented by the US government.

While the U.S. government leaves over 10 million people in the dark, they spend more and more time telling Americans just how vulnerable the water and power infrastructure of this country is, and how seriously they should fear someone attacking it.

On July 30th, 2026, an official EPA and FBI report was released detailing how Iranian “malicious cyber actors” were coordinating cyberattacks against water and wastewater infrastructure in several U.S. states.

The Guardian reported that a U.K. power plant was targeted and temporarily disrupted because of the countries connections to the U.S.

Americans didn’t exactly need much help imagining what a prolonged power outage might look like. This all occurred as millions of families attempting to recover from a series of catastrophic storms that hit the Midwest over a two-week period, causing severe flooding, widespread damage, and multi-day power and water outages across several states.

Some of the citizens were the residents of Gary, Indiana, who reported that for the first 6 days following the storms they were left in a total blackout. They had no access to cell towers, or even emergency services.

One woman reported that after six days she was finally able to use her cell phone again; that’s when she’d realized no one was talking about Gary.

At all.

In Gary, Indiana, entire neighborhoods lacked access to power and clean water for over 2 weeks. As of August 24, 2026, resident and NIPSCO reports show that these necessary-for-life services have not yet been restored to over 9,000 families.

Eight data centers are being built in or in the vicinity of Gary, Indiana, a predominantly (80%) Black city where residents report being hit with astronomically high NIPSCO power bills after having spent weeks without power.

When you look at the entire picture, every event and report results in fear. Fear of an 18-month-plus energy crisis affecting millions of Americans, and when you are left days-to-weeks without power or clean water you know just how miserable it is.

A true total power grid failure would destroy the ability to store fresh food, or medications like insulin.

It would also hurt the water infrastructure, just as it did in Gary.

Treatment plants, local distribution pumps, and booster stations require continuous electricity to maintain pressure to push clean water into the city.

Cellular towers would lose power, and with cell towers down, you would be completely cut off. This would leave families with no way to contact from emergency services or family.

Hospitals would be very limited in what care they could provide. They would run primarily on generators, which only go so far. Ultimately, people would die as a result… starting with Americas more vulnerable populations.

When an established, trusted newspaper warns of a seemingly imminent blackout while the Trump’s federal agencies announce outsider attacks on American utilities paints a frightening picture.

But what’s underneath that picture?

DEREGULATED NUCLEAR ENERGY

On May 23, 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump signed not one, but four — 14299 , 14300, 14301, & 14302 — executive orders labeling the U.S. power grid as a national security issue.

On that day, Trump did far more than drag a jumbo Sharpie across yet another pre-written executive order. He deregulated nuclear safety and effectively handed all regulatory power over to the people who stand to profit from it most.

The second order he signed, “Deploying Advanced Nuclear Reactor Technologies for National Security” begins with a statement: “The United States faces a critical national security imperative to ensure a resilient, secure, and reliable energy supply for critical defense facilities.”

“A national security imperative.”

This EO effectively guts nuclear safety in America under the claim that existing nuclear safety protocols through the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) are a product of unnecessary overreach that need discarded.

The safety committee that has historically evaluated reactors for safety only are now being told to weigh the “economic benefit” of it. Benefit to whom, exactly?

The NRC is now placed on an 18 month time limit to approve any reactor, and they’re punished if they take longer thus paving the way for rapid-approval nuclear facilities.

It also cuts federal staffing of The Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards (ACRS) a panel of independent scientists and engineers created by Congress in the Atomic Energy Act of 1954.

The ACRS panel are the first-liners of nuclear safety in America.

The way it works is that before the NRC approves a reactor, this panel reviews the safety case and tells the NRC commissioners whether the design is safe.

The group has done this for every single nuclear reactor that exists in America today. It cuts membership to the "minimum necessary," and restricts what the panel is allowed to review. The EO limits reviews to issues that are "unique, novel and noteworthy."

It doesn’t specify what qualifies as “unique, novel and noteworthy.”

And for smaller nuclear reactors — including those intended for military bases under Executive Order 14299 — the NRC is effectively told not to look too closely if the military or Department of Energy has already ‘checked’ the work leaving safety checks to dwindle down to a standardized government form.

And they’re not even pretending this isn’t about AI.

The EO goes onto explicitly say, “Advanced computing infrastructure for artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities and other mission capability resources at military and national security installations and national laboratories demands reliable, high-density power sources that cannot be disrupted by external threats or grid failures.”

Why? because AI can’t be hindered by the American power grid on its last leg that’s concurrently facing active damaged from the excessive power consumption by data centers.

Hyperscale AI data centers are using 2.4 million kWh or more of daily power. As of 2025, the U.S. contained 50% of all hyperscale AI data centers.

It’s strange that it took a corporations need for a real solution, as the billions we’ve poured into the grid under so many acts did so little.

But now that there is more money to be made, and these billionaires are rushing to see which company gets control of most of our power grid? Well, now things are different.

When American’s were trying to stay cool in the heat, the data centers were, too. If the AI semiconductor chips used in data centers get above 113 Fahrenheit, they risk frying and losing the data. And data centers have thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands of them, lined up in rows.

So, when as these hyperscale AI data centers needed to stay cool, this put massive pressure on the PJM power grid causing outages and power surges across several states.

Which begs the question — is the power grid on its last leg — or would we be just fine without billionaires.

Bloomberg reports that data centers could consume a staggering 34% of PJM’s generated power by 2030, with their total energy appetite quadrupling by 2035. Compounding this pressure, a 2026 NEMA study reveals that total U.S. electricity demand will surge by 55% by 2050.

As data centers use more energy for their typical data center operations and to meet AI requests, they consume larger amounts of water to cool their processor chips, so as to avoid overheating and potential damage.

But hey, it’s a national security imperative, and it’s for your economic benefit. And if you don’t want one in your backyard? The President of the United States says you’re going to be “backwards and poor.”

I’ll let you in on a secret.

Nearly once a decade, America undergoes some form of an energy crisis with someone, somewhere, making money from your fears.

Fear has been a marketing tactic for decades — research shows that someone who’s afraid is more likely to accept whatever is presented as a solution. For the salesman, that could be a product, and for the government, a policy.

In the 1970s, an ‘oil crisis’ sent prices soaring after the U.S. backed Israel in the Yom Kippur War.

At the time, global oil supply fell by about 4%, but Americans panicked and emptied gas stations, resulting in the price of a single barrel of oil increasing by up to 400% in some places.

The economic shock waves that followed helped to create the conditions of the two-year recession that followed. Now, in 2026, we can see history repeat itself following the start of the U.S-Israel attacks on Iran: Chevron’s earnings increased from about $2.4 billion to $12.07 billion in roughly a year, a massive increase of ~385% for the oil giant.

In one report from Cambridge University economists reflect on how electric and oil price shocks are almost always followed by some degree of nationwide financial hardship for working class families.

It continued throughout the decades, and by the 2000s, we saw the California electricity crisis, where the Texas conglomerate Enron made billions by exploiting the deregulated markets. When the 2008 financial crisis hit America, the government handed out a “stimulus package,” formally known as American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA).

This ARRA included billions of dollars for the Smart Grid Investment Grant program with the explicit purpose of fixing and improving America’s power grid that’s reportedly able to lurch us into 2-years of darkness at any moment.

We have to ask ourselves who benefits the most when we’re made to feel helpless?

FOLLOW. THE. MONEY.

The entire idea of power grid blackout can be traced back to the first Trump administration’s 2018 report titled “Surviving a Catastrophic Power Outage” that was prepared for the Trump by the National Infrastructure Advisory Council (NIAC).

The 2018 report was written by several authors representing a very specific collection of interests: electric utilities, grid operators like PJM, nuclear energy, defense manufacturing, water companies, the Department of Homeland Security, the TSA, and a counterterrorism advisor.

Oh, and one public health official, of course.

This author list includes many names, but one of the most notable being William Fehrman, then CEO of Berkshire Hathaway Energy, and now the President and CEO of American Electric Power (AEP). He is also chairman of the AEP board.

AEP operates utilities for over 5.1 million people across 11 states alone.

When Fehrman took his new role in 2024, AEP began to actively pursue new small reactors in Indiana and Virginia, has created a dedicated Nuclear Development organization with Alicia Knapp as the head, and is in the early-site-permit process for advanced nuclear.

Fehrman also currently sits on the boards of both the Nuclear Energy Institute and Nuclear Electric Insurance Limited. Fehrman is the highest-paid utility CEO in America.

Of the many dystopian aspects of the report was the idea government-controlled “community enclaves” around fragmented power grid remains.

Interestingly, under the 2009 Smart Grid Program, utility companies were required to match federal grant money dollar for dollar. If the government put up $1, the utility had to put up $1 of its own. And suddenly, when upgrading the grid required corporations to actually spend some of their own money, the enthusiasm for federal funding looked a little different.

According to the Department of Energy, the government and electric industry ultimately invested about $9.5 billion across 99 cost-shared Smart Grid projects, leading to an average corporate investment of $100M.

So, billions of dollars have already been poured into modernizing this grid.

And yet, nearly two decades later, the same country is being told that its electrical infrastructure is so vulnerable that nine substations could theoretically plunge America into darkness for more than a year.

And among the people circling that industry are billionaires like Peter Thiel, people who can make more money in a day than most Americans will ever see in a lifetime.

In April 2025, General Matter publicly launched after being developed through funds from Founders Fund, the venture-capital firm of Peter Thiel.More specifically, General Matter was founded using this money by Scott Nolan, who was already a partner at Founders Fund and previously worked as an engineer at SpaceX.

The same month that Founders Fund led a $50 million investment in General Matter, Peter Thiel joined the company’s board of directors.

By August 2025 — just four months later — the U.S. Department of Energy gave General Matter a for approximately 100 acres of federally owned land at the former Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Kentucky where the company plans to build a $1.5 billion uranium enrichment facility.

Built in the early 1950s, it was a massive gaseous diffusion facility that enriched uranium for America's nuclear weapons and later for commercial nuclear energy reactor.

Decades of operations left radioactive and chemical contamination in the soil and groundwater, along with contaminated buildings, equipment, and massive quantities of depleted uranium. The federal government estimates cleanup of the site will continue for decades, and will cost Americans $17 billion dollars.

American taxpayers are still paying to clean up environmental damage from the former enrichment plant while the DOE leases that same land to General Matter to build another $1.5 billion uranium-enrichment facility.

We need to stop looking at each of these events as seperate.

The contaminated nuclear site, the billion-dollar federal contracts, the gutted safety regulations, the exploding number of data centers, the warnings of catastrophic grid failure and the sudden push of America needing enormous amounts of new power generation ASAP are all happening at the same time, almost in-sync.

What exactly requires so much power that decades-old regulatory and safety rules suddenly became disposable? And who is this going to harm in the end? Not the people profiting from it. People like Peter Thiel and his friends — they have remote housing and underground bunkers after all.

Look at the whole picture — the contracts, the announcements, the data — together this paints something consistent with manufactured panic over grid failure.

Panic that functions as necessary pretext to speedily manufacture the enormous amounts of deregulated nuclear energy required to build Americas permanent digital prison through data centers.

All that data they collect on us had to be stored somewhere, right?

A government obsessed with tracking your every movement through Flock cameras, federal fusion centers, and AI algorithms never intended to let the lights go out.

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Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

On April 10th, 2025, Ohio Republican David Joyce introduced a bill (HR 2853) dubbed the ‘Combating Organized Retail Crime Act’ (CORCA). The bill co-sponsored by Senator Chuck Grassley, a 92-year-old Senator from a town with a population of nearly 500 in Iowa.

Over a year later, on May 12th, 2026, CORCA passed the house. Now it sits in Grassley’s hands in the U.S. Senate. And soon, it could be quietly amended into the National Defense Authorization Act Bill, commonly known as the military budget bill, for the coming year.

The stated purpose of the bill is to, “target organized retail crime.”

But look beyond the cover, and what you'll find is a corporate-state surveillance merger that hands ICE, DHS, DOJ, DEA, and even the Secret Service direct access to retailers' live CCTV feeds, FLOCK camera data, and even store-wide facial recognition programs. At the heart of it would be a physical facility. A fusion center where retailers sit at the same table as ICE agents.

American-Made Cronyism

On November 18th, 2025, over 20 corporations and 69 trade organizations representing hundreds of businesses sent a letter to Congress urging the passage of CORCA. A trade organization sounds nice. It even works a lot like a union. But the difference is, it's a corporation representing other corporations. Never the people who work for them.

It’s a pseudo-polite way to add a layer of obscurity and pull the wool over the eyes. When people read this letter, they will not find Walmart, Target, Macy’s, Levi Strauss, Dick’s Sporting Goods, or BJ’s Wholesale Club. No, instead they’ll see the National Retail Federation (NRF) that represents these organizations and hundreds of other corporate proprietors.

The Board of Directors of the National Retail Federation includes John Furner, President and CEO of Walmart, and Bob Eddy, President and CEO of BJ's Wholesale Club. Walmart donated $150,000 to Donald Trump’s 2025 inaugural committee.

The timeline of executive appointments within the National Retail Federation requires a deeper look when viewed next to the political financial activity of the corporations they represent.

Amazon’s Doug Herrington, Worldwide Amazon Stores CEO, joined the NRF board in January 2025. One year later, Target CEO Michael Fiddelke followed. Then the subsequent routing of $1 million to the 2025 inaugural fund by both Amazon and Target. Walmart donated $150,000 to Donald Trump’s 2025 inaugural committee. Donor records indicate Target’s donation was the first in over ten years. All three donors are NRF members.

Some of the other million dollar inaugural donors include: McDonald’s, Pfizer, Meta, Delta, Visa, and United Airlines. Overall, the Trump-Vance inaugural committee raised a record $239 million with $161 million coming directly from corporations.

A conglomerate of corporate syndicates capitulating to cronyism

However, to truly understand the scope of this, one must look at the interlocking networks behind these corporate monopolies. The executives at the helm of Walmart, Target, and Amazon have not simply limited their influence to bankrolling inaugural committees or occupying board seats at the National Retail Federation (NRF).

The reality is much more insidious.

The NRF is completely run by these massive monopolies, and they’re the ones who not only initially lobbied for the bill, but whose statistics are being cited as statistical fact for Congressional justification.

You’re reading that exactly right. An examination of the prior 2023 legislation for CORCA reveals reveals data laundering operates through congressional levels.

When Sen. Chuck Grassley and Rep. David Joyce drafted the updated 2025 version of CORCA, they did not rely on independent, third-party crime data to justify it but rather statistics that had come from the NRF themselves. The previous legislation claimed the industry had ‘lost $720,000 for every $1 billion in sales during the 2019 fiscal year.’

The figure was not the product of independent economic analysis, forensic accounting, or audited law enforcement records. Instead, the data came entirely from a 2020 NRF provided questionnaire distributed to senior loss prevention and security executives across 164 retail brands who’d been asked to estimate their shoplifting rates.

The White House using data laundering to engineer policy is not limited to CORCA. Manipulated think tank data from The Center for Immigration Studies, a designated hate group going back to 1985, is frequently cited as a factual verdict against immigrants, through people like Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem.

The NRF has been wrong before, giving statistics that they later walked back. The National Retail Federation claimed that $45 billion dollars a year was lost to retail left. The real number was closer to $5 billion. NRF ONLY walked it back in December 2023 after a reporter checked their math finding that the actual figure was less than 1/10th of what they claimed.

And remember, that the NRF is only one of 69 massive retail syndicates who signed that congressional plea urging speedy passage of CORCA:

This referenced letter to congress is more than a routine appeal to corporate America. It showcases how thousands of American corporations are ready and willing to align with the Trump administration’s growing surveillance state.

Some of the other trade organizations named reportedly represent companies such as Procter and Gamble, Nike, Crocs, FedEx. Chanel, The Estée Lauder Companies (Maker of MAC, Clinique, Tom Ford Beauty), and more.

This is not the first time Chuck Grassley has tried introducing something like this. In 2023, he and Senator Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV) co-sponsored a nearly identical bill — S. 140 — that ultimately failed.

It goes further than this. Some of the things named in the bill are already occurring in America.

The ACLU recently discovered that retailers are secretly using facial recognition programs in their stores. Wegmans, a grocer with over 114 stores across nine states, admits to using facial recognition programs to find “persons on interest” that they later turnover to law enforcement. Those on the other side of the camera have no idea.

Those Who Fail to Learn from History…

One can’t help but ponder just how long before the CEOs of these companies learn the same lesson as Fritz Thyssen, a credulous man whose capital was commandeered by the Nazi party?

Thyssen was so intertwined with the Nazi’s that in the immediate aftermath of WW2 he was forced to undergo “Denazification” training.

During the rise of the Nazi Germany, Thyssen funded the Nazi Party using money derived from his company, Vereinigte Stahlwerke AG. And his investment paid off. The Nazis crushed unions, purchased his steel, and he became a much wealthier man. It was a win-win.

Or at least that’s what he thought.

In 1938, Thyssen spoke out against the ongoing genocide, and in the blink of an eye his steel empire was snatched from under him. He ended up political prisoner of his own making, spending the remainder of the war in concentration camps (including Sachsenhausen and Dachau) as a high-profile captive of the SS, while the state seized his wealth.

When it comes to increased digital surveillance technology, this grocery behemoth is just one of many suits in the plutocratic sea. Whole Foods, another grocery titan has recently come under fire for using biometric surveillance on shoppers in New York.

In 2023, the Federal Trade Commission banned pharmaceutical giant Rite Aid from using facial recognition tech as their AI would not stop incorrectly identifying thousands of customers, primarily women and people of color, as shoplifters. Rite Aid was made aware of this problem, but store employees were instructed to act on the automated alerts leading to customer harassment and fallacious calls to the police.

In America, dozens innocent people have been arrested after artificial intelligence misidentified them. The concept isn’t theoretical. It’s becomes so much of a problem over 20 cities have banned facial recognition tech in law enforcement.

What does it look like to be profiled by facial recognition?

Police have used facial recognition for many years. And they’ve used it knowing it’s incorrect “96% of the time.”

In 2018, an unknown individual took several luxury watches from the Shinola Corporation in Detroit. When the company handed Michigan State Police the choppy CCTV footage, it was run against 41 million driver’s licenses and ID photos held the Michigan Department of State’s facial recognition database. The automated biometric identification system looked at an old, expired driver’s license photo of Robert Williams and incorrectly identified him as the culprit.

The DataWorks Plus AI had warned the officers that the poor quality video provided by the retailer made it hard to identify, and it couldn’t be certain if it was Williams, but the Michigan State Police made the decision to ignore this and acted anyway.

They had placed Williams photo among a six others and told security guard make his best guess at which photo was the person he saw on the grainy security footage. The security guard never witnessed the theft in person. He was going off the same degraded CCTV footage it had been flagged as determined by tech itself.

When questioned about this Police Chief James Craig admitted the technology almost never returns match and almost always misidentifies people. His exact framing. He inadvertently admitted that the software would misidentify someone 96 percent of the time.

The police knew that the AI was misidentifying people and still Williams got a call at work telling him to turn himself in, assumed it was a joke, then came home to find police waiting. They pulled in behind his car and blocked him in the driveway. He was arrested in front of his wife and daughters. He was locked behind concrete walls and metal bars — a cell packed with other inmates — where he was wrongfully held by Detroit police for over 30 hours.

When it had came out that he couldn't have been at the store, since he was 24 miles away driving home from work, their case fell apart. If Robert hadn't had that alibi, what could have happened?

After it was proven that Robert Williams was innocent, he didn’t want anything from the department other than an apology. Well the Detroit Police Department refused him that, the ACLU sued the Detroit Police Department on behalf of Williams’ wrongful arrest. They sued under Section 1983, the federal civil rights statute. It led to a settlement in Mr. Williams favor.

Federal agents aren’t covered under Section 1983.

Section 1983 is written in a way that exempts them. That’s why in 1971, a federal lawsuit (Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents of Federal Bureau of Narcotics) made it legal to sue federal agents.

But SCOTUS has repeatedly weakened the Biven’s precedent over time. The ruling can only be used specifically in regards to a warrantless home search and unreasonable seizure by line-level narcotics agents under the Fourth Amendment.

Some agencies, like ICE, Bivens does not apply to at all. The Court ruled in Egbert v. Boule (2022) that ICE and similar agencies have "national security" implications and their own internal grievance procedures, the courts cannot interfere.

You can also only sue the individual agent, never the FBI, DEA, or BOP as an organization under FDIC vs Meyer (1994). And if a prison — much like the ICE detention centers — is run by a private contractor like GEO Group or CoreCivic those guards cannot be sued under Bivens according to Minneci v. Pollard (2012).

Over 90% of ICE detention centers are run by private contractors.

In a modern world, one should consider how facial recognition and biometric programs feed into predictive policing programs like Palantir's Gotham, which was 'gifted' to the New Orleans police (among other police departments in different cities) in 2012. Since the software was a 'gift' and not purchased, NOLA PD skirted the law, bypassing regulatory rules to use it on the people of New Orleans. Without notice.

Palantir told police that their program, Gotham, could identify people at ‘high risk’ of committing or falling victim to gun violence by analyzing police reports, social media, and other databases, including jailhouse phone logs. They claimed it used a social network analysis and it would map relationships, look at who you connect with, and assign a risk score to any person in that network. This over a decade ago in 2012.

The CORCA bill would allow ICE, among other organizations, to access data from thousands of retailers with millions of stores across America. Data that would likely be fed into Palantir’s ImmigrationOS, the custom-built AI surveillance program built for ICE using U.S. taxpayer dollars.

What CORCA Bill Actually Says:

This bill classifies organized retail theft as a predicate offense under federal money laundering laws, which permits criminal forfeiture of seized illegal profits and property.

“Predicate” means the original charge can become the doorway to something much bigger. If prosecutors can later produce enough “evidence” to frame an action as part of a broader organized movement, they can start adding on felony charges like money laundering, racketeering, and terrorism.

It also gives them access to expanded powers, such as forfeiture, wiretaps, asset seizures, transaction monitoring, bank subpoenas, and the ability to invoke interstate‑commerce jurisdiction all under the umbrella of an ongoing investigation. This bill also allows unrelated acts can be combined into a single “organized crime” case.

The Trump administration has increasingly tried to portray between leftist activism as organized terrorism, using the term “ANTIFA,” — which is a merger of the words anti-fascist — as though it were a centralized terror organization.

Once political dissent is framed as participation in an organized extremist movement, the act of filing conspiracy, racketeering, financial crimes, and terrorism charges becomes probable. The predicate system has been used against union workers and activists for decades. This is just another tool to do so.

And it continues to happen today. This same approach was used to justify a 30-year prison sentence for Daniel “Des” Sanchez Estrada, a Texas tattoo artist, who the DOJ portrayed as part of an ‘ANTIFA’ terrorist cell after he moved a box of leftist zines from his home into his car in Prairieland, Texas.

What would look like possession of political literature to the average person was instead folded into a much larger ‘terrorism’ narrative by the Trump Administration. Estrada was one of several arrests made under the national security memo NSPM‑7, signed by Donald Trump in 2025. If someone sells political literature, patches, or protest materials online, an aggressive interpretation could treat them as part of a network.

When DHS, FBI, ICE, CBP, USPIS, ATF, and DEA share intelligence, investigations tend to extend beyond the stated intent. After 9/11, the United States created fusion centers. These centers were originally marketed as a tool of targeting organized crime, such as drug cartels or terrorists.

Between the CORCA bill, Flock Cameras and other automated license plate readers, invasive Graphite spyware contracted by the ICE, and real-time crime centers (RTCC) in places like Atlanta, Detroit, Chicago, and NYC that integrate all of this data.

Facial‑recognition systems exist already in places that scrape billions of images from the open web and place them into law‑enforcement databases, sold as a way to “identify violent offenders” but frequently used in day-to-day investigations.

• There are tools like PredPol that use “risk terrain modeling” to create “crime prevention analytics.”

• Social‑media surveillance tools like Dataminr, ShadowDragon, and Babel Street that scan social media posts, comments, and connections to flag “emerging threats,” of protests or visible political dissent.

• Stingrays mimic cellphone towers to convince your phone to connect so the police can mine metadata.

All without a warrant. Not a single piece of paper signed by a judge. Now they're building fusion centers to sweep it all up, and they're selling it as 'shoplifting.’

Originally justified after 9/11 under the guise of counterterrorism that are now used by local police departments with limited oversight. Historically, predicate cases we led to individuals having their bank account seized without ever being charged with a crime. This may not be the listed intent of the CORCA bill it’s structurally possible — even probable since it’s happened many times before.

We can see a perfect example of this in the story of the Hirsch brothers.

In 2014, three brothers who had spent 27 years running a snack and candy distribution business in Ronkonkoma, New York saw their entire operating account seized for alleged “structuring,” despite never being charged with any underlying crime. It took an incredibly publicized lawsuit to for the federal government to return the wrongfully seized $446,651.11.

That October, the IRS stated they would no longer seize money on “structuring” grounds unless agents believed the funds were tied to a crime. Just a few months later, in March 2015, the Department of Justice followed with their own policy change.

But beneath their language of reform, nothing in the law itself had actually ever changed. These were agency promises, not statutory limits. These internal guidelines can be rewritten, reversed, or ignored with a single memo being released telling you otherwise. The underlying authority remains exactly where it had always been.

Just look at the history, you can’t ignore what’s happening now. Once the tools exist, prosecutors skirt the edges, stretch ambiguous definitions, and bend the law to their will. The definition of a criminal changes until it fits whoever the government wants to target. Intentionally ambiguous.

And with the coup of the Department of Justice — as planned in Project 2025 — we must remain vigilant. If the architecture is already in place, and the precedent already established, what next?

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The Trump Administration told us Iran was so close creating nuclear bombs, and that they would kill us if they had a chance. That they’d been enriching uranium. It’s the same thing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been repeating for over 30 years.

February 2026 — without a formal Congressional declaration of war — the U.S., alongside the Israeli military, scattered 900 bombs over Iranian cities.

For those in Iran, the sky began to fall between 7:00 and 9:45 on a Saturday morning, Tehran time. In Iran, Saturday starts the week. So for the people who live there, their workweek was just starting, schools hallways filled with friends and stories of the weekend.

I want you to put yourself in their shoes. You’re driving to work, the light is stuck on red and you’re mindlessly thinking about the upcoming day. Everything goes dark, and you wake up finding yourself trapped under a crumbling building, pain shooting through your lungs with each breath.

On day one, some of the very first victims of the undeclared war were children. The U.S. unleashed an airstrike on the Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab, Iran, killing over 150 people, including 120 children. Most of the deaths were young girls between the ages of 7 and 12.

When your adolescent, your world is small. Your biggest concerns are recess and homework. You don’t think about geopolitics, military strategy or corporate profit margins. Hell, you don’t even know what most of those words mean.

Initially, the United States denied having anything to do with this. On social media and news networks, we were told that it was a failed Iranian bomb that had fallen back on the school. The truth later came out that it did, in fact, come from the United States. Video analysis, open-source satellite mapping, and recovered munition fragments confirmed that the school was hit by BGM-109 Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles.

Of the countries involved, these precision-guided missiles only come from the U.S. Navy

This bombing was made possible by RTX Corp (Raytheon) who is the primary manufacturer of the BGM-109 Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles used to decimate the children’s school. These missiles were originally designed and produced in the 1970s by General Dynamics, and production was later shared with and eventually taken over by McDonnell Douglas, before ultimately becoming a RTX Corp (Raytheon) program.

Back in the 1970s, Tomahawk missiles were clunky, hard to use, and expensive. Now they’re loaded with technology to make sure they hit their intended targets with absolute precision. These missiles each have backup after backup built into them including satellite navigation, motion tracking sensors, terrain scanning radar, and target confirming cameras all working together so nothing throws them off course. The newer, more expensive models can be redirected mid-flight.

Just one Tomahawk missile costs approximately between $2.2 to 4 million dollars to produce.

6 months ago, RTX (Raytheon) announced a 5-year agreement with the Department of Defense (‘War’) to drastically scale up Tomahawk production to more than 1,000 missiles per year. Every year we’re looking at billions of tax-payer dollars going to instruments of global destruction and death.

A video of the aftermath of the U.S. bombing on the Minab School in Iran on February 28, 2026. Sourced from the Guardian.

The defense contractors and Wall Street capitalists funding these missiles just bought another yacht, or paid off another politician. But for the families? It meant the permanent devastation of losing a child.

Those girls will never get the chance to grow up, to graduate, fall in love, build careers, or become mothers themselves. Their stories ended before their lives had really begun.

And somewhere, thousands of miles away, the people who authorized these bombs will never bother to know any their names. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and United States President Donald Trump won’t learn their names.

And neither will the corporations who got richer from it all: Chevron, ExxonOil, Saudi Aramco, Shell, Lockheed Martin, RTX Corp (formerly Raytheon), Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, and Palantir. Among many others.

The U.S. is Spending Billions on Bombs

Despite the fact that sitting U.S. President Donald Trump campaigned on “no wars,” the United States military is seeing explosive growth. Structural, financial and industrial expansion Americans haven’t witnessed since the historical Cold War.

They’re calling it the Arsenal of Freedom, a surging defense mobilization has already unlocked billions of dollars in fresh government contracts and corporate expansions. The goal to replenish the United States’ missile arsenal.

The initial push for expansion came from the Pentagon, and now corporations that profit from war—including RTX (Raytheon), Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Oracle, Palantir, and Anduril Industries—are proud to announce they are participating in the Arsenal of Freedom.

On September 5th, 2025, exactly 223 days after Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth took the helm, Donald Trump signed an executive order authorizing the use of "Department of War" as a secondary title for the Department of Defense. The rebrand itself left US taxpayers footing the costs of an estimated $10 million.

Here’s some history: Back in 1947, the National Security Act renamed the Department of War to the National Military Establishment (NME) as part of an effort to merge the Department of War and Department of the Navy together. Prior to the merger, they were separate cabinet-level departments. In 1949, they changed the name again—from the National Military Establishment (NME) to the Department of Defense—because they realized NME sounds like enemy. The Department of Defense and their trillion-dollar budget want you know they’re not the enemy; they’re protecting you. Don’t pay any attention to the fact they failed every single audit they’ve ever had.

By November 2025, the now re-branded Department of Defense quietly posted a 39-page document titled “Acquisition Transformation Strategy” launching their military augmentation plan and the Arsenal of Freedom.

The United States government orchestrated the Arsenal Freedom Initiative based on the heavy depletion of the US missile arsenal. Over the last few decades, the United States has manufactured thousands upon thousands of missiles.

So what happened to them all? These million dollar missiles don’t sit in a warehouse. They get sold and shipped overseas through the foreign military sales (FMS) program. A program is brokered by the Pentagon, with oversight coming from the Secretary of State. Under the second Trump administration, oversight of the FMS program comes from Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

The US government sells missiles, jets, tanks, artillery shells, rockets, and even nuclear-powered submarines to foreign countries from Saudi Arabia to Germany.

The profits from these sales are paid directly to the defense contractors who manufactured the weaponry, creating an on-going cycle of profitable conditions. When the arsenal is empty, it needs to be replenished. The same contractors are given the contracts to make more.

But it isn’t just sales to foreign governments depleting the American missile arsenal. It’s the president and his convoluted idea of charity.

Using the “presidential drawdown authority” loophole, the executive branch has bypassed all congressional oversight to funnel domestic military stockpiles to foreign countries. In recent times, the U.S. has even begun pulling the trigger themselves themselves.

When Israel and the United States dropped 900 bombs over the Iranian skies, Iran fired back. Over 650 missiles were flew through the skies to Israel leading to massive structural damage in places like Tel Aviv. In response, the United States used 80% of its interceptor missile arsenal — both THAAD and Patriot interceptors — to protect Israel from further attacks.

US officials say the Iran war is to blame for this shortage. And while technically, it is because of the Iran war. They frame the war as a necessary means to protect Americans.

Meanwhile, the American arsenal was systematically liquidated to service a client state whose leader has spent more than thirty years relentlessly lobbying Western governments to wage a kinetic war against Iran. America gutted their arsenal to execute the decades-old geopolitical obsession of a foreign prime minister.

The United States domestic defense grids have been left compromised by these actions. Americans are not any safer because of it. And now the war profiteering networks have been instructed to churn out missiles, both — offensive and defensive — as quickly as possible. Or else.

Donald Trump signed an executive order in January warning defense contractors that are ‘underperforming’ in missile production, they’ll be punishing by being prohibited from buying their own stock to inflate its value and enrich shareholders. Wall Street calls it a buyback.

In both March and June 2026, Donald Trump and senior government officials hosted executives and representatives from some of the world’s largest defense contractors at the White House. BAE Systems, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, RTX, Honeywell, and L3Harris. Both meetings were to address the speed at which the missiles were being pumped out. And what the U.S. government could do to ensure it happened.

Between January 2025 and August 2026, the Pentagon funneled an astronomical $108.36 billion in major new and expanded mega-contracts directly into the hands of Lockheed Martin, RTX, and Northrop Grumman. Prior to this 19-month surge, these three contractors operated at a combined baseline of approximately $136.7 billion in annual Department of Defense contract revenue.

Combining their established $136.7 billion annual baseline with these $108.36 billion in new mega-awards pushes the total taxpayer funds funneled into these giants to $245.06 billion.

The ‘arsenal’ will continue to grow under the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) of FY27—the Department of Defense’s budget bill for the upcoming year. They’re requesting $1.15 trillion dollars with $750 billion set aside to expand military manufacturing capabilities and procure weapons.

In official documents from the United State House Armed Services Committee, the Arsenal of Freedom and the massive amount of funding the Pentagon is set to gain is presented similarly to ‘America First’ initiatives. Whilst using the same trickle down economics framework as Ronald Reagan, the congressional committee promises that the expansion will help everyday Americans by bringing the war economy home, sharing the $1.15T payday with smaller corporations that profit from war.

So with the explosion of weapons development, could this theoretically help Americans? While theoretically sound, history has shown us otherwise. Despite the fact that the United States has anti-monopoly laws, legal loopholes and exceptions for the ultra wealthy allow these large corporations a massive level of obscurity.

Many of the ‘small corporations’ that stand to benefit from the $1.15T military budget bill are actually the same handful corporate giants in a trench coat.

This is something obscured from the public eye by using a convoluted corporate infrastructure meant to overwhelm anyone looking at it. This is a tactic used nearly every corporate giant across every industry, and that’s not an exaggeration. Subsidiaries work because they let a parent company wall off risk, taxes, and regulation into separate legal boxes.

The way that it works is that larger corporations like RTX own a handful of smaller companies called subsidiaries. For example, one subsidiary of RTX is privately-owned corporation Solipsys. RTX and Solipsys are the same company. But corporate law allows them to exist as separate legal entities. If you sue one, the other is protected.

In April 2025, the company was rewarded a $182 million contract by the US Navy for infinite access to for Common Aviation Command and Control System software owned by the company. Which actually means RTX received $182 million.

This is just one example of many. Military contracts are not only awarded to the larger, well known companies but also the smaller companies in their network. The structure works like Russian nesting dolls: each company has another inside of it. Sometimes several.

Case in point: HRL Laboratories, LLC. Reportedly, this is a corporate Research and Development Laboratory that specializes in Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

HRL was once owned by RTX (Raytheon), General Motors (GM), and Boeing. Three giant companies, one subsidiary. RTX sold it’s ownership in the company in 2007, resulting in 50/50 ownership between GM and Boeing.

Since its founding, the HRL subsidiary has earned at minimum $340 million dollars in government contracts. Between 2014 and 2023, HRL received no government contracts. Breaking a decade of silence, they secured $37 million in new government contracts in 2024.

A new contract wasn't necessary since the existing one could just be modified, which is exactly what happened.

In January 2026, the Pentagon awarded HRL a massive $14M contract modification, bringing the total value of their on-going contract to $25,951,038. By July 2026, the HRL Labs subsidiary was sold for an undisclosed amount to IBM. Corporate giants trade subsidiary companies much like children in the early 2000s traded Pokemon cards.

This is the information that’s available to us publicly. The next layer isn’t transparent. RTX (Raytheon), Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics. These are all publicly traded corporations making them subject to SEC laws that require them to list their subsidiaries such as HRL labs and Solipsys.

These subsidiaries are separate corporations from their parent companies. More specifically, these subsidiaries are private corporations that are not publicly traded, meaning they are not subject to the SEC’s reporting requirements and have much less oversight.

What this means is that if Solipsys bought five more companies, and each of those companies bought ten companies, all of that information would be private because they are a privately owned corporation. It does not matter that RTX (Raytheon) owns Solipsys as legally Solipsys is its own company. Any profits or subsidiaries owned by Solipsys are not included in the SEC 10-K filings for RTX.

They are intentionally hidden behind corporate privacy laws that allow this structure to exist. The infrastructure of hidden companies is something that corporate giants like Alphabet (Google), CVS, Berkshire Hathaway (Geico), Aetna, PepsiCo (Frito Lays), United Healthcare and many others use. Many of these companies refer to this structure as vertical integration, or a tiered structure.

This means these defense corporations are likely significantly wealthier, with more power and more of a corporate network than most Americans realize.

But in the event that that the militaries ever-growing budget weren’t just trickling down to subsidiaries and the shareholders, it still would not benefit the American people in any meaningful way.

The military-industrial network has existed for over hundred years. It predates the Trump administration by decades. It’s older than Donald Trump himself.

It began with the Department of Navy.

In 1918, Lockheed Martin made their first aircraft sale to the Department of Navy. At the end of World War II, Lockheed was rolling out 23 planes a day and held war contracts worth $2 billion. This was in 1945, $2B at the time is equivalent to $37.11 billion in 2026.

RTX (Raytheon) secured its first major U.S. government defense contract in June 1941. The U.S. Navy paid them to mass-produce the top-secret cavity magnetron vacuum tube and deliver 100 radar systems for Allied naval ships. It was only five short months after RTX scored their first government contract, the United States entered WWII. At the end? RTX (Raytheon) was worth over $150 million.

Northrop Grumman received its first Navy contract to build pontoon boats in 1930. By April of 1931, they were making fighter planes for the Navy. Their aircraft being used in warfare led to being worth $150 million by 1946.

TL;DR? The three largest defense contractors in America — Lockheed Martin, RTX (Raytheon), and Northrop Grumman — began with a Department of Navy contract. All of them are American-based companies. All of them have been around for decades, and the average Americans quality of life is no better for it.

The Oil Giants

The executives of military contractors aren’t the only corporate interests receiving direct access to the White House.

In January 2026, just days after the U.S. military operation targeting Nicolás Maduro, Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum convened executives from at least 17 major oil and gas firms in the White House East Room. They sat comfortably among CEOS and representatives from Exxon, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and Shell among others.

These were friends. Executives who had known Trump for years pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into his campaign and inauguration funds, first in 2017 and then again in 2025.

Oil and gas companies spent an estimated $450 million for Trump during the 2024 campaign cycle. Donald Trump’s 2024 election was funded in part by powerful, ultra wealthy oil corporations. They were making an investment that paid off for many in January 2026.

In this meeting, Trump told oil executives about the “tremendous wealth” in Venezuela and all of the lucrative opportunities just waiting for them down in South America. Venezuela holds the largest oil fields in the world. So Trump made a promise to old friends that 2007 — the year Venezuela nationalized their oil — would never happen again.

The sitting president of the United States guaranteed these multinational oil conglomerates profits and protection by the U.S. Military. The United States military, our children, deployed to act as a taxpayer-funded Pinkerton squad for oil executives.

Days later, the U.S. and the new Venezuelan authorities announced an energy deal where the U.S. would “help” sell Venezuelan oil. Six companies were handpicked and given General License 50 by the US Treasury. This license being the golden ticket allowing the select few to export and refine that Venezuelan crude.

The companies pumping and/or selling Venezuelan crude include BP, Chevron, Shell, Eni. Repsol and Établissements Maurel & Prom SA. As of August 2026, no other companies have been ‘awarded’ a golden ticket.

Since Donald Trump took office in January 2025, Chevron’s profit margins have increased by 400%. Exxon, Shell, and BP followed suit with reports of record profits.

These oil companies are some of the largest spending lobbyists in Washington outside of the military industrial giants.

Chevron gave $9 million to Trump’s 250 PAC. They spent $2 million on his 2025 inauguration. They spent some on his 2017 inauguration. They also spent over $9 million in lobbying the federal government in 2025.

Exxon spent $1 million on his 2025 inauguration. They spent $500,000 on his 2017 inauguration. They also spent over $8.5 million in lobbying the federal government.

Exxon originally left Venezuela in 2007 following Chavez’s nationalization of Venezuelan oil. While they didn’t apply for golden ticket, Exxon CEO Darren Woods publicly declared that he is absolutely interested in Venezuela (both their oil and natural resources) but would like to wait until the ‘political climate’ has calmed down before they colonize again.

Shell Oil and British Petroleum (BP) are corporations based in England. These are massive foreign oil conglomerates that spent a combined $10 million lobbying the America government in 2025. By 2026, they were given a seat at the White House and a special golden ticket for drilling oil from America’s latest regime change.

But 20% of the entire world’s oil supply does travel to the street. It goes to places like China, India, South Korea, and Japan. So when 20% of the entire supply of oil is inaccessible. The price of a barrel of oil goes up. The more scarce a resource, the more a company can make from it.

Before the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran oil was $61 a barrel. By Spring 2026: It had skyrocketed to $118.35. Today it’s sitting around $83.55.

Which is still much higher than it was before Washington decided to ignite yet another foreign conflict that consequently, pads the pockets of their donor conglomerates from the very two industries that lobby the US government more than any other — oil and war.

Most of America’s oil comes from within its own borders. The oil that comes from outside of Americas borders typically comes from from Canada, New Mexico, and now Venezuela. The United States now imports nearly 800,000 gallons of Venezuelan oil daily. None of these supply routes are affected by the closure of the Strait. At all.

The companies have not had any reduction in supply or availability of their oil, and yet American gas prices are surging with the cost of the barrel. Companies like Chevron, Exxon, BP, and Shell are looking at that skyrocketing global price and raising their prices to match it. But remember… they don’t have to deal with the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.

That strait has nothing to do with their oil. Their supply lines are fine. These companies are knowingly and willingly overcharging Americans. You are footing the bill. They are selling you the exact same oil, pumped from the exact same places, and they are demanding you pay the “Middle East War” premium.

They could technically choose to sell it to you at a fair price based on their actual costs. But then they wouldn’t make record-shattering profits we’re seeing today.

After reading about how deep the corruption runs, it’s easy to feel hopeless, aimless, and afraid. These corporations are massive, and they want you to feel small. There are more of us than them, and change starts with you and it starts with me.

The only way out is community & what you can do locally. When you start small, it makes a huge difference because they don’t expect the ‘little man’ to stand up. Show up to city council meetings. Go to the town halls and public forums your representatives and senators hold.

Start a community garden and hand out food. You could host a free weekly dinner under the Food Not Bombs framework. Put a giving box in your front yard where you and your neighbors can stock it with books, canned goods, and water for those in need.

Support independent media. The people who benefit most from all this own the news networks, they fund the lobbyists working your senators, and they hold stock in the military industrial complex. The same shareholders keep showing up everywhere. Unlike this octopus of corruption, I don’t have shareholders. I only have me, you, and what we built together here.

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Love, Dissent in Bloom

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When you think of a credit score, what comes to mind? Lower interest rates on loans? Approval for a higher credit card limit?

Do you ever think about the fact that three major corporations collect, buy, and sell your personal data in ways that extend far beyond your debt and payment history?

What a significant percent of the US population doesn’t realize is that these companies are not just credit reporting agencies. They are private for-profit corporations raking in billions from selling your location data, your employment records, your advertisement data, your behavioral analytics, your email address, and much, much more.

These corporate giants sell this information to your employers, to landlords, to lenders, to the government, and to advertisers. Truthfully, they will sell this data to just about anyone with the right dollar amount.

In fact, I’d wager that they’re just as invasive as Palantir and Flock, and t he data they collect is used by organizations like the two, but they’re not the ones making the headlines.

The credit score system in itself is arguably a problem. Most Americans are one disability, one missed paycheck, or one emergency room visit away from a looping cycle of debt. And not only can a poor credit score prevent you from getting a loan, an additional line of credit, or a home, but it can even prevent you from getting a job. All that it takes is one employer putting negative information about you on the market.

The Equifax subsidiary “The Work Number” collects information about you—including your pay rates and employment history—from millions of companies and sells that information to other employers, lenders, people doing background checks, and even government agencies.

These companies are integrated into the very foundation of everything Americans need to survive, everything needed to meet the very basics of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

Food. Water. Warmth. Rest.

All things that are necessary for survival. One could even argue that if you’re not in good standing with these companies, then you cannot survive.

Most people have never actually chosen to use these companies, but you really can’t opt out—at least not in any meaningful way—because they are integrated into everything. These companies make their money from selling your personal data to lenders, landlords, insurers, and employers.

In most cases, if you’re unhappy with a company, you just stop using it. But with these three, you have no choice. They’re integrated. Yet, people seem more and more eager to give their personal information up if it means being viewed as upstanding in society.

You know of the big three: Experian, TransUnion, and Equifax, but you probably don’t know about their many, many subsidiaries.

All the data referenced here comes from the official annual reports and SEC data for Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion. The annual reports are written by the company, and they weren’t written for transparency or accountability. They were written to convince investors to hand over (more) money. Keep that in mind as you read.

Experian Subsidiaries

Experian holds the role of a significant data broker. In their FY26, the company reported a revenue of an astronomical $8.445 billion dollars between their 213 subsidiaries. These companies span between the United States, Australia, England New Zealand, Monaco, and more.

In October 2017, Experian acquired Clarity Services, INC. This significantly expanded the amount of personal data companies were able to purchase on everyday people. It functions as a ‘micro credit score,’ providing them with smaller-scale information about things such as rent-to-own transactions, check cashing history, telecommunications, utility accounts, and information on auto loans.

And then in March 2019, Experian opted to give consumers the ability to feed them personal data directly with Experian Boost by offering to boost their Experian-only FICO scores if consumers linked personal bank accounts to prove they make recurring payments.

But it’s far beyond payment history.

While you would think that the companies that a credit bureau owns would report on things like loans, credit cards, and payment histories, they’re actually creating behavioral analysis of you to sell to marketing industries, health industries, and even ID verification platforms.

• Using their subsidiary NeuroID, Experian states that they perform “behavior analytics” of consumers to provide companies with “end-to-end fraud protection.”

• Using subsidiaries AtData and Xverify, Experian scans over 10 billion email addresses to track a person’s activity across websites and devices over time creating a profile of a person using their email address.

• Tapad, another Experian subsidiary, builds "identity graphs" that link a single person or a household to multiple devices. A device fingerprint that catches a ‘fraudster’ is also a targeting identifier for advertisers.

• PredictivePop INC, DBA as Audigent, is another subsidiary of Experian that sells personal data to advertisers so that they can create targeted, individualized content for brands and media agencies to place in front of people.

You can view the full, comprehensive list of Experian subsidies and corporate information compiled by Dissent in Bloom by clicking here.

Equifax Subsidiaries

The Equifax Annual Report and SEC report for FY25 show a revenue and subsidiary count that continues to grow. Their global reach expands from the United States to Germany to the UAE and even places like Argentina, Australia, and Ireland.

One subsidiary of Equifax, dubbed Appriss Insights, LLC, provides an individual’s “risk data.” They state their primary focus is, “retail loss prevention, risk intelligence, and healthcare data solutions.”

Their data encompasses information sourced through public records such as arrest records, bank liens, public credentialing databases, traffic tickets, and bankruptcy filings. From there, they look and see if you’ve ever had a civil judgment, substance use issues, your name on a restraining order, or any involvement with domestic violence.

This company is used by lenders, landlords, and employers too.

Appriss Insights (Equifax) offers pre-employment screenings and post-employment screenings, meaning they will provide ongoing monitoring of your records as requested by your employer.

Equifax has other companies that are just as invasive. TDX Group Unlimited is a company that sells a debt-collection software CyberFinancial to debt collectors and insolvency management services. This software includes information like a person’s “propensity to pay” score. This means the software looks at your current bank accounts, your credit limits, and your recent payments to calculate exactly how much available cash you likely have.

They do this by using credit reports and their program, The Work Number, which, as said above, is the massive database where Equifax tracks the real-time payroll data of millions of people.

If they see you pay off a car loan or if your credit limit increases, it tells them to pursue you even more aggressively because now you have the means to pay.

They also use skip tracing so that debt collectors can follow you no matter where you move, if you change your phone number, or if you ignore their calls. The software does this by using a feature named, “residency and trace.”

Because Equifax is constantly taking in your information from utility companies, cell phone providers, and landlords, the second that you open a new account or sign a lease, debt collectors can find you immediately.

No matter how much PR branding these corporations use, it’s important to see beyond that and recognize the massive pro-corporate behavior we see here.

You can view the full, comprehensive list of Equifax subsidies and corporate information by clicking here.

Transunion Subsidiaries

In their latest 2025 records, Transunion’s annual report and SEC filings show a 7% increase in revenue, equating to approximately $4.58 billion by the end of 2025. Just like their data-broker brothers, TransUnion is global, with companies located in South Africa, the United Kingdom, the U.S., Spain, the Philippines, and so on.

Perhaps the most concerning of the Transunion subsidiaries is Neustar, Inc. Neustar was purchased by Transunion in 2021 for $3.1 billion dollars.

Neustar is functionally another LexisNexis.

If you aren’t familiar with either,they exist to connect your digital footprint, such as your IP address and your identifying information, such as your email and phone number, to your real-world identity.

Neustar calls that profile OneID, and LexisNexis calls it LexID.

LexisNexis bought a company called ThreatMetrix to track the specific smartphones and laptops you use. TransUnion bought iovation (now rebranded as TruValidate) to do the same thing.

Ultimately, this means that anything you do across the internet on your device, using your cell phone number, name, email address, or anything that could be used as a tracking point, can be connected to you specifically. This is used for everything from government operations to advertising data.

They market it as fraud prevention and preventing risk. What something is marketed as vs. what it’s used for are very frequently different things. Functionally, these corporations act as invisible surveillance networks.

These are just two in an enormous ecosystem of data brokers, advertisement tech, and cybersecurity platforms all competing to build the biggest “identity graph” of a person.

Overall, research shows that these companies own dozens of other smaller companies that all dabble in your data.

You can view the full, comprehensive list of the “Big Three” subsidies, profit, and corporate information compiled by Dissent in Bloom by clicking here.

Big Brother Is Watching

I preface this article by stating that I feel these companies are just as bad as Palantir and Flock. I’m not the only one that feels this way, which is why this interview happened between the CEO of Technology and Software Solutions at Experian, Alex Lintner, and The Verge magazine.

What Alex doesn’t mention, however, is that three months before this interview, Experian was shut down in the Netherlands for doing just that.

In 2025, Experian was fined €2.7 million ($3.2 million USD) by the Dutch Data Protection Authority after the discovery of their illegal consumer credit assessment services in the Netherlands. Much like in America, Experian was purchasing private consumer data.

This data was used to create trustworthiness scores that were sold to corporations, leading to unexplained rental rejections, higher utility deposits, and even denied installment payment plans for Dutch residents, eventually triggering an investigation.

Experian officials ultimately decided not to appeal and told Dutch officials they would delete their entire database. That marked the end of Experian’s Netherlands operations.

This seems contrary to the fact that in their FY26 annual report Experian states that they help consumers, “save on car insurance, find the right credit card, lower bills and cancel subscriptions.”

Data for Sale

Data brokers exist to purchase and sell your personal data. Their entire corporate foundation is based on the collection and selling of data. So, where do they get it from?

They may collect the public data for free, but private information gets bought, and somewhere in a terms of service you clicked through, you likely gave them permission.

Almost every application you download requires that you agree to their terms of service that dictate how users should use the app. This typically includes their privacy policy, which dictates how the app can use the users. More specifically their personal data.

A person may download a weather app, a flashlight, or a mobile game. These apps ask users for permission to access GPS data, contact lists, device ID, and usage habits.

Often, users will just hit accept because they want to get to the content or the application. And in doing so, they allow these innocuous-seeming apps to sell a continuous feed of an individual’s daily movements and activities to data brokers.

The grocery giant Kroger operates a data analysis and monetization subsidiary called 84.51. 18.51 gets consumer data from store loyalty cards from Kroger and their various other brands. This data is then sold to data brokers. Kroger generates roughly $1 billion in annual revenue through its data monetization and retail media operations alone.

Hell, even your car was selling your data. General Motors (GM) collected and sold information on millions of customers’ driving habits through its “Smart Driver” OnStar program. Specifically, they sold this information to LexisNexis Risk Solutions and Verisk, who then sold it to auto insurance companies that used it to determine insurance rates based on the “risk score” assigned by their AI.

GM & OnStar accomplished this until early 2024 when it was shut down by the Federal Trade Commission because it wasn’t in the fine print so consumers argued they didn’t have informed consent.

The History and Current Ownership

You have probably heard of a FICO score. You have likely heard of the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA). Not only that, but you’ve likely heard of the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau (CFPB). What countless people haven’t put together is the history that combines all three and that deeply involves Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion.

It also involves a dark, albeit fascinating history of keeping profiles on millions of Americans—a practice used by government officials to target “subversive” Americans during the Red Scare.

In fact, the FCRA was created so that private, investigative organizations—like Wackenhut, now known as GeoGroup—could not keep secret files on Americans without their knowledge or access to the information being collected about them.

Before the massive consolidation of personal data, credit scores used to exist on a city-by-city basis. This eventually grew to exist on a state-by-state basis, then a federal basis, and now a global basis.

Experian began as Credit Data Corporation (CDC). CDC was created in 1965 and was the first computerized credit bureau system to exist in California. The person behind it—Harry C. Jordan—was appointed to be an “expert advisor” on consumer privacy and credit automation to Ronald Reagan during his tenure as California governor.

CDC was ultimately sold to another corporation called TRW in 1968, and then in 1996 it was sold again to Bain Capital and Thomas H. Lee Partners.

In June 2023, Bain Capital was ranked the 13th largest private equity firm in the world on Private Equity International's PEI 300 list. They hold ownership in corporations from AMC Theaters to Dunkin’ Donuts to Hospital Corporation of America. Thomas H. Lee Partners is a smaller private equity firm holding ownership in corporations like The Nielsen Company, Warner Music Group, and Dunkin Brands. The two share a lot of corporate ownership.

Experian—the largest of the three—is traded on the London Stock Exchange. All three are structured the same way at the ownership level, they are public companies whose shares are held mostly by the same few corporations.

The difference is which country’s stock market and financial regulators they answer to, the UK’s for Experian and the US’s for Equifax and TransUnion. And in both places, they’re owned by the same people.

BlackRock owns

• Transunion: 15.3M shares, 7.90% stake, roughly $1.33B

• Equifax: 6.1M shares, 5.00% stake, roughly $1.35B

• Experian: 52.7M, 5.1% stake, roughly £1.43 billion, or approximately $1.78 billion USD

Vanguard owns

• Transunion: 19.0M shares, 9.77% stake, roughly $1.65B value

• Equifax: 15.2M shares, 12.44% stake, roughly $3.36B value

• Experian: 45.6M shares, 5.1% stake, roughly £1.24 billion, or approximately $1.54 billion USD

Final Thoughts

Ultimately, whether you believe the PR or not, companies like this exist and sell data without real constraints or rules, and companies like Palantir, LexisNexis, and more eat it up.

During the Red Scare, private entities and government agents collected massive amounts of information on Americans. Now the corporations do it for them.

Experian makes the most money.

And it’s not just Experian, TransUnion, and Equifax, but companies like Axiom, Epsilon, and Corelogic. These are all massive private corporations raking in billions in revenue through data brokerage.

And nearly all of it is owned by the same group of billionaires that own your 401(k). They own the companies that track your every move, and they manage the money you need to survive when you get old. A tiny group of people owns absolutely everything—and they’re collecting your data right now.

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In those five years without treatment, women face irreversible damage to their bodies as the severity of their disease begins to ramp up. By the time they finally receive a diagnosis, it’s gone from an early-stage disease that could easily be managed to a chronic debilitating condition.

Five years of your body attacking itself.

In the 1900s, women got a hysteria diagnosis. That diagnosis was removed from the Diagnostic and Statistics Manual in 1980, so in 2026, women instead get an anxiety diagnosis.

Women are seven times more likely than men to be misdiagnosed and sent home from the hospital while in the middle of having a heart attack. Black women are three times more likely to die in childbirth than anyone else.

It wasn’t until 1993 that women of childbearing age were allowed to participate in clinical trials—because a potential fetus was deemed more important to the state than a woman’s ability to access equitable, quality medical care.

This week, the House Education and Workforce Committee held a congressional hearing titled “Training Activists, Not Physicians: The Impact of DEI on Medical Schools”

For normal people, that just means teaching doctors to treat every human being with basic, equal dignity. It means teaching medical students not to make fatal assumptions based on what a patient looks like.

Women die on a routine basis because of gender and racial bias in health care. This week, our elected representatives sat in a stuffy conference room to state that they do not want the doctors of America’s future to have a diverse, equitable, and inclusive practice.

If you’ve ever read the book 1984 by George Orwell, you’ve heard the concept of doublethink. Orwell defines it as the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.

War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength.

This concept was supposed to remain fiction. A warning of what could happen. It was meant to be a guidebook for politicians or corruption. I want you to keep this in mind as we talk about what happened in this hearing.

The hearing kicked off with a speech from a Republican from Michigan named Tim Walberg. He’s the chairman of the committee.

He told the room that the real problem—the “deeper problem,” as he called it—isn’t a broken, profit-driven healthcare system. No, the real concern is the “activist infrastructure” of medical schools putting people into racial categories. He claims that diversity is being used to discriminate.

And then, he took it a step further. He claimed that teaching diversity and equity is actually what’s inciting “pervasive antisemitism” on campuses. Why? Because, according to Walberg, D.E.I. labels Jewish people as “white,” and therefore “privileged and oppressors.”

Tim didn’t give any actual evidence of this happening. He did not list any schools, any classes, or any actual cases where this happened. It is a strange world we live in—where our congressman can make extreme claims without evidence.

What we saw Tim do today is very similar to what Stephen Miller had recently done when targeting the landmark Olmstead v. LC case earlier this year. This is the legal case that let disabled people out of institutions and into their homes and the community. Both use the same argument: that equitable care towards one group means that you’re being discriminatory against everyone else.

“Are we going to teach medicine or are we teaching social justice?” asked Rep. Owen Burgess, a Republican from Utah.

Medicine is social justice. Think about it. If a working-class kid comes into the ER with severe asthma because his family can only afford rent right next to a corporate chemical plant, treating the root cause of his asthma is social justice. If a woman’s heart attack is missed because decades of medical textbooks were based entirely on male bodies, teaching future doctors to recognize her symptoms is social justice.

Social justice is not a political buzzword. It’s the modern-day politicians who have assigned this word to their narratives surrounding identity politics. But in reality, social justice, as it is and always has been, is the right to equitable conditions—whether school, voting rights, or healthcare—for every single person in America.

Burgess Owens was born in 1951.

He didn’t grow up reading about segregation in a history textbook like most of us. He was actually born into it. Not only that, but he grew up in the same America where Black people were legally barred from holding office, drinking from the same water fountains, and even receiving care in the same hospitals as white people.

When he was a child, a Black person having a medical emergency would be turned away if they went to the ‘wrong’ hospital, a “whites-only” hospital. And when these segregated hospitals refused care, it led to the deaths of hundreds of children, mothers, fathers, and grandparents.

So, the communities responded by creating their own hospitals. In these institutions, they treated Black patients, had Black physicians, and would also treat white patients who needed it. Social equity is the only reason Burgess Owens is allowed to hold office, or even receive healthcare in the same building as Rep. Tim Walberg.

“And you do teach biology?”

Let’s talk about Representative Mary Miller of Illinois.

Social justice is the reason she can vote, hold office, and seek medical care without being locked in an asylum for being hysterical. White women were unable to vote until 1920. And while they could technically hold office, state and federal governments skirted around legality, arguing that the 19th Amendment only applied to the voting booth, not the halls of power. In states like Oklahoma, the legal battles to keep women out of elected office dragged on all the way into the 1940s.

It was even harder for Black women. It was not until 1968—years later—that Shirley Chisholm became the first Black woman ever elected to Congress.

Mary Miller’s questions were loaded around her upset with some university courses using the term “pregnant people,” questioning the physicians about their credentials and knowledge.

On June 24th, 2022, the Supreme Court overturned Roe V. Wade. The next day, Mary Miller took that time to stand next to Trump on a campaign stage, calling it a “historic victory for white life.”

White life

Her staffers stated the Congresswoman simply “misread her notes.” She meant to say “right to life,” you see.

When normal people make a mistake reading out loud, what do they do? They stop, blink, and they correct themselves. If you accidentally say something entirely different from what you meant—especially something as jarring as substituting “white” for “right”—your brain catches it. You say, “Excuse me, I meant right to life.”

But watch Mary Miller. She claps instead.

I think one of the most ironic things here is that this committee started out by stating that diversity groups cause anti-Semitism. Yet only two days into her 2021 House term, Miller issued a prepared speech to the conservative think tank Moms for America, where she quoted Adolf Hitler saying:

On January 7, Miller's office tweeted that her remarks had been intended to compare alleged youth indoctrination efforts by “left-wing radicals” to those of Hitler.

‘Left-wing radicals’ are not the ones quoting Hitler. Left-wing radicals aren’t the ones speaking about “historic victories for white life,” either.

“We’re so determined to be diverse that we’re willing to take unqualified people, and we put them into our institutions.” — Rep. Randy Fine

In April 2023, an ethics investigation found that Randy Fine abused his constituents when he tried to withhold state funding from Special Olympics Florida in the city of West Melbourne because of a personal feud with a school board member.

So what exactly counts as a qualified, Representative Fine? Is it a deep commitment to public service?

Is it voting to cut Affordable Care Act subsidies, leading to millions of Americans losing health insurance? Or is it voting to cut Medicaid, raising costs and cutting off health care access for thousands of Americans, even though increasing access to health insurance was a campaign promise you ran on?

Is it quality to illegally vote for your fellow representatives who aren’t present?

Is it quality to refuse to move to the district that you represent? Or is it doxing a school board member in your community—sharing her personal phone number and telling people to contact her, leading to her home being vandalized and her life being threatened?

Remember, these are the same politicians who held a whole congressional hearing to scream that teaching diversity makes people discriminatory. They clutch their pearls over college syllabuses. They claim they are deeply concerned about hate.

Meanwhile, what is Randy Fine doing?

That. He is also publicly calling for the mass expulsion of all Muslims from the United States. He routinely labels Muslim Americans as “terrorists”.

Randy Fine also openly calls for the starvation of Palestinian children, and the for dropping nuclear weaponry on them. Is discrimination the problem, or is it okay as long as it’s directed at the ‘right’ people?

So the next time they tell you who the “extremists” are, and the next time they tell you that being diverse is discriminatory, remember Randy Fine. Remember exactly what kind of people are running this system.

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Flock cameras are used by the government to track your license plate, but also you and all of that information is routed to the government so they can track where you are in real time. This has been abused by ICE using the governments data to target immigrants despite not having a contract with the organization — to a Texas sheriff using it to track a woman who had an abortion.

Flock isn’t the only people collecting surveillance data for the United States government. You also have to consider Palantir, Giant Oak Technology, Thomson Reuters, Clearview AI, Airlines Reporting Corporation, Ventel, Babel Street, and more.

According to their website, Flock Safety stores all government contracted recordings and metadata—both state and federal—on a Amazon Web Services (AWS) GovCloud servers.

Amazon has two GovCloud server regions — West & East — with facilities in Virginia, Oregon and Ohio. These are cloud servers, and the cloud works by pulling data from the two regions into one massive dataset. These servers hold a large amount of data from the every government agency, including all 18 intelligence agencies.

According to public records, Amazon has directly made a whopping $424.2 million tax-payer dollars across 332 contracts by allowing the government to store their data on their servers.

The Top-Secret Virginia Data Centers

There is a ‘top-secret’ AWS GovCloud campus based in Ashburn, Loudoun County, Virginia — just 30 miles from Langley, the Pentagon, and NSA headquarters — and it’s there that AWS operates three data centers at 21263, 21267, and 21271 Smith Switch Road. One of those is a 350 megawatt facility, and 150 megawatts of that is walled off for classified government data. Only US citizens can work there, and it meets the strictest federal security standards (FedRAMP High and DoD IL5/IL6).

Ironically, Flock was founded in 2017 by someone named George Langley (among others)

That data comes from the More Than Just Parks data center tracker, which pulls directly from power grid filings. The campus uses 1.1 million gallons of water a day.

Construction of these three sister data centers began in 2013. They were built through the company COPT — a federal government and defense contractor. The data centers were completed and functional by the end of 2015.

The year the construction of this campus started (2013) is the same year Amazon/AWS landed a $600 million contract to host data for the entire US Intelligence Community.

The CIA ran the procurement, but the deal wasn’t limited to CIA data. It served as the shared cloud for all 18 intelligence agencies where the CIA and all the other 17 members of the intelligence community were given a place to feed their data.

As they collected more data on us, the need for storage grew. So in 2020 the contract expanded. Amazon kept holding intelligence secrets, but now the 18 intelligence agencies were using Microsoft, Google, Oracle, and IBM, too. AWS, Microsoft, IBM, Google, and even Oracle have or had data centers in the state of Virginia.

CIA. NSA. FBI. DEA. Navy. Coast Guard. Army. The Department of State.

All of these places are storing personal data from Flock, among everything else collected, in the cloud servers of Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, and Google.

Back in 2014, Waging Nonviolence first discovered AWS job listings in Ashburn, VA requiring Top Secret/SCI clearance. And in 2017, Flock Safety was incorporated. The same year that Teresa Carlson, the VP of Worldwide Public Sector at AWS, announced Amazon would be creating a second GovCloud region to open on the East Coast in 2018. Specifically, the Ohio region.

But we know from above that they already had an entire region dedicated to GovCloud servers on the East Coast — in Virginia — dating back to 2013.

AWS didn’t say that they were expanding. They announced this as a brand new thing, completely obscuring the CIA and intelligence agencies storing a massive amount of data in the data centers of VA.

Flash forward to 2026, there are now AWS jobs just like this all over Virginia, from Warrington to Fredericksburg. Each of them requires prospective hires to undergo a lie-detector test polygraph for federal clearance.

These top-secret-clearance data center jobs do not end in Virginia. They may have started in the Ashburn corridor, but they’ve since stretched from the Loudoun County server farms to the Wexner-planned corporate campuses of New Albany, Ohio.

The Top-Secret Ohio Data Centers

Amazon opened its first data center in Ohio in October 2016, and since then they have continued to expand across the state. The state also has servers from intelligence contractors Microsoft and Google living between the cornfields.

Columbus AWS job listings today require Top Secret and SCI clearances, and one is explicitly titled Sr. Physical Security Engineer for GovCloud.

• Hilliard: located at 5113 Hayden Run Rd, Hilliard, OH 43026.

  • They are offering Engineering Operations Technicians up-to $60 an hour — as long as they’re a U.S. citizen and they currently possess and maintain an active top-secret security clearance with SCI eligibility.

• New Albany: Amazon has a massive sprawling complex of several data centers on Beech Road SW in New Albany. There are eight total job top-secret job postings in New Albany, and at least one requires you to take a lie detector test.

• Dublin: located at 5895 Houchard Road, Dublin, OH, USA. As of right now, there is only one top-secret data center job available in Dublin, Ohio.

• Plain City: there are three AWS data centers in Plain City, Ohio. And much like in New Albany, these are clustered with no more than 3 miles between them. There are fifteen job postings between them:

  • 8619 Industrial Parkway, Plain City, OH 43064

  • 8567 Warner Road, Plain City, OH 43064

  • 6685 Crosby Court, Plain City, OH 43064

What People Can Do

Not long ago, the CEO of Flock Safety publicly condemned Americans as terrorists for pushing back against their surveillance cameras. He’s trying to walk it back now, but I think it’s important we keep fighting and don’t forget what he said.

And here are some ways you can do that:

• Use the ACLU’s ‘Get the Flock Out’ Toolkit.

• Find out information about Flock cameras—as well as others like it—in your community by using the free and interactive de-flock map.

• Go to your city council meetings. Especially if Flock is on the agenda, because these are the people that make the decision to put Flock in your city.

If it hasn’t already happened, sooner or later a senator, rep, or city council near you is going to hold a meeting about Flock. It is important that you show up. If you can hit more than one in your area, even better. Prepared speech and pointed questions? Awesome. Just a warm body in a chair? Also important.

What counts is that you’re in the room. We need our city councils to cancel these contracts with Flock. Numbers move these things, and you have every right to be there. Never forget the power that you have. There are more of us than there are of them, and I’m sick and tired of corporations thinking they have more power than the people because of the wads of cash that line their pockets.

Speaking out, showing up, and holding them accountable works. We’ve already seen dozens of block contracts be canceled. Let’s keep it up.

My local city council meeting on Flock is coming up, and I’ll be there.

Expect footage and reporting from that meeting once it wraps. I’m staying on Flock, the whole surveillance machine behind it, and how it squeezes regular Americans like you and me.

If this article taught you something, helped you out, or you just thought it was interesting, hit subscribe.

Free, paid, whatever works for your wallet. What I need is ears (well, technically eyes) on this stuff, because the reporting only matters if it reaches people who give a damn. You made it this far already. Stick around for the rest of the ride.

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America loves nurses, at least in theory. But admiration is cheap, and it costs the wealthy hospital systems in America absolutely nothing.

Right now, over 4,000 nurses from Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Massachusetts are in the news for being on strike. The media will report on the strike, but they will never — ever —highlight the nurses. Instead, they lean heavily on statements from hospital leadership.

Over 18 nursing strikes have happened this year, with seven more authorized before the end of 2026. In every single one, the nurses sound the same alarm, safe staffing. But you won’t hear about that part.

The nurses become the subject of the story; the hospitals get to tell it. It gets framed as a wage dispute, or simply two parties being unable to agree on a contract.

There’s a reason this happens. You will never see a floor nurse sitting on a hospital board, but you will find an investment banker. Researchers who examined the boards of top-ranked hospitals found that only about 1 in 7 board members — roughly 14.6% — were health professionals. Most hospitals — including nonprofit and for-profit hospitals — have boards of directors and trustees that are full of executives, bankers, and CEOs from private for-profit corporations. I’m not being figurative. The vast majority (80.2%) led financial corporations, including private equity firms, wealth management firms, and banks

These powerful people have powerful connections.

The very same people who have spent decades profiting off Americans are now sitting in the boardrooms deciding how many patients one nurse should be forced to manage in a shift; these are the same people who make the decision to charge you $500 for Tylenol while they take home salaries of over a hundred million a year.

These boards are full of for-profit executives with a for-profit mindset, even if they hide behind a non-profit label.

But talk is cheap; receipts are everything. Let’s talk about Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH), since it’s in the headlines, and we can watch this play out in real time.

Nurses Strike in Massachusetts

Over 4,000 nurses and 500 home care staff from the Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) Health System went on strike after months of the Mass achuetes Nurse Association trying to work with directly the hospital without success. They gave 12-days-notice, as legally required.

No one was left without care. They didn’t leave mid-shift, or abandon patients. The hospital was required to hire nurses to cover them for that 24 hours. And they did. In fact, they paid travel nurses up-to $120/HR and gave them $1,400 bonuses, leading to a $10 million dollar estimated cost for the health system.

The nurses' strike was set for 24 hours. The home care strike ran 7 days. When the nurses showed up the next morning ready to work, security blocked them at the door and told them to come back on July 15th.

So what happens next? The nurses are standing out on the street. They’ve been locked out of their own workplace. They have no choice but to set up picket lines outside the very doors they usually walk through to save lives.

Jessica Pastore, the Senior Director of Public Affairs for Brigham took to the Boston Globe and made the statement:

“Brigham nurses are among the highest compensated in the market.”

What Jessica failed to mention is that these nurses work and live in Boston where everything is more expensive. Out of the 19,495 cities in America, Boston consistently ranks as the 5th most expensive one to live in.

These nurses make $49/hour on average. New graduate nurses only make around $38 an hour. Sounds like a lot until you find out one-bedroom apartments in Boston average $3,636 per month.

On average, $309 million dollars in compensation is given to only 42 employees of Brigham and Women’s Hospital. And none of them are staff nurses. Compensation is their biggest expense, but most of that is going to corporate.

So yes, America, one of the things that they want is a cost of living wage increase so that they can feed their families in an economy where the cost of living increases every year. They also want to be able to afford health insurance, which the hospital increased the cost of for staff, but most importantly? They want safe staffing.

But they don’t talk about that. They want you to see that the nurses are not dedicated professionals trying to keep your family members from dying in a dangerously understaffed hallway. No, they’re the villains. They’re selfish radicals who are abandoning the community all in the pursuit of money.

The same executives who paid an estimated $10 million dollars on travel nurses instead of raising wages went on to launch a coordinated, smear campaign to paint these nurses as the bad guys.

The hospital posted an official letter apologizing to the public for the nurses behavior, and sent cease and desist notices to the union representing the nurses trying to flip the script completely.

They know that if they take a direct shot at the nurses, it’s not going to go well, so instead they try to appeal to the emotions of their consumers, er, I mean “neighbors.”

The major hospitals love to use manipulative platitudes when speaking with the general public. We care about you; patient-centered care is our focus. Patient-centered care used to mean something, holistic healthcare matters, but now it’s become a corporate buzzword.

Is it patient-centered care when every patient added to a nurse’s load beyond four raises your risk of dying by 8 percent? Is it patient-centered care when some hospitals put nine patients under a single nurse at once?

One day the patient is going to be you. Or your mother. Or the one person you can't picture the world without. When that day comes, you'll pray for a nurse who isn't split across eight other rooms.

The President and CEO of Mass General Brigham. — Anne Kilbanski — makes $8,407,816 a year. The corporation is so large that it’s the parent company that owns Brigham and Women’s Hospital. That is $23,035.11/day, or $16.00 a minute.

Anne makes more in 48 hours than some nurses at her hospital system make in an entire year. She is also a Harvard professor.

And she isn’t the only well-paid person in leadership. Here’s a list of some of the others:

• $3,536,715 is what’s made by John R Barker, Former Chief Investment Officer, $3,210,922 by Ron Walls, COO, $2,844,616 by Gregg S. Meyer, President, Community Division, $2,349,621 by Elizabeth L Baldwin, Portfolio Manager, $2,323,582 by Niyum Gandhi, CFO and Treasurer, and 988,790: Yolanda Lorig Colson, PHD Director

  And remember, this is just a smidge of the vast amount of leadership under is the parent company. This isn't Brigham and Women's. This is the corporation that owns Brigham and Women's among others.

  I've worked in healthcare for years and I've never once met a "PhD director" or a "digital officer" at a bedside. I'm no businesswoman, but that's a staggering amount of money for people who never lay hands on a patient.

Now look one level down at who actually governs BWH:

Giles W.L. Boland, MD

Giles is a radiologist from London, UK. He has been the president of Brigham and Women’s Hospital since March 2024. He’s also the vice president of the parent company, Mass General Brigham. He makes $1,509,981 a year, or $4,137 a day.

And the Board of Trustees is not to be trusted.

John Fish, Chair of the Brigham and Women’s Hospital Board of Trustees.

John is also the chairman and CEO of Suffolk Construction, the largest building company in New England, with $6 billion in revenue in 2024. Being the chair of the board of trustees, John holds considerable power over the hospital. He was named the number one most powerful person in Boston by Boston Magazine twice. His own construction company built a facility at Brigham.

And it’s not just the hospital he holds power over. He has significant influence over local media and events due to his prominence in the community. He’s also the chair of the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce, the chairman of the Boston College Board of Trustees. And he’s donated both to Obama and the Republican National Committee.

Anne Finucane, Vice Chair

This is a different — and arguably somehow more powerful Anne than above.

In 1995, Anne Finucane Joined Fleet Financial as the head of corporate affairs and marketing. Fleet Financial Group was a New England banking company If Fleet Financial doesn’t sound familiar, maybe Bank of America will. See, Fleet merged with Bank Boston, and was eventually merged with Bank of America.

Finucane came with that. She was the Global Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer for Bank of America after the 2008 financial crisis. She was even the Chair of the Bank of America of Europe, and she retired from Bank of America in 2021.

She’s also the Director & a board member of CVS Health. The Vice Chair and Lead Director of the Special Olympics. She was a member of the Rockefellers Global Leadership Council. Anne is a member of the Venturewave Capital Global Advisory Council. She was on the board of Carnegie Hall where she received the Carnegie Medal of Excellence in 2021, and she’s a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

She also well known in the community as she was on the board of the Public Library Foundation and the board of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. She was even a member of Joe Biden’s Presidential Intelligence Advisory Board in 2022.

And that’s not even all of it. You can view a lot more on her Wikipedia and LinkedIn pages.

PR and marketing is like speaking English to her; it’s what has gotten her to where she is. In 2013, she was ranked in PR Week’s Power List. She received the Matrix Award from the Association for Women in Communications.

She oversaw Bank of America’s entire marketing, advertising, and communications functioning. She’s one of Forbes’ 50 most influential CMOs globally, and she was also on Forbes and Fortune’s most powerful women lists between 2016 and 2020.

John Connaughton, Trustee

John Connaughton graduated with an MBA from Harvard in 1994. He used that to become an investment banker with Bain Capital in 1989. By 2016, he was the Co-Managing Partner, and now he is the Chair of the Board of Directors for Bain Capital.

He is an investment banker. He is also the Global Head of Bain Capital Private Equity. But that’s not all.

He is on the board of IQVIA Holdings. He is on the board of the Boston Celtics Investor Group. He was on the board of trustees for the Berkley College of Music and The Roxbury Latin School. According to his Linkedin, he is also on the board of Directors for The Green Life Fund, and the board of Dean’s Advisors for Harvard.

And he has a heavy media influence, given his significant history in working for the media he was on the board of IHeartMedia. He was on the board of the largest private TV broadcaster in Germany. He’s also been on the board of AMC Theaters, Cumulus Media Partners, HCA Healthcare, Warner Chilcot, Air Medical Group Holdings, Bio Products Laboratory Holdings, and Stericycle Inc.

If you’re a nurse, or if you work in healthcare, I know you recognize a few of those names.

Mark Nunnelly, Trustee

Mark Nunneley also graduated from Harvard with an MBA. He was a product manager at Proctor and Gamble, the people who make Pampers Diapers (I wonder what BWH keeps stocked in their nursery?) Nunnelly is chairman of Toolbox Holdings and Foundation

And just like John, he is connected to Bain Capital. He was managing director until 2014 when he retired.

In 2005, Harvard University offered Mark Nunnelly the position of Chief Executive Officer of the Harvard Management Company (HMC). This role meant managing the university’s massive investment portfolio, known as its endowment. He declined.

He was the Secretary of the Office of Technology Services and Security for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. He is also the Commissioner of the Department of Revenue and Special Advisor to Governor Charlie Baker for technology and innovative competitiveness.

You can see more on his LinkedIn.

Nunnley is also on the board of New Profit, Center College, and Harvard Business School, where he holds the position as Chair of the Board. He’s a trustee for ‘children’s education sitting on the board for KIPP Schools Foundation and Jump Start. He is a trustee of BridgeSpan.

He also used to be the director of Blumenbrands, Apple Leisure Group, BMC Software, Duncan Brands, GenPact, Turnitin LLC, and Travel Click.

And he also has media connections, just like his friend John. He was a board member of Warner Music Group. He held a seat on the WMG Acquisition Court Board. He’s also a board member of the Halcote Mifflin Harcourt Publishing, which is a major educational publisher.

His former company — Bain Capital — invested in Houghton Mifflin for $1.28B alongside Thomas H. Lee Partners and Blackstone, late 2002. Along with Connaughton, both Bain figures governed Warner Music Group simultaneously

Martin J. Walsh, Trustee

Martin Walsh was born and raised in Massachusetts to Irish immigrant parents. He survived lymphedema as a child. He survived alcohol addiction. He’s a member of the laborers’ union, and he rose to the head of the Boston Building and Construction and Trades Council. He sounds like a true working-class, relatable person.

Which is how he became the 53rd mayor of Boston from 2014 to 2021. He was the 29th United States Secretary of Labor from 2021 to 2023, and now he’s the executive director of the NHL Players Association.

That’s a pretty significant person to have on your Board of Trustees. And my mama always told me, “You’re only as good as the company you keep.”

Look at who he’s surrounded by.

As you see, the trustees who govern Brigham and Women’s Hospital — one of the most powerful academic medical centers in the country — represent a remarkable concentration of political, financial, and corporate reach that extends well beyond healthcare. Mass General Brigham’s own tax filings, available through the IRS and their non-profit portal, flag documented conflict-of-interest transactions every year on record.

And if that’s still not enough for you, if you’re still saying:

“Well, I think if the nurses are not in it to care for people, they shouldn’t be nurses in the first place, right?”

The for-profit media make it seem like nurses are just asking for bigger paychecks. Although wages may be part of it, the number one line that follows through every single strike is safe staffing.

The moment nurses started asking difficult questions about staffing, patient safety, and working conditions, much of the praise disappeared. The public was told were fighting over paychecks. What many nurses were actually describing was a system under strain.

Nurses are human, and you should never expect perfection. And nurses are also advocates, so you should never expect compliance in situations that put their patients at risk.

Every year since, the media and the public have made one thing perfectly clear — they expect our absolute dedication, but they don't give a damn about our survival.

The moment nurses began speaking openly about staffing shortages, burnout, unsafe conditions, and a healthcare system stretched to its limits, the conversation shifted. Their warnings were often reframed as complaints. Their demands were reduced to questions of pay.

The public loved calling us "heroes" during the 2020 COVID pandemic when nurses came face to face with death daily and the CEOS & Boards of Directors/Trustees sipped wine in their houses we can never afford.

Historically, female-dominated, care-based professions have been the easiest to manipulate through guilt. Just as union-busters tell teachers, "If you really cared about the kids, you wouldn't strike," hospital administrators and the media tell nurses, "If you cared about patients, you wouldn't demand better ratios."

When you frame the job as a moral calling rather than a profession, it makes it socially unacceptable to ask for better money, safety, or labor rights, because if you want anything more, you’re heartless and greedy.

I’m a nurse. You’ll never learn my name. You’ll forget Anne Klibanski’s too. But I’m the one who’ll be in the room when it counts, and I’m telling you now, while I still can, that they’re cutting us to the bone. Believe me before you need me. Believe the other nurses before you need them, too.

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Today, in the middle of my unpaid lunch break, I read a piece about a local Children’s hospital where the nurses are just steps away from forming a union. This lit a fire in me.

As some of you know, I’m a nurse and I care a lot about fixing the deeply broken healthcare system. I spent my whole break reading up on labor history, dreaming about doing something similar one day. I was so ready to dive back in the second I got home.

On the drive home, I began to listen to music to amplify the mood. From Twisted Sisters, “We’re Not Going to Take It,” to Michael Jackson’s “They Don’t Really Care About Us.”

When my husband turned onto our street and the front steps of our house came into view, my mind was already racing through a mental checklist of everything I was going to research, all the people I was going to reach out to, and all of the plans I’d dreamed up on the ride home.

But as I made the climb up the stairs to my desk, the reality of the day slammed into me, and my inspiration evaporated as my body cruelly reminded me of its own limits. Before I even reached the top step, a sharp knot formed in my stomach and a heavy ache began to throb behind my eyes.

My mind was ready for a revolution. But I suddenly felt absolutely horrible; too horrible to even sit in my desk chair.

My life has been measured in the battles I’ve chosen to fight for those who couldn’t. It started small—protecting my classmates from bullies on the playground—and grew into marching in the streets and ultimately starting Dissent in Bloom.

Radical empathy is often forged in the fires of personal struggle. The ones fighting the hardest to build a better world are usually the ones who know exactly how brutal it can be.

I talk about my health here. When you’re living inside it, it comes out. You can’t be pristine and perfect, but you can be human, and holding onto our humanity is the part that matters. The corporate polish, the ideologue voice, the smooth professional surface, all of it is bullshit in the end. People would be better off if they were themselves more often.

So I’ll be real about it. I’m managing several conditions at once, and I was born with most of them. There’s an autoimmune condition my doctors are still working to name. I have Ehlers-Danlos, so my joints bend in ways joints shouldn’t, and that means pain every single day. Spinal stenosis. Chronic migraines. Chronic hives. I’ve had over 12 surgeries. And I have a progressive genetic heart condition that killed my mom at 38 and has now found me.

I take between 10 and 16 medications a day. Injections every three months from two different doctors, plus one I do monthly. I still work full time. I am 29 years old.

I’m not on my deathbed, but the good days are getting rarer and the bad ones harder. I spend every one of them trying to leave this world better than I found it. If I do anything at all here, I want it to be that. Bad days mean a lot of hours flat on my back, and you do a lot of thinking there.

I’ve spent many hours laying in bed just pondering why some people grow up to become the Peter Thiel’s of the world, hoarding everything for themselves, building doomsday bunkers, and hurting people every step of the way.

Others become the Florence B, Seibert’s, using their pain to heal people:

Florence B. Seibert contracted polio as a child, leaving her with a lifelong disability. Instead of letting that define her, she used her experience as fuel to ensure others wouldn’t have to suffer. She became a pioneering biochemist and revolutionized medicine. Before Florence, patients regularly contracted deadly bacterial infections from unsterilized IVs and injections. Because of her, we now have safe IV therapies, medications, and blood transfusions. She even invented the standard test for tuberculosis. Florence could have easily lost her life to disease; instead, she chose to save hundreds of millions of others from it.

I think it comes down to what kind of person we are when life drops a bomb on us. Y’know, they say that cockroaches can survive a nuclear blast. But who wants to just survive the blast if it means crawling around the rubble alone?

Thiel and men like him are a tale as old as time. There have always been people who look at human suffering and see an opening. Thiel looks at ICE and sees a growth market, even as dozens of people have died in ICE custody over the last two years alone.

That same idea, where a human body becomes a profit margin, created something school never taught me about.

In 1955, Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine was declared safe and effective.

Demand was astronomical, and the government moved fast, contracting pharmaceutical companies to manufacture it. One of them was Cutter Laboratories. Salk’s design depended on a deactivated version of the virus, a killed thing the body could learn to fight. Cutter’s process failed and regulators looked the other way. Their vials went out carrying live, active polio.

Instead of preventing the disease, they injected the public with it. That failure caused 40,000 cases of polio, paralyzed 200 children, and killed 10. It stopped the vaccination campaign cold, shattered public trust, and forced the creation of the pharmaceutical regulatory system we rely on today.

You’re reading this because I wrote it down on a rough day, when my body betrayed me and I wanted to leave something behind anyway. Consider what you’ll do with yours.

As scary as everything is, all the headlines the people building doomsday bunkers have already lost because they look at others and see only threats. They have lost their humanity, and so they are afraid. I want a different legacy. I want to choose, repeatedly and unapologetically, that my suffering will be spent on others instead of building something hoarded. Money is fragile; your community is strength.

You can make this choice today. It does not require heroics, money, or being famous. It just requires doing small, tangible things for strangers.

Verify your voting status and sign up to work the polls. Support a neighborhood mutual aid fund. Sit through a boring local board meeting. Carry Narcan. Drive over to check on a struggling friend.

I want you to know that there is more good than bad in this world, and although the bad is often more visible, the good is still there. Our time is limited, and eventually, all of our bodies will eventually betray us. I am choosing to be a bridge instead of a bunker. Go do something small with that time this week.

I appreciate you taking the time to read this today. Knowing you are out there makes the hard days feel a little lighter. We are not just disconnected people surviving on our own. We are a collective force, and our strength comes from how we choose to show up for our neighbors. Thank you for being part of this community. Let us go out and prove we belong to each other.

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That single clause held up nearly every major civil rights win for the next 160 years. It got rid of the “separate but equal” racial segregation of schools in Brown v. Board (1954), legalized interracial marriage in Loving v. Virginia (1967), and secured marriage equality for LGBTQ+ Americans in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015).

On the eve of America’s 250th birthday, the Supreme Court ruled by a thin, thin margin of 6-3 to keep birthright citizenship in America. Read the opinions and it was really 5-4. Kavanaugh agreed birthright citizenship could be revoked. His only caveat was that Congress should do it instead of Trump.

The 14th Amendment survived the Confederacy, Jim Crow, and George Wallace. In June 2026, it nearly did not survive a Tuesday.

Rewind to January 20th, 2025.

Hour one of term two. Donald Trump signed over 20 executive orders, including an executive order aimed at birthright citizenship. The official narrative was that Trump simply dislikes immigrants, and we were expected to nod along and accept that. Never mind that two of his three wives arrived here on foreign passports. Never mind Ivana from Czechoslovakia or Melania from Slovenia.

It’s also rather odd because Donald Trump played a part of actual birth tourism. In 2017, The Daily Beast found that Trump's own properties had been serving as birth tourism suites for wealthy Russians. Nothing was ever done about that. For a man that really cares about birth tourism, that’s kind of an odd choice, don’t you think?

Suppose, for a moment, that this is not about birth tourism at all. Suppose the plan is older, and colder, and more patient than that. Suppose it has parts, several of them, laid out in plain sight, and the only reason we have not seen the whole is that we have been trained to look at one piece at a time.

Birth Tourism

The ink was barely dry when Stephen Miller — the White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy — turned up on Fox News with Jesse Watters, insisting immigrants have babies on American soil to milk Medicaid and welfare, then funnel it back to whichever country they actually pledge allegiance to.

The claim was pregnant women come here as tourists with a due date, timing their trips to give birth on American soil and walk away with a lifetime of benefits attached.

What you don’t see here is everything they did to set this narrative up weeks, and even years before the SCOTUS ruling ever dropped.

On April 10, 2026, an internal ICE email directed Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) agents nationwide toward a new enforcement priority targeting "fraud, financial crimes, and organized facilitation networks" connected to foreign nationals traveling to the US to give birth.

On June 11, 2026, the State Department published “enforcement action” information on more than 600 cases of “birth tourism” and warned visas will be denied or revoked if childbirth is the primary purpose of travel.

In his interview with Fox News, Miller stated: “that baby can sit on a jury when he turns 18 and sit in judgment of you and sit in judgment of me and sit in judgment of our loved ones.”

Meanwhile, White House spokesman Anna Kelly stated, “uninhibited birth tourism poses a tremendous cost to taxpayers and threatens our national security.”

Our national security.

Think about the language there. If you didn’t know any better — if you just dropped in and heard that soundbite — you would honestly think they were warning us about armed insurgents. You’d think they were describing some hostile foreign militia.

And that’s exactly how they are treating it. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced that they are going to sic the DOJ, FBI, and DHS on pregnant immigrants not even a full 24 hours after SCOTUS upheld the 14th Amendment.

On Wednesday morning, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin said the administration is prepared to “look at” restrictions on pregnant travelers to the U.S.

Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) posted on Twitter/X that the State Department, “should immediately cease to give out visas to pregnant applicants.”

Just completely cut them off. A blanket ban.. if you happen to be pregnant, no visa for you. Are we going to have federal agents pulling aside every single woman of childbearing age at the airport and demanding a urine sample?

She was joined by Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN) who went as far as proposing the “Anchors Away” act. They're not even referring to them as children anymore. They aren't human beings who live and breathe and love; to them they are just “anchors.”

Lauren Boebert and Andy Ogles. Aren’t these the exact same people who tell us, day in and day out, that they are proudly, unapologetically ‘pro-life?’

Yes. Yes, they are.

Now ask the obvious question. Where did the script come from?

Because now we this wasn’t just an angry reaction from the right. The April ICE directive came two months before the ruling. The Fox appearances were loaded and ready. The DOJ memo dropped the same night. Somebody had already written the planned thing out. They just needed the Supreme Court to hand them the opening whistle. That somebody has a name. Several names, actually.

The Center for Immigration Studies

Read just the prologue of Project 2025, and you will find the Heritage Foundation’s Advisory Board. On that list, you will find many names, and one of those is the Center for Immigration Studies. It was founded by a man named John Tanton. An ophthalmologist from Michigan who believed America’s biggest problem was the ‘wrong people’ having babies.

• In 1979, he founded the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) which is a political lobbying group to push the government against immigration.

• In 1985, he spun off the Center for Immigration Studies to be FAIR’s research front. It pretends to be non-partisan, non-biased reporting. They even call themselves, “pro-immigrant.” It’s not. Look at where it came from.

• In 1996, he backed NumbersUSA for lobbying. This was the operation designed to send out millions of action alerts and flood congressional switchboards with angry phone calls. They were built to create the total illusion of a massive, spontaneous uprising of ordinary Americans demanding these exact policies.

Each one designed to look like a separate institution. Together, they are one of the the single largest drivers of anti-immigration policy in the United States, and they have been for forty years. Yes, they all still exist today.

Mark Krikorian, the author of The New Case Against Immigration, Both Legal and Illegal, now runs the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS). Hours after the Supreme Court struck down Trump’s birthright citizenship order, Krikorian told PBS NewsHour the loss “almost a gift to the president,” because it gives him more incentive to deport immigrants before they have kids.

That same night, CIS published a legal breakdown of the ruling, written by Andrew R. Arthur. At the exact same time, the Trump administration’s talking points about “Birth Tourism” used Krikorian’s framing almost word for word.

So, what does the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) actually do?

People like Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, Kristi Noem throw numbers at us. Fox News loops the same digits under the same faces. The numbers feel authoritative. They are meant to. But where do they come from? The Center for Immigration Studies, of course. The Center for Immigration Studies has been designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

They do not use United States Census data. They do not use official government headcounts or verified field reports. The reason is simple. The highly specific, deeply inflammatory things they claim are happening are not tracked by any legitimate agency. No one collects that data because that data, as they present it, does not exist.

So they guess.

CIS builds its numbers from public federal datasets, targeted FOIA requests, leaked documents from inside DHS and ICE, and their own modeling layered on top of survey data. Almost none of it is proprietary. Almost all of it is interpretation dressed as measurement.

The activists invent the estimates. The politicians quote the estimates on the floor of the House. The establishment media reports the estimates as fact. Then the activists cite the media coverage to prove they were right all along. The loop closes. It was designed to close.

They launder opinion through a think tank, convert it into data, and expect you to swallow the whole thing without asking a single question.

You are expected to be frightened. You are expected to be grateful. You are not expected to look.

But if you do look, this is what you find. Pregnant children, some of them thirteen years old, locked in a facility the government already shut down once for neglect, reopened, and filled again. Miller's fingerprints are on that policy too. I wrote about that here.

During that first presidency, Trump created a “zero tolerance“ policy. Thousands of families were separated. There was backlash, because even now, sometimes, there is. Tom Homan responded by standing at a podium inside the Center for Immigration Studies and calling the separations “necessary.”

Approximately 1,360 children of the 4,500 that were separated from their families at the U.S. border during the first Trump administration remain unaccounted for. That is a sentence you can read and then continue with your day. Most people do.

__

This time around?

In February 2025, Trump signed an executive order blocking undocumented immigrants from federal public benefits they were never eligible for in the first place. The White House “fact sheet” backing it up used CIS and FAIR data.

In July 2025, at “Alligator Alcatraz,” Trump claimed the average undocumented immigrant costs American taxpayers $70,000. That figure came straight from CIS.

There is also the personnel. These people move between CIS and the government.

• In 2020, Trump nominated Ronald Mortensen, a CIS fellow, as Assistant Secretary of State for Population, Refugees, and Migration. That role oversaw the entire U.S. Refugee Admissions Program.

• Jon Feere left CIS to join ICE as a senior advisor in 2017. When that term ended, he went back to CIS as Director of Investigations. In January 2025, he returned to ICE as Chief of Staff. By December, he was Senior Adviser to the ICE Director. A revolving door.

• Julie Kirchner, former executive director of FAIR, another node in the same Tanton network, went on to lead the USCIS oversight office in 2017.

• Robert Law served as Director of Regulatory Affairs and Policy at CIS, then moved to the America First Policy Institute. In January 2025, he joined the Department of Homeland Security as Senior Counselor to Secretary Kristi Noem. By September, he was Under Secretary of Strategy, Policy, and Plans at DHS.

• Todd Bensman, a longtime national security fellow at CIS, was brought into the administration in June 2025 as a senior adviser to White House “Border Czar” Tom Homan. Just two days ago he joined the Heritage Foundation as a “Senior Research Fellow.”

  The think tank writes the policy. The personnel carry it into the building. The building implements it. Then the think tank publishes a paper saying the policy is working. You are not supposed to notice that they are all the same people.

  ---

Stephen Miller is the closest thread connecting Trump’s cabinet to CIS, closer than anyone else in the room.

He spent seven years as Jeff Sessions’ communications director, and his job there was to take CIS research and package it for public consumption. He mass emailed their material to Republican staffers across Congress, building a pipeline that moved CIS talking points into the mouths of lawmakers long before he ever walked into the West Wing.

Leaked emails published by SPLC's Hatewatch showed Miller spent ten months feeding CIS research directly to Breitbart, including confidential reports and the personal cell number of CIS’s research director. The editor who received those emails later said “what Stephen Miller sent to me in those emails has become policy.”

In the White House, Miller did what he’d trained for. He put CIS researchers on national television and called them experts. He pushed federal agencies to adopt CIS estimates that career officials had already flagged as broken, numbers built on sand, forced into concrete anyway.

In his 2026 Fox News segment with Jesse Watters on "birth tourism," Miller echoed the CIS 2020 estimate of 20,000 to 26,000 annual "birth-tourism babies," though he did not name the source. He never names the source.

And when you look just beyond the surface, you’ll find that it all comes full circle.

Linda Chavez is the connector here. She ran U.S. English, another Tanton-founded group that fought bilingual education while Tanton served as its president. Reagan made her White House Director of Public Liaison and Staff Director of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. Bush Sr. put her on the National Commission on Migrant Education. Bush Jr. had her run his immigration task force during his 2000 campaign and later nominated her for Secretary of Labor.

• The Federalist Society & Center for Equal Opportunity: She sits as the Chairman of the Center for Equal Opportunity. And under her leadership, they operate hand-in-glove with the Heritage Foundation and Federalist Society.

• Project 2025: They share the same goals, they write the same policies, and yes, her Center for Equal Opportunity sits right there on the advisory board for Project 2025. Right alongside the Center for Immigration Studies.

Ironically, Linda is currently vice chair of the Renew Democracy Initiative whose mission is to "unmask and confront the alliance of dictators threatening freedom around the world and inspiring people in the US and in other free countries to value and defend their own democracies."

IT ALL BOILS DOWN TO THE GREAT REPLACEMENT THEORY

if you read anything in this very long article, I hope it’s this:

John Tanton built these organizations years before I was born. A man I had never heard of, shaping the country I grew up in. His goal was clear, though he dressed it in policy language and foundation letterhead. He wanted to reduce immigration because he believed immigrants, the non-European ones, would eventually outnumber people who looked like him.

This was not his idea alone. It has a name: The Great Replacement Theory. The belief that somewhere, someone is orchestrating the deliberate replacement of white populations in Western nations with non-white immigrants.

It has millions of believers, some of them in Congress, some of them on television, some of them in the comment sections, some of them at Thanksgiving dinner. People like Vice President of the United States, J.D. Vance and Stephen Miller.

Our people. Replace. The language of the theory, stripped of its name, spoken aloud by a man who would become Vice President of the United States.

And his pregnant wife, Usha, is the daughter of Indian immigrants. He goes home to her every night. Sits across from her at the table. Looks at the faces of their children, who are half the thing he is warning about. Our people aren't having enough children to replace themselves. Which people, exactly. Which selves. Not hers. Not theirs. He has drawn a line through his own household and chosen the side that does not include the woman he married.

So is this what he’s always believed, or is he just pushing the chosen rhetoric?

And this theory did not begin with immigration at the southern border. It began with Jewish people.

The original conspiracy held that Jewish elites were the architects, the hidden hand orchestrating the replacement of white Christian populations from behind closed doors.

Stephen Miller is Jewish. He knows this.

Miller's maternal great-great-grandfather, Wolf-Leib Glosser, arrived in the United States in 1903. An Ashkenazi Jew from the shtetl of Antopol, in the Russian Empire. The Glossers did not suffer the Holocaust. They were already here. Perhaps that is the distance that makes all of this possible in his mind.

At some point the theory shed its first skin and began to target all immigrants. I could not tell you the exact moment it happened. All I know is where we are.

We have a theory born aimed at Jewish people, championed by a Jewish man, aimed at brown families, funded by tax-deductible donations, enforced by the federal government of the United States. If you wrote it as fiction, no one would believe the characters.

But plausibility was never the point, but rather, repetition was. Say it enough times, in enough rooms, with enough graphs behind you, and it stops sounding like a conspiracy. It starts sounding like ‘common sense.’

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On January 20, 2025, day one of his second term, Donald Trump signed 26 executive orders. By the end of week one, the count hit 36. The term “executive order” is generous. It’s really just a memo telling executive branch agencies how to behave within the confines of the law. It’s not a law, you can’t change the law with it, and it’s not the final say.

Among the executive orders that Trump swept his jumbo Sharpie across was Executive Order 14160, “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship.”

This EO stated that any children born to an undocumented immigrant or an immigrant with temporary status — such as a tourist, visa holder, or someone here under temporary protected status — were not American citizens unless their fathers were. That they did not have birthright citizenship.

That order had since made the long, inevitable journey to the Supreme Court, a year and a half and several news cycles later. This is the highest court in the land. It was created strictly to uphold the U. S. Constitution and to ensure liberty and justice for all. They’re supposed to be our protectors that sit at the head of the judicial branch of the United States of America untouched by outside influence.

It’s truly a monumental job; perhaps the most important one in America. So, how the hell did we let the Federalist Society walk right in and take it?

If you’ve managed to remain unfamiliar with the Federalist Society until now, consider that innocence spent. And if you are? Well, you probably saw this coming.

Six of its nine justices in SCOTUS have ties with the organization or the men who conceived and control it. The Federalist Society did not build a pipeline to the Supreme Court by chance.

The Federalist Society (FedSoc) is a powerful, conservative lawyer network founded in 1982 by students at Yale and Chicago who felt ‘outnumbered’ by progressives on campus. Trace any case that makes the ACLU lawyers drink, and you will find a FedSoc member on the other side.

The society operates under a legal theory called originalism; they follow the belief that law in America should be interpreted under the original seven articles of the Constitution. Legal amendments — things that abolished slavery, gave women the right to vote, and gave all American’s equal protection — are things they believe should have never existed at all.

FedSoc originalists love to skip the part where the original Constitution, Article V, built in instructions for how to amend it

With chapters on over 200 campuses, the Federalist Society does not stumble onto its members. It finds them, cultivates them, and sends them out. And that’s the road that led to the birth of Leonard Leo — a lifelong friend of Justice Clarence Thomas — hand-selecting all three justices that Trump placed on the Supreme Court.

Trump appointed three SCOTUS justices during his first term: Neil Gorsuch (2017), Brett Kavanaugh (2018), and Amy Coney Barrett (2020).

The Federalist Society may have started as a fringe college society in 1982, but in 1986 that changed.

Leonard Leo, a law student at Cornell University, stumbled onto the Federalist Society and he is inspired. Since Cornell didn’t have a presence on campus, Leo went on to found the school’s first FedSoc student chapter.

From there Leo built and then used a massive network and billions of dollars in anonymous donations to strategically pack the U.S. court system — all the way up to the Supreme Court — with strictly conservative, ideologically aligned judges.

By also funding state elections and lawyers, he ensured these judges received the exact cases needed to overturn major progressive laws, such as the right to an abortion. Now that he has reshaped the courts, Leo is using a historic $1.6 billion fund to expand his conservative crusade beyond the legal system and into everyday American culture, business, and education.

We could spend the entire hour tonight just peeling back the layers of this thing to show you what’s really going on underneath. But frankly? The details are so deliberately convoluted, so completely exhausting, that it would take longer than any normal, sane person is willing to sit through right now. We’ll save that investigation for another day.

What’s important for this article is that is that you understand the power and reach of FedSoc.

THE LONG GAME

And now that you do, let us talk about just how completely the Federalist Society has woven itself into the Supreme Court of the United States, and how close that relationship came to setting a precedent that American democracy would not have recovered from.

Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch all voted today to get rid of birthright citizenship.

Had it passed, the implications would have stretched far beyond birthright citizenship. It would have established that a president can, by executive order alone, functionally amend the Constitution without amending it. And these guys? They were OK with it.

The three Federalist Society appointees Trump put on this Court, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Coney Barrett, all voted today. Two of them, plus the two FedSoc alumni already seated, refused to say the Fourteenth Amendment itself guarantees birthright citizenship.

Today’s decision in Trump v. Barbara arrived dressed as a headline victory. Every network ran the number 6 to 3 all afternoon. Birthright citizenship stands. The Fourteenth Amendment survives.

Chief Justice Roberts, joined by Sotomayor, Kagan, Coney Barrett, and Jackson, wrote that “citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights, to freely participate in our political community. The Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to ‘every free-born person in this land.’ We keep that promise today.”

Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined the outcome. He rejected the reasoning. In his concurrence, Kavanaugh wrote that Executive Order 14160 doesn’t violate the Fourteenth Amendment at all. According to him, it only conflicts with a 1952 statute, 8 U.S.C. §1401(a), that Congress passed to codify what the Constitution already guarantees.

The Fourteenth Amendment, all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States, is, in Kavanaugh’s view, no barrier at all to a president stripping citizenship from newborns. He believes Congress could amend §1401(a) or otherwise enact new legislation establishing exceptions to birthright citizenship for children born to foreign citizens unlawfully or temporarily in the country, and he would have zero constitutional objection.

Senators Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, and Katie Britt already introduced that bill. It’s called the Birthright Citizenship Act of 2025, and Graham said out loud it was written to codify Trump’s executive order.

That’s the play. Today’s ruling was Leonard Leo showing us where his fifth vote sits and waiting for Congress to hand him the version he can actually win.

Thomas’s dissent runs 91 pages. Ninety. One. Pages. He argues the Fourteenth Amendment applies only to people “domiciled” in the United States, a word that appears nowhere in the amendment itself.

Gorsuch — a 2017 Trump appointee — he signed onto that dissent.

Alito filed his own to complain about “birth tourists” and to tell the millions of people who would have lost citizenship to take it up with Congress. The same Congress currently sitting on S. 304.

Sotomayor is 72. Kagan is 66. The people willing to say no will not always be here.

Leonard Leo spent thirty years building the pipeline that produced this exact 5 to 4 split. The Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868 to overturn Dred Scott, to guarantee that no future court could strip citizenship from an American child based on who their parents were. That guarantee just survived by a single vote from a Chief Justice appointed in 2005 by a Federalist Society president.

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Back in 2010, nearly two decades ago, reporters were already speaking out against the abhorrent conditions in their facilities. Some states even shut them down back when oversight was still somewhat a thing. They have been getting away with this for decades. Nobody stops them. It is not just the private prisons, either. They are doing the exact same thing in their mental health facilities. They are doing it in their immigration detention centers.

So how exactly does a corporation get this massive? Who exactly do they know in Washington to keep getting away with this?

Well, yes Trump. But given all the power they’ve had for years, you have to ask yourself where they came from. And as it turns out, the history is a lot darker and much more complicated than you could ever imagine.

But they’ve lasted this long because they didn’t just pop up overnight.

They’ve been doing this since 1954. Only back then, the GEO Group didn’t exist. They went by a different name: Wackenhut. The corruption and blood-spilled by Wackenhut has been hidden between the pages of the state-issued history books, and somehow…

Blood is still on their hands, even today.

CORRUPTION

Jean Wilson Brutus was only 41-years-old. He entered ICE custody on December 11, 2025. The next day, ICE transferred him to GEO Group’s facility, Delaney Hall, where he left this world forever.

According to ICE’s own account, he showed no signs of distress at intake and had no history of any health issues. The timeline given is that at 1:25 pm, a registered nurse sits down to do an intake screening on Jean. They check his vitals, completely normal. He denies any medical issues.

The nurse officially clears him for the general population — a totally healthy man, right?

As he is being escorted to his housing unit, this perfectly healthy 41-year-old man suddenly, “becomes sluggish” and “starts hyperventilating” in the hall.

Think about the timeline. His intake was at 1:25 pm; they called for an ambulance at 4:32 pm. What exactly happened in those 3-hours while a human being was under the care of a massive, for-profit prison corporation that they didn’t feel the need to call 911? Is it that much of an inconvenience for you to get them life-saving care?

Unfortunately, Jean was rushed to University Hospital where he was pronounced dead only 4.5 hours after his nurse intake. The cause of death on his death certificate is “inconclusive,” and his family wants answers.

His death was the first publicly reported death at Delaney Hall since the facility reopened just months earlier under a 15-year, $1 billion ICE contract that pays GEO Group roughly $60 million a year.

Just weeks ago, about 300 detainees announced a joint hunger and labor strike on May 22. Why? Because the billion-dollar GEO Group was serving them rotting, moldy food infested with worms. Because they were denying the pregnant and the elderly access to healthcare. They were demanding the release of the vulnerable people locked up with them.

When Sen. Andy Kim of New Jersey arrived to inspect the facility that month, GEO Group told him he could enter the building but he could not speak to a single detainee. If he tried, the tour would end. Kim said it was the first time he had ever been blocked from oversight at a detention center.

A private, for-profit corporation just gagged an elected official from inspecting a taxpayer-funded black site. And it’s not the first time they’ve done this.

GEO Group has actively sued several states, and is currently suing Colorado after they passed a very basic, common-sense law allowing health inspectors to make sure the people inside GEO facilities have clean water, edible food, and basic medical care. That's it. That’s the reason.

So, we have a multi-billion-dollar corporate monopoly that has spent years using an army of high-priced lawyers to build a legal fortress around its operations. They have systematically stripped away the right of the public to know what is being done in our name, and with our money.

~51 people have died in ICE custody since Trump’s 2025 inauguration. About one in three people in ICE custody is held by GEO Group. According to their own documentation 80% of GEO’s revenue comes from ICE or state government contracts.

And the corruption is deep: The acting director of ICE — David Venturella — used to be a senior vice president at GEO. Pam Bondi, the U.S. Attorney General was a registered lobbyist for GEO in 2019. Tom Homan, Trump’s “border czar,” was on a GEO consulting contract weeks before he took the job. He was also acting director of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Trump’s first term.

GEO Group was incorporated in 1988 as Wackenhut Corrections Corporation.

It spent its first decade as a subsidiary of a private security firm so embedded in the American intelligence apparatus that the media called it the shadow CIA.

Long before GEO Group ran a single private prison, the company that it was born from was the largest private intelligence — both foreign and local — operation in the United States.

A firm whose founder, George Wackenhut, was a former FBI agent who built his fortune by keeping files on more than four million Americans suspected of being communists, civil rights demonstrators, or anti-war protesters.

George Wackenhut walked so Peter Thiel and Palantir — a massive digital age surveillance company — could run. And much like Thiel, Wackenhut had his hand in the global cookie jar.

‘SHADOW CIA’ WAS NOT A METAPHOR

Imagine it’s the late 1960s. You’re going about your life, paying your taxes, raising your kids, assuming you live in a free country. But unbeknownst to you, a private company down in Miami — not the government, a private company — has a secret file on you. Well, you and 4 million other Americans.

The whole thing was started back in 1954 by a 34-year-old former FBI agent named George Wackenhut and three of his bureau buddies. They originally called it “Special Agent Investigators Inc.”

by 1955, there was a disagreement among the founders. So George Wackenhut — quite literally — fist fought one of his partners, bought out the rest, and put his own name on the door.

Initially, George Wackenhut, an Army vet from Pennsylvania, tried to join the FBI in 1945 and got rejected. The Bureau wasn’t impressed and offered him half his asking salary, which he turned down. He came back in 1950. J. Edgar Hoover — arguably the most corrupt Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation —hired him in January 1951 at $5000 a year.

The company he went onto create was hard line anti-communist, anti-leftist, and anti-democratic. And for their employees they recruited heavily from the FBI, the CIA, and the military. This created a ‘shadow CIA’ of a private corporation that wasn’t subject to government oversight. At least not at first. So, they started collecting files.

The files grew fast. By 1965, Wackenhut was telling potential investors it had records on 2.5 million suspected dissidents, roughly one in every 46 American adults then living.

In 1966, the company purchased the private files of Karl Barslaag, a former staff member of the House Un-American Activities Committee. This was a committee that was formed to investigate “disloyalty” and “subversive activities” of American citizens.

Frank Donner, the then director of the ACLU's Project on Political Surveillance, documented all of this in his books and papers. He found that Wackenhut kept updating these dossiers right through the 1960s and into the 1970s.

If you protested a war, if you marched for civil rights, congratulations; you were added to their list of — and this is their exact term — “derogatory types.”

And what did they do with this massive, terrifying, unaccountable database? They monetized it. The company sold the information to clients who wanted to know who in their workforce or their town had been to a protest. Companies used this to screen potential hires and make sure they weren’t union organizers and activists.

Between 1975 and 1976, the U.S. Senate actually did its job for once. They found that the government surveillance and attacks went far beyond the House Un-American Activities Committee.

This was brought to light by a different committee — the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities — aka the Church Committee. They pulled back the curtain and exposed what the intelligence agencies were really doing in the dark.

They uncovered the FBI’s COINTELPRO program and the CIA’s MHCHAOS operation. Both of which had been illegally surveilling and infiltrating Americans engaged in civil rights and antiwar activism. Many of the original documents from these programs are now publicly available online thanks to FOIA for anyone interested in reading them.

In 1970, The Fair Credit Reporting Act passed. This let Americans see and challenge what credit agencies AND investigative agencies were holding about them.

The combination made a corporate database of “derogatory types” legally untenable and a massive liability.

So, if you’re the Wackenhut Corporation, what do you do? Do you come clean? Do you shred the files and apologize to the millions of Americans whose privacy you violated? Of course not… You don’t do that.

No — you find a loophole.

They took their massive dragnet of dossiers and handed it all off to a tax-exempt religious nonprofit called the Church League of America. Much like many of the non-profits of today, it was not a charity, but a total farce. They weren't subject to the same laws so he just stored the files there so he didn't lose access to his database.

The Church League shared the files with the red squads of big-city police departments that had been doing the same kind of surveillance for decades.

In 2026, nothing has changed. What they did is very similar to Peter Thiel’s Gotham — an intelligence software that aggregates massive amounts of disconnected data like phone records, license plate scans, and financial histories into a single, searchable visual web so government and law enforcement agencies can track individuals and their networks.

When the Church League eventually dissolved in the 1980s, its files were acquired by the Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at New York University (NYU) where they still sit to this day.

The company that built that database wasn’t a few fringe FBI employees. The Wackenhut board over the decades included former FBI Director Clarence Kelley, Defense Secretary and CIA Deputy Director Frank Carlucci, CIA Deputy Director Bobby Ray Inman, Secret Service Director James J. Rowley, Marine Commandant P.X. Kelley, and DIA Director General Joseph Carroll.

William Casey served as Wackenhut’s legal counsel before President Ronald Reagan made him CIA director in 1981.

The contracts followed the personnel. Much like GEO Group, most of Wackenhut’s contracts were with the U.S. government.

By the early 1990s, Wackenhut was the largest private security provider to U.S. embassies worldwide. This includes in Chile, Greece, and El Salvador, countries.

These were places where the CIA just happened to be working alongside right wing death squads. What a coincidence.

Then the government handed them contracts to ‘protect’ America's top-secret and sensitive locations: Area 51, The Nevada nuclear test site, nuclear facilities at Hanford and the Savannah River.

In the 1980s, Congress explicitly banned the United States from arming the Contras in Central America. So Washington used Wackenhut to bypass the law entirely. They set up an explosives factory on the Cabazon Indian reservation. Why there? Because it was legally treated as a sovereign nation.

They exploited a domestic loophole to manufacture bombs on American soil and ship them directly to foreign rebels.

Yes, they developed and shipped weapons to the Contras during the Iran-Contra affair that was made possible by the Reagan administration.

In 1992, an investigative journalist named John Connolly documented a 1990 Wackenhut operation that allegedly trucked equipment across the Mexican border. The purpose was to manufacture chemical weapons for Saddam Hussein. I guess old habits die hard.

WHO IS CASHING IN TODAY?

In 1984, Wackenhut launched a corrections and detention business as an internal division. The new venture was formally incorporated as Wackenhut Corrections Corporation in 1988. A 38-year-old executive named George C. Zoley was made its founding president and director. George Wackenhut himself sat on the early board.

In May 1994, Wackenhut Corrections went public on the New York Stock Exchange, and people were trading dividends on prison cells.

The Wackenhut name had grown sour in the mouths of the public. So in 2003, they scrubbed the name completely. They brought in the PR consultants and the focus groups, and they rebranded the company. Wackenhut was dead.

What did they call this vast network of cages and concrete? The GEO Group.

• 2005. Correctional Services Corporation, for $62 million in cash plus $124 million in assumed debt.

• 2006. CentraCore Properties Trust, for $356 million. CentraCore was a real estate investment trust that owned 13 correctional facilities. One of them was a 726-bed building in Newark, New Jersey called Delaney Hall.

• 2010. Cornell Companies, for $730 million in cash and stock. The merger produced a combined company with approximately $1.5 billion in annual revenue and 78,000 beds under management.

• 2011. BI Incorporated, a Colorado-based provider of electronic offender-tracking technology that held an exclusive contract with ICE for what became the Intensive Supervision Appearance Program, or ISAP.

• 2017. Community Education Centers, the company that had been operating Delaney Hall on a lease from GEO since 2006.

He went from president of the subsidiary in 1988, to chairman in 2002, to CEO of GEO from its public listing in 1994 until his temporary retirement in June 2021, to Executive Chairman, and then back to CEO on March 1, 2026, on an employment agreement that runs through April 2029.

His current contract pays $1.2 million in base salary, a target bonus of 200% of base, and annual restricted stock grants worth at least 300% of base. In 2025, his total compensation was roughly $15 million.

But you may be wondering, who else is profiting from this? Who are the shareholders? Wall Street.

The top five owners:

1. BlackRock: Larry Finks empire. They hold 20.59 million shares of the GEO Group. That is roughly 15.41% of the entire company, valued at nearly $478.28 million.

2. The Vanguard Group: Through its various portfolio management arms — like Vanguard Portfolio MGMT and Vanguard Capital Mgmt — they control somewhere between 10 to 11% of the outstanding shares valued at $392 million.

3. Pentwater Capital Management LP: Founded and owned by Matt Halbower, a billionaire hedge fund manager and now investment banker.

4. UBS Group AG: This is a a Swiss multinational investment bank that owns 7.03% worth $278.52M. Interestingly, Blackrock owns 5% of UBS Group AG themselves, and Vanguard owns 3-4%.

5. Continental General Insurance Co: This company owns 4.27%, worth $169.39M. Michael Gorzynski serves as the Executive Chairman of Continental General Insurance Co meaning he made the decision to buy trades.

You can view the full 34-page list of GEO Group shareholders are Nasdaq by clicking here.

WHERE DOES THIS LEAVE US?

Jean Wilson Brutus is where this ends, because Jean Wilson Brutus is where it always ends. A healthy 41-year-old man walked into Delaney Hall on December 12 and was dead within hours. Three hours passed between his intake and the call for help. His death certificate reads "inconclusive."

Every person that walks into a GEO Group facility never walks out the same. Some never walk out at all. And the corruption of the company is older than the President of the United States of America. We’ve let this go on for far too long.

Even if you feel small, you voice is large.

Your voice is large because theirs depends on you staying quiet. That is the whole arrangement. Wackenhut built an empire on four million people who never knew their names sat in a file. GEO Group runs on the bet that you will read about Jean Wilson Brutus, feel something for an afternoon, and move on. Their lawyers, their lobbyists, their revolving door of former officials all rest on that single wager about your attention span.

So break the bet and prove them wrong. Learn the names of the people who died in those facilities. Say them out loud. Call the senators who got turned away at the gate and ask what he plans to do about it. Find out which of your own representatives took GEO money and make them answer for it in public. Support the legal aid groups and journalists who keep dragging these black sites into daylight, because daylight is the one thing a company like this has spent seventy years trying to buy its way out of.

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For most of the 20th century, mass institutionalization of disabled people was the default in America. If you had a physical, psychological, or intellectual disability, the state could — and often would — lock you in large, crowded asylums or state schools for the entirety of your life.

These facilities were rife with overcrowding and both physical and psychological abuse; state facilities built for 1,000 people instead held 4,000 to 5,000 people behind their decaying, concrete walls.

That era ended with the landmark 1999 Supreme Court decision Olmstead v. L.C, a case where it was ruled that the government forcing disabled people into institutions was unlawful discrimination under Title II of the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

When it was affirmed by SCOTUS, it became the federal rule for people to reference.

This was only a fragment of that fight. One chapter in a book written in exhaustion, in grief, in blood, and in the slow accumulation of small wins paid for by people who would not live to see them.

But this week, on June 18th, 2026, just four days before the 27th anniversary of Olmstead, the Justice Department released a thirty-nine-page-memo calling to overturn it, by claiming it does not mean what every federal court for nearly three decades has said it does.

Olmstead did not reform everything in 1999, but it became the foundation for every reform that has happened since. Including the Ohio lawsuit that came 21 years later using Olmstead as the basis, that resulted in freeing 1,000 disabled people from facilities where they had been waiting an average of 13 years to go home. That was the work Olmstead made possible.

Now, the DOJ wants to get rid of it.

A memo is not a ruling. But this one came from the DOJ itself, and silence right now is the exact response they are hoping for. This is a litmus test, and how we respond is the answer. Speak up. Learn about it. Talk about it.

The timing of the anti-Olmstead memo is almost ominous, aligning suspiciously well with last July’s executive order, “Ending Crime and Disorder on American Streets,” a directive that pushes for the involuntary civil commitment of thousands of Americans, as well as NSPM-7, the executive memo that gives them cover to place normal dissenters under civil commitment.

A mandate of that scale requires massive physical infrastructure. The DOJ has already started writing the checks, up to $3 million per grant under the FY25 Public Safety and Mental Health Initiative, which pays and incentivizes states to build “crisis stabilization centers,” with “no refusal policies,” meaning police drop someone off & the center cannot turn them away.

And not everyone can be framed as having a psychological or mental disability. And for those that can’t, you need to look no further than the contractors of confinement, GEO Group and CoreCivic.

All together, GEO Group and CoreCivic run roughly 160 facilities that contain ~150,000 beds, and all of it’s paid for by us. ICE alone accounts for 48% of GEO Group’s revenue and 35% of CoreCivic’s. That is billions of dollars in income a year. After every immigrant has been ‘processed’ through, the cages will still be standing, and their pockets will still need filled.

Of note: Geo Group and CoreCivic both have an existing behavioral health specific infrastructure, and are both eligible to run these “crisis stabilization centers,” too.

THE “OVERCONSUMPTION” OF HEALTHCARE IN AMERICA

I want to preface this by saying that, “overconsumption” is their word choice, not mine.

It comes from an excerpt of Project 2025, the seditious plan written years in advance for the Trump administration by the Heritage Foundation.

Their specific complaint being that health insurance, “induces overconsumption of health care,” and that Medicare and Medicaid are, “irrational reimbursement schemes.”

It’s vaguely written and uses phrasing that almost makes it sound reasonable.

Well, that is until you look at the data and see that disabled people are 10-15% of Medicaid enrollees, but account for ~40% of all spending.

Autistic children alone ‘cost’ the government billions, because Medicaid overwhelmingly pays for their care. The Trump administration repeatedly and explicitly refers to autism as an epidemic that destroys families and children.

They are not calling it that because they’re worried about autistic people.

‘Economic Researchers’ in suits sit in a room calculating the lifetime social cost of autism and put a $3.6 million price tag on each child. The head of HHS reverberates that to the rest of America. RFK Jr. said autistic kids, “will never pay taxes” and, “will never hold a job,” as if your value as a person ends the second you can’t work.

Honestly, the entire section on Health and Human Services reads like they care about improving patient access and affordability. Every single word in it was chosen to make sure it reads that way.

And as a registered nurse, I will be honest, a few of their ideas here are surprisingly good, like saying we should prevent drug companies from funding government research that decides whether their drugs get approved and sold to Americans.

It’s a real problem. When a pharmaceutical company pays for the study of its own drug, the answer is almost always yes. It’s called industry sponsorship bias, and that is exactly how OxyContin got marketed as non-addictive, lighting the flames of the opioid epidemic in America.

This idea did not survive the inauguration. Roughly 53% of Project 2025 was enacted by the end of 2025, and this was not part of it. In fact, they are doing the opposite, and pushing more research into the hands of private pharmaceutical companies, while simultaneously cutting NIH funding for unbiased research.

And I need to be blunt:

One good idea does not outweigh the heinous amount of frightening proposals and claims throughout the 920-page-document.

The entire HHS section opens with a very specific claim that white Americans have lost 7% of their expected lifespan. It blames abortion, LGBTQ+ identity, transgender people, and divorced mothers. And it explicitly names each of these groups as a threat to children and America.

A lot of people treat Project 2025 as old news, but it’s not, and doing that would be a mistake. Every maneuver, every bill, every single thing you see happening inside the United States government is to execute the exact goals written in that document.

TL;DR? Project 2025 is not good by any means.

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We need to talk about their plan to fix healthcare "overconsumption" in America, because the proposal we are allowed to read is worse when you scratch the surface.

The ‘fix’ they propose is to hand the health insurance market to private insurers instead, and push everyone into HSAs, which are savings accounts that let you set aside pre-tax money for medical costs, which only helps if you have money to set aside.

Many disabled people do not. They are not allowed to.

7.5 million people (including those disabled from birth and those who became that way later in life) rely on monthly SSI income from the Social Security Administration (SSA) to survive. For disabled people to get help, the government requires a disability, having limited assets, and being under the poverty line.

HSAs are for healthcare, but the IRS has a technicality that grants people the ability to pull the money out of them. The SSA makes decisions not based on what you actually do, but instead what you COULD.

Anything that can be turned into cash is counted against you, and with asset limit of only $2,000 total, and owning a small HSA puts you over SSA’s federally-mandated limit. This would make a disabled person lose the income that they need to survive.

The Big Beautiful Bill gutted Medicaid by a trillion dollars, 11.8 million Americans are losing coverage outright, another 3.1 million are losing their marketplace plans, and disabled people are already among the wreckage left behind.

It Gets Worse.

Another thing to consider with the push away from Medicaid and towards private insurance companies is the fact that private health insurance is built to fix short-term problems, like an infection or a broken bone. It is not set up to pay for years of ongoing developmental support.

This is an ongoing problem.

In 2021, a father sued United Behavioral Health in Doe v. United Behavioral Health because the United Health plan that his employer bought refused to pay for therapies for his autistic son.

A 2020 report found that roughly 78% of UnitedHealthcare's business runs through self-funded plans, which is the legal arrangement giant corporations like Target and Walmart and even the ones that major hospital systems use, specifically, to avoid paying for state-mandated care like autism therapy. Therapies that are covered under Medicaid.

Just days before Trumps second inauguration, UnitedHealthcare donated $5 million to MAGA Inc., the primary super PAC supporting President Trump. This ‘donation’ was twenty-five times larger than any other contribution they’ve made. I don’t know about you, but this makes me look twice at how the DOJ has handled the Luigi Mangione case.

Oh, and in 2025, the IRS raised the maximum amount of funding people can put into these high-deductible HSA accounts. In fact, this something that United Healthcare, through their subsidiary Optum Bank, has utilized astronomically.

Yes, you read that correctly.

UnitedHealth Group owns the insurance company, the bank that holds the HSA, and the doctors, clinics, and pharmacies the HSA pays. The same company collects on the same dollar three or four times before it leaves your account. The doctor who decides what care you need works for them.

This is something that CVS Caremark, does, too.

The company that decides whether to cover it works for them. The pharmacy that decides what you pay works for them. The bank that holds the money you use to pay it works for them. Every decision about your care is made by someone whose job is to charge you more.

So, to the Heritage Foundation and everyone making their Project 2025 dreams come true in the government:

The able-bodied stay insured, and your donors stay rich. The disabled get a benefit too small to live on, an asset cap too low to save out of, and a healthcare market run by the same companies who write your white papers.

Able bodied, employed, lucky. That’s your healthcare model. Everyone else gets a coffin and thoughts-and-prayers from whatever senator is on your payroll.

And as a nurse, I am so fucking sick of watching people suffer and die because of the choices of the wealthy whose only concern is to make more money, even though they have more money than they could spend in a hundred thousand lifetimes.

Your proposal for HSA accounts is a joke. You want patients to "save" for their insulin? They're choosing between rent and rationing meds, and your answer is open a savings account.

You call it consumer freedom—

I have seen first hand what your idea of “consumer freedom” looks like.

It looks like a 34 year old with multiple sclerosis losing her power wheelchair coverage. It looks like a diabetic amputee discharged to a homeless shelter because Medicaid wouldn't cover the rehabilitation bed. It looks like an autistic child stripped of speech therapy mid sentence, because the waiver waitlist in Texas is now fifteen years long and his family makes forty thousand dollars too much to qualify for what’s left.

That's a culling, let’s not pretend otherwise.

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Dissent in Bloom is written, researched, edited, and run by one disabled nurse raising autistic kids, the exact people Heritage wrote out of their healthcare model. Free subscriptions grow the work. Paid subscriptions and one time donations sustain it. Either way, thanks for being here.

The man names his companies after the darkest places in Tolkien’s map, so when Thiel reads like the bad guy in his own story, treat it as a deliberate.

This week, a basic security lapse led to a leak of internal information about the notoriously secretive organization, Dialog. It’s a private, invitation-only group cofounded in 2006 by Thiel and Auren Hoffman. The leak uncovered a registration list of 222 people scheduled to attend Dialog’s private retreat near Dublin, Ireland, in August 2026.

I scanned the list and found data brokers, algorithmic fortune tellers, and people who turn a profit on armed conflict.

Some of the registered attendees include: Democratic Senator Cory Booker, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Republican Senator Ted Cruz, Elon Musk, Scooter Braun, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, the President of Microsoft, the Governor of Maryland, Leonard Leo, and many, many more.

According to the schedule, attendees can expect an eclectic mix of off-the-record talks, among them, “Money (Does?) Buy Happiness,” “Bring Back Nuclear,” “Navigating WWIII,” “Battlefield Technologies,” and, somewhat incongruously, “How’s Your Sex Life?”

The agenda also includes “Build-a-Cult,” led by the founder of the Christian networking platform Pray.com, and “Build-a-Party,” hosted by a former White House national security official.

You might read this itinerary, roll your eyes at the profound absurdity of the presentations, and find it easy to dismiss the whole meeting.

However, this isn’t just a weekend getaway for the ‘Masters of the Universe’ to drink single-malt and complain about their love lives but a network of regulatory and institutional capture.

Regulatory and Institutional Capture

The fact of the matter is that these meetings have been on-going, at-least annually, since Dialog was founded in 2006.

This shows us that this isn't some isolated anomaly but rather a deeply entrenched institutional capture that has been systemic for nearly two decades. Let’s look at all the ways we can expect to see that same capture play out at this upcoming event.

The Death of Data Privacy: Secret Meetings of Silicon Valley and Regulators

You know the TV trope where the mafia pays off the cops and the cops look the other way? That’s America. The mafia just swapped the Joe Pesci suits for Patagonia vests and khakis.

Run down the guest list, and you pass more than one sitting US Senator. One of them is Ted Cruz. The Senate seat alone might not move you. Look at the power he holds instead.

Ted Cruz chairs the Senate Commerce Committee, the panel that writes the rules for half the industries sitting in that same room.

This is the Congressional committee that oversees the Federal Trade Commission, the agency that confronts data brokers and the companies selling your information and writes the rules on how they handle your privacy.

And these companies have far more information on you than you realize. Most people have no idea of the sheer volume of personal data that apps like Facebook and Amazon harvest the moment you accept their terms of service.

And now Ted Cruz, somehow installed as the gatekeeper of that personal data, will spend his evenings breaking bread with the exact people who make their fortunes selling and using it.

Including the men behind the curtain: Peter Thiel and Auren Hoffman themselves.

Hoffman alone is a Titan in the industry of selling your personal data. For starters, he was the founder and CEO of LiveRamp, a company whose expertise is in linking your identity to every digital click you make so advertisers can precisely target you.

Hoffman also founded a company called SafeGraph, which is a massive geospatial data broker that tracks and sells human location data harvested from mobile phones. To put it plainly, they track your cell phone’s location and sell it.

Before becoming LiveRamp, the company was called Rapleaf, and a 2010 Wall Street Journal investigation found that they illegally scraped users’ Facebook and MySpace data and sold it to advertisers without consent. And Google banned SafeGraph from the Play Store in 2021, and in 2022 it was caught selling private location data on visitors to Planned Parenthood and other clinics until public backlash forced them to stop.

Peter Thiel’s involvement does not stop there, though; alongside his fellow Dialog attendee, Joe Lonsdale, he co-founded Palantir, a company whose entire business model relies on turning that same harvested data into advanced mass surveillance, intelligence, and targeting software.

The US government, from the military to ICE, writes Palantir checks with our tax dollars, and between 2025 and 2026 the company’s profits have skyrocketed by roughly 300%, primarily off no-bid government contracts (work handed over through loopholes with no competing bids), pulling in their own reported $871 million in the first quarter of 2026 and $2.28 billion over the last twelve months.

Step back and look at the whole thing, and the puzzle starts to make sense. Once you connect the pieces, you will see that Ted Cruz is running nothing less than a textbook protection racket for data brokers and the billionaire technocrats.

At the Dialog conference, there are not many rules, but they explicitly told attendees two:

1. Everything is strictly off the record and there is a total press blackout.

2. You must not use a .gov email address to RSVP. You must use your personal email.

You don’t need an analyst to see that this is a meet-and-greet for the American surveillance state, meeting right as data centers go up across the globe, raised to warehouse everything they pull off of us.

By the end of 2026, we are looking at a worldwide total of 8,821 data centers.

The Military Industrial Complex: “Navigating WW3" and “Battlefield Technologies”

These are the names of just two of the presentations that are being offered for attendees to ‘enjoy.’ There is absolutely no ambiguity here. They aren't sitting around a conference table asking, "What if World War III breaks out?"

Nope. They are pointing to some war profiteers slide deck and casually letting the rich people of the world know, ‘The world is going into WW3, and here is our proprietary tech you need to survive it.’

Their actions alone tell us everything. To them, WW3 is an absolute certainty, which is why Peter Thiel and the tech billionaire VIPs on that guest list are actively preparing subterranean doomsday bunkers. This is something they have been doing long before Trump’s ‘war’ on Iran, and even before the war in Ukraine.

Now, let me be more specific:

According to the list, you’ve got a sitting NATO Supreme Allied Commander — General Alexus G. Grynkewich — attending panels like, “Navigating WWIII” sharing a room with the tech executives who sell the exact battlefield systems being discussed.

You’ve also got Dan Driscoll, Secretary of the Army, and Jim Himes, ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee. These are men who run the rooms where the money moves, Driscoll signing the Army's contracts and Himes overseeing the agencies that buy from the people sitting beside him.

• Stan McChrystal, retired four-star Army general who commanded Joint Special Operations Command and led coalition forces in Afghanistan. Now runs the McChrystal Group consultancy.

• Lisa Monaco, former Deputy Attorney General and, earlier, White House Homeland Security and Counterterrorism Advisor.

• Anne-Marie Slaughter, former Director of Policy Planning at the State Department, a core foreign-policy and national-security post.

• Turki Al Faisal Al Saud, former head of Saudi intelligence (Minister of Intelligence) for over two decades.

McChrystal can still get the Army’s senior leaders on the phone because he trained half of them. Monaco spent 25 years inside the intelligence world, and she brought every one of those relationships with her to her new job at Microsoft.

Slaughter shows up with her old State Department contacts and with Eric Schmidt, the man who funded her think tank and gave her the job, sitting right there in the room with her. Turki Al Faisal is a direct line to the money in Saudi Arabia.

And Lonsdale? He sits on the boards of defense companies Epirus and Saronic, his firm 8VC was an early backer of Anduril, and he’s a Trump-administration adviser on military priorities.

His investments have already paid off long before this conference. Palantir’s profits jumped 300 percent between 2025 and 2026, Anduril hit a $61 billion valuation in May 2026 after landing a $20 billion Army contract, and Saronic now carries a $4 billion price tag.

And at the annual Dialog conference, Joe gets every opportunity to mingle with the haves and the has-beens of military and intelligence power. The military angle alone turns this from a Washington ethics violation into a global security crisis.

The AI tech bros aren’t just there to sell your data to the government; they’re part of the war machine now, too.

Take OpenAI, whose founder Greg Brockman and Chief Strategy Officer Jason Kwon are both on the guest list. Brockman sells AI weaponry to the U.S. military, and OpenAI itself is being used to power Pentagon systems.

Then there’s trillionaire Elon Musk, whose AI Grok was just used to fire missiles at Iran, and whose company SpaceX is being used to pump out satellites and launch rockets for the military, on top of a special version of Starlink he built called Starshield, which provides internet service to war efforts.

Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google himself, makes tools for the U.S. military to send into war zones, and the Pentagon just awarded a $500 million contract to Perennial Autonomy for counter-drone systems, a company Schmidt financially backs.

Caroline Cochran, co-founder of Oklo, has been awarded Department of Defense microreactor contracts for tiny, portable nuclear power plants, and Pete Shadbolt, co-founder of PsiQuantum, holds government DARPA quantum contracts, meaning he builds ultra-fast, futuristic supercomputers for the military.

The man who regulates the data brokers eats dinner with the data brokers. The man who signs the Army's checks toasts the men cashing them. The retired generals lend the room their Rolodexes, the sitting ones lend it their signatures, and the tech billionaires lend it the war they've already decided is coming.

Peter Thiel named his surveillance company after the all-seeing eye in Tolkien, named the next one after the dark towers, and it’s all deliberate because a man who casts himself as the villain is telling you exactly how the story ends if we don’t stop him.

See, historically, we know that these men love to talk about their plans publicly. They publish them, they podcast them, they put them on stage and funnel them through think tank after think tank.

The moment they build a secret platform with a total press blackout and a rule that you cannot RSVP from a government email to prevent the public from finding out? That’s their Achilles heel.

When the people who never stop talking suddenly want silence, we need to be concerned, and we need to make some noise. Your local news network is not going to do it for you. So I need you to shout this from the rooftops.

Figuratively, but if you want to do it literally, I support that too.

Don’t let Peter Thiel and his rich foes finish our story. A better tomorrow starts with all of us. It starts with you. It starts with me. Don't just scroll past it; share it. Don't just think it; say it. Be the annoying one at dinner. Be the inconvenient one in the group chat. Cause ‘good trouble’ as some of you say. Because if we don’t, our future is written.

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Dissent in Bloom is a one-woman investigative platform dedicated to the truth, not clicks. I don’t have corporate backing or an influencer network — I only have you. I’m a disabled mom to special-needs kids and a nurse. As busy as my life is, I show up to write this because you deserve the real information that mainstream pundits ignore.

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Before anything else, there is something you need to understand. It began with half-truths, disinformation, and a manufactured enemy of their choosing.

The men behind this bill — Josh Williams, Vivek Ramaswamy, Matt Huffman and Rob McColley — are using the ‘waste, fraud, and abuse’ playbook.

The same one used to justify DOGE which accessed and shared sensitive Social Security data on millions of Americans on unsafe servers. The same tactic deployed during the Minnesota ICE crackdowns disguised as daycare fraud enforcement.

Matt Huffman runs the Ohio House. Rob McColley runs the Ohio Senate. McColley is Ramaswamy’s running mate. He stood next to Ramaswamy at the May 19 press conference that kicked off the broader Medicaid crackdown.

Now Vice President JD Vance’s White House “Anti-Fraud Task Force” and Ohio Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy have launched a coordinated crackdown on alleged widespread Medicaid fraud in Ohio.

Republicans have controlled Ohio state government since 2011. If there's fraud in the system, they made the system. If the system has weak oversight, they wrote the oversight.

Ramaswamy and Vance have been friends since they attended Yale Law together nearly 2 decades ago.

Hang out.

As if suctioning a life-long breathing tube is just hanging out. As if initiating a peg tube feeding is how families spend a casual Saturday night. As if crushing medications, managing equipment, monitoring vitals, and keeping another human being alive is something you’d describe to a neighbor over the fence as a good time.

And these family caregivers make $12 to $18 an hour.

This bill is makes it seem like caregivers are pocketing millions. The reality is that a single parent in Ohio needs to make $38 an hour just to cover housing, food, and medical care for one child. Caregivers under this program top out at $18.

They aren’t even making a living wage.

That did not stop Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy — a Trump endorsed Republican and former DOGE member himself — from putting Rosiak on his campaign stage to tell more people the same lie. Just days ago Luke Rosiak testified before U.S. House Oversight Committee task force on Ohio Medicaid waiver fraud, federalizing the narrative.

Ohio House Hill 795 was born on March 25th, 2026. They gave it a name designed to make you feel safe. The SHIELD Act. It stands for Safeguarding Healthcare Integrity through Electronic Location Data.

The bill was introduced a month It came a month before the Rosiak article ever did. Almost like the article was written to lobby the bill.

Interestingly, Josh Williams dropped out of high school at 18, fell more than thirty feet on a job site, and spent six years disabled, going through surgery after surgery before he could finish his education. He survived all of that, experienced it struggle first-hand, and chose to write this bill anyway.

This bill makes Ohio families prove their need for care every 90 days, but it says nothing about nursing homes. Under current Ohio law, nursing homes only have to recertify every 3 years.

What a strange and convenient coincidence.

An earlier version outright banned Medicaid from paying any family member caring for a disabled loved one. When that sparked public outcry, they removed it without announcement, but everything else is still there and it still gives the people in power enough ammunition to force people into nursing homes.

And here’s what many of those nursing homes look like for those who live there

But to truly understand the full picture, we have to look at who funded the men who made this possible.

The Sprenger Family

Based on political finance records, the largest individual donor to this cause appears to be Scott Sprenger.

The company operates 13 nursing homes, 12 assisted living communities, and 8 independent living communities across Ohio, Indiana, and South Carolina, with nearly 2,000 beds, 2,000 employees, and roughly $322 million in annual revenue. In recent years, he stepped aside as CEO to make way for Nicole Sprenger, the current CEO and a third-generation operator. She has since stepped aside for Shannon Kuhn.

Scott now spends his time sitting on the Board of Directors for an organization known as the Ohio Health Care Association (OHCA), the state’s largest nursing home trade group.

OHCA runs a political action committee, which is a fundraising arm built to collect money from industry executives and route it to politicians.

It’s called the Ohio Health Care Association PAC and it’s spent over $140,000 on political donations in 2026 alone, it’s primarily funded by personal checks from wealthy nursing home chain owners, like the Sprenger family.

Here’s how the Sprenger money moved this year.

Scott Sprenger gave $15,000 to the OHCA PAC, plus a separate $10,000 directly to Vivek Ramaswamy’s gubernatorial campaign. Nicole Sprenger gave an additional $7,500 to the OHCA PAC. The OHCA PAC then donated $7,500 to Ramaswamy — who is one of their top payees.

Josh Williams, Representative That Introduced the Bill: $2,500.

Matt Huffman, Speaker of the Ohio House: $20,000

Rob McColley, the President of the Ohio Senate: $17,000

Campaign finance records show that the OHCA PAC also paid Republican state legislators Nick Santucci ($7,000), Jerry Cirino ($6,000), Monica Robb Blasdel ($5,250), Jeannette Schmidt ($5,000), and Theresa Gavarone ($4,000).

If HB-795 passes, even a fraction of the 7,000 displaced Ohio families will mean new nursing home placements at the steep price of ~$8,000 to $10,000 per resident per month.

The Sprengers own 13 of those very facilities in Ohio. Every disabled person shoved out of their family’s home and into a Sprenger bed is worth roughly $100,000 a year in Medicaid billing.

To put it all together for you, one family making $322 million a year spent a mere $32,500 of it on “political donations” in 2026. If HB-795 passes, they’ll make that back in weeks and can potentially make millions for years.

The Ohio taxpayer foots the bill.

Disabled Ohioans and their loved ones pay the price.

But of course, these were not the only wealthy executives who donated to a group who lobbied for this.

The OHCA PAC’s top contributors read like a who’s who of Ohio’s nursing home industry, and the OHCA Board seems as if it is paying itself to pass this bill. Of the major individual donors to the OHCA PAC in 2026, at least four are current officers or directors on the OHCA Board itself.

If you haven’t caught onto the pattern yet, what gets sold as a righteous cause is usually a marketing campaign from for their own self interests. And it’s always the same group of people.

They sell you anger by pointing at someone supposedly taking from you. Meanwhile, they’re the ones taking, for themselves and their friends.

Propaganda scholars call this Accusation in a Mirror. You accuse your opponents of the exact crimes you’re committing. It was used to fuel the Rwandan genocide and Nazi Germany.

Let’s not fall for the propaganda. Let’s follow this money together.

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If I taught you anything, if you enjoyed this article, or if you’d like to see more like this please hit that subscribe button below. You can do a free or paid subscription. Both are monumental in helping me maintain this page.

I do not get tens of thousands in donations from ultra rich corporations and government friends. I am just a regular gal writing on the real issues and investigating what needs to be investigated.

One of the biggest names in right wing media, a guy who spent years cheerleading for Trump and everything that came with it, is now out here acting like he’s some kind of truth teller speaking out against the very movement he helped build. People are eating it up. They are calling him brave. They are calling him based. They are sharing his clips like he just discovered something the rest of us missed.

Because when you actually trace Tucker Carlson’s career, his money, his connections, and his loyalties, the story looks a lot less like a man having a political awakening and a lot more like a man doing exactly what he was always going to do.

Tucker Carlson did not turn against the right. Tucker Carlson is the right. The New Right, and the institution that shaped everything he is today has been pulling strings in American politics for over fifty years.

Tucker Carlson Probably Works For the Heritage Foundation.

Yes, the very people who wrote Project 2025.

Carlson actually started his career at Heritage in 1991 as a fact-checker, proofreader, and writer for the foundation’s quarterly journal Policy Review. That was his entry into Washington.

He never forgot it. “It turned out to be the greatest job ever, mostly because of the people I worked with,” Carlson said in a 2018 interview. That same year, Heritage gave him their Salvatori Prize, awarded to those who, “advance America’s founding principles.”

In 2023, he was the keynote speaker at their 50th anniversary gala.

Fox Corp fired him days later, and Heritage President Kevin Roberts publicly defended him, saying America needed more leaders like Carlson. Roberts then offered Carlson a standing job at Heritage.

Heritage ran a donation page sponsored by Carlson's media company, featuring a quote from Carlson praising both Roberts and the foundation.

“Tucker Carlson is a fearless American who is unafraid to challenge the Washington regime, ask tough questions, and hold the ruling elite accountable. His nightly show is must-see TV for anyone who realizes we have a limited window of time to save this country,”

— Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts.

And in October 2025, after Tucker Carlson sat down with neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes there was enormous uproar and people wanted answers because of just how connected Carlson & Heritage are.

Some people claimed Heritage was going to distance itself from Carlson.

Roberts posted a video response on Twitter where he adamantly denied that Heritage was “distancing itself” from Tucker Carlson. He said Carlson is, “a close friend” of the Heritage and said attempts to cancel him would fail.

He later quietly apologized when Project Esther — the Heritage Foundations Christian Nationalism and Zionism merger project — began to fall apart as the people in charge of it began to resign en masse causing Heritage to lose significant monetary and social support.

I am not surprised by any of this. Carlson’s ties to Heritage go back decades. They shaped everything he is today.

The Heritage connections run deeper, and they go back years, and the roots of corruption have since grown into the White House.

JD Vance, now Vice President, wrote the foreword to Heritage President Kevin Roberts's book about taking over America, Dawn's Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America. Roberts was also one of the people lobbying Trump to choose Vance as VP, calling him a “close friend” of Heritage.

Their long-time loyalist and former employee Tucker Carlson lobbied for Vance as VP, too. So did Elon Musk. So did Donald Trump Jr. He pushed his father to pick Vance, and some reports even place him in the room when Peter Thiel first brought Vance to Trump back in 2021.

This is why mapping the connections matters. And here are some more:

Tucker Carlson’s media company— that he started only after being fired from Fox and offered a job at Heritage — was only able to be start because it was funded by 1789 Capital, a capital investment firm run by the exact same people as JD Vance’s ultra-secretive Rockbridge Network. Tucker Carlson Network (TCN) was the very first thing 1789 Capital ever funded.

MORE ON ROCKBRIDGE: This is a political nexus that doesn’t have a website, public facing information, and it exists completely in the shadows with information only coming out through leaks. Tucker Carlson was at the founding meeting of Vance’s Rockbridge Network. The Rockbridge Network didn’t just have Tucker Carlson’s support. It had him in the room on day one.

So, given the connection between Rockbridge, Carlson, & 1789 Capital, it came as no surprise when his ally Donald Trump Jr. landed a top job at 1789 Capital in 2025, becoming a partner (meaning he now helps run the firm and shares in its profits).

Three months after Don Jr joined, 1789 invested in a rare-mineral company called Vulcan Elements. Then Trump declared a fake "national security emergency," which let him skip normal government bidding rules and pour hundreds of millions in Pentagon money straight into Vulcan and Don Jr’s pockets.

The Rebirth of the ‘New Right’ is the Biggest Goal of Project 2025

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Paul Weyrich set out to build think tanks that could support the emergence of a new right, feeling an acute institutional lack when it came to ideological support for right-wing policies and politicians.

He co-founded the Heritage Foundation itself.

The movement today pulls together members of the right-wing Claremont Institute, National Conservatives, Post-liberals, and the Hard Right.

These are the people that helped plan January 6th and created Project 2025. They have been extremely loud about all of it. No one is listening.

In 2020, John Eastman, a senior Claremont fellow (and Trump advisor) who actually wrote the memo explaining how Pence could just throw out certified electoral votes from seven states and keep Trump in office. This very same man — John Eastman — was at Trump’s rally on January 6th, 2021 where he told them to, “fight like hell.”

The Claremont Institute is also listed as an advisory board member of Project 2025. They advised the Heritage Foundation in writing the document.

So it’s not a surprise that Project 2025 is the same thing scaled up massively. Their own words literally say the goal is to build “an army of aligned, vetted, trained, and prepared conservatives to go to work on Day One to deconstruct the Administrative State.”

The 922 pages of policy proposals are almost not even the point. The infrastructure is.

They’ve built a personnel database, training programs, a 180-day takeover playbook. This is about building a movement durable enough to survive any single administration and keep going regardless of who wins what election.

What Vance said during the Heritage Foundation summit in 2023 plays directly into this. And he’s said other things that support this as well.

For example, back in 2022 when Vance was running for Senate on Peter Thiel’s money, he was interviewed on conservative influencer Jack Murphy’s podcast. It was here that he blatantly admitted the plan to burn down the right from the inside and take over America. That’s not even an exaggeration.

You can see the clip by clicking here, or the full episode by clicking here.

That is the plan of the New Right, that is the plan outlined in Project 2025, and that is what we are seeing happening in real time.

Once it is born and America is put into an authoritative legal chokehold, they can begin to build the country as Heritage would like it, a Christian nationalist nation that bows to the billionaires.

SO, IN SUMMARY:

• We have the Heritage Foundation, a think tank that has been building toward this moment since 1973.

• We have the Claremont Institute, which provided the legal blueprint for January 6th and advised on Project 2025.

• We have Kevin Roberts, Heritage president, who lobbied for Vance as VP, defended Tucker Carlson after he sat down with a neo-Nazi, and wrote a book about taking over America that Vance personally wrote the foreword for.

• We have Tucker Carlson, whose entire post-Fox career was funded by the same people running Vance’s secret political network.

• We have Peter Thiel, who bankrolled Vance’s Senate run and personally introduced him to Trump.

• We have Don Jr., now profiting off a company his father funneled Pentagon money into.

And at the center of all of it is Project 2025 and the New Right: a fifty year project to capture every lever of American government and use it to build a Christian nationalist state that answers to billionaires instead of voters.

They did not hide it. They wrote it down. All 922 pages of it.

The only question left is whether enough people are paying attention. Because this is not about left versus right anymore. This is about whether the American government is going to be run for the people in it or for the movement that spent fifty years planning to take it over.

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I’m autistic. I’m a registered nurse. I run a nonprofit. I’m an activist. And I’m the mother of three wonderful autistic children.

This week, I found out RFK Jr. is seeking access to millions of Americans’ private medical records to, “study the link between vaccines and autism.”

A link that doesn’t exist. It’s been proven time and time again. But it keeps coming up.. to justify a crusade against people like me.

I am so beyond fed up with this man. Why is a recovering heroin addict with a confirmed brain worm so hellbent on eradicating autistic people? As if WE’RE the problem, and HE is the pinnacle of human achievement? Let’s talk about it. His crusade, what it is, why he’s doing it, and who the man behind the bullshit actually is.

Born on January 17, 1954, Robert Francis Kennedy Jr — also known as Bobby — is the son of the late Robert F. Kennedy Sr. and Ethel Kennedy. He is the nephew of the late President John F. Kennedy.

Yet, despite the Kennedy name and every advantage it has handed him he’s ended up as the family’s black sheep. He falls well short of his father's and uncle's shadows, all while exploiting their legacies for credibility.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s tenure as Secretary of Health and Human Services has carried a steep public health cost. In June 2025 he fired all 17 members of the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices and replaced them with appointees who included well-known anti-vaxxers part of a broader purge of agency staff. That August, a gunman who attacked CDC headquarters to protest COVID-19 vaccines fired more than 180 rounds into the campus and killed DeKalb County police officer David Rose.

Days later, Kennedy's own CDC Director, Susan Monarez, was fired after refusing to rubber-stamp vaccine recommendations without reviewing the evidence, the shortest-tenured director in the agency's history, with several top officials resigning in protest. By December his reconstituted panel voted 8 to 3 to roll back the 30-year-old universal recommendation for the hepatitis B birth dose for newborns of mothers who test negative. All of this unfolded while measles, eliminated in the US in 2000, came roaring back, with more than 4,200 cases and the first measles deaths since 2015, including two children, as Kennedy gave shifting, lukewarm messaging on the MMR vaccine and promoted vitamin A.

His focus stayed fixed on finding an environmental cause for autism, and in the fall the CDC hired Mark Blaxill, a former SafeMinds leader who claims without evidence that every vaccinated child is in some way injured, as a senior adviser.

Eugenics is the largely discredited, pseudo-scientific belief and practice of “improving” the genetic quality of the human population. The term was coined in 1883 by Sir Francis Galton and literally translates to “well-born.”

Yes, I know it’s a. ‘buzz word.’

But don’t roll your eyes and close the tab. Hear me out.

Eugenics has existed in America for centuries. Thirty-two states once had forced sterilization laws on the books, and around 70,000 people, mostly poor women, disabled people, and women of color, were sterilized without their consent.

There were entire eugenics organizations, movements, and research institutions funded by some of the wealthiest industrial families in America, including the Rockefellers, Carnegies, and Harrimans.

At its core, eugenics is the ideology that certain humans hold less value than others because of their cognitive or physical differences or disabilities.

There's a real irony here. I'm autistic, and I have more medical credentials than RFK Jr., and he's the one running the entire U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Meanwhile, his résumé? A Bachelor of Arts in History and Literature, a Juris Doctor from the University of Virginia, and a Master of Laws in Environmental Law. Zero. medical. training.

Why Is RFK Obsessed With Autism?

RFK Jr. likes to tell this as a story about one Minnesota mom showing up uninvited on his porch. His own organization tells it differently.

According to Children’s Health Defense, the “mercury moms,” led by SafeMinds co-founder Lyn Redwood and National Autism Association co-founder Laura Bono, had been following Kennedy around his environmental speaking tour all year, urging him to look into thimerosal.

Reportedly, Sarah Bridges — one of their “speakers” — turned up on RFK Jr’s porch in 2005 with a stack of now-debunked research. Her goal? The same as the other mercury moms… to get him to help her find a link between the vaccine preservative thimerosal and autism after becoming convinced her son's pertussis vaccine was the reason behind his autism diagnosis.

She blamed the vaccine preservative thimerosal for his neurological damage.

See, her son Porter had suffered an acute medical emergency after receiving an older, highly reactive — and long since discontinued — version of the pertussis vaccine. Sadly, the 4-month-old boy had spiked a severe fever that triggered a massive, two-hour grand mal seizure.

Prolonged seizures of that magnitude in an infant often cause permanent brain damage, and in Porter's case the result was profound developmental delays, loss of speech, and behavioral issues that met the brand new-clinical criteria for severe autism. Decades earlier, Porter would have been diagnosed with, "MRDD secondary to encephalopathy (brain damage).”

But by the mid-1990s, the newly broadened autism criteria under the DSM-IV absorbed cases like his, and that label change gave Bridges the exact ammunition she needed to incorrectly conflate her son's traumatic brain injury — where the cause physical brain damage — with idiopathic autism. Idiopathic meaning we don’t know the cause.

From thimerosal vaccines, to MMR vaccines (which never contained thimerosal), to Tylenol in pregnancy, to circumcision. Everything gets blamed for her son’s autism. And that’s how one woman’s traumatic grief was used to target an entire generation of Americans.

Bridges brought that trauma with her when she stood on his porch in 2005, and RFK Jr — a man who wanted to make a name for himself as a Kennedy — turned her trauma into his purpose.

He took his anti-vaccine position when he wrote, "Deadly Immunity," an anti-vaccine piece ran in Rolling Stone and Salon that June. The article covered what she had brought to him. Eventually, Rolling Stone deleted it. Salon retracted it in 2011, calling it a massive mistake.

Thimerosal hasn't been in childhood vaccines for 25 years. ‘RFK Jr. "banned" it last year anyway.

And despite being out of childhood vaccines for 2.5 decades, Autism rates haven't dropped. They've climbed. By their logic, you could actually argue thimerosal was suppressing autism rates (it wasn't, obviously).

Kennedy's own federal financial disclosures show how lucrative his vaccine-skeptic profile has been. He drew $326,000 in salary for roughly 15 weeks of work as chairman of Children's Health Defense, the anti-vaccine nonprofit he founded, which has filed dozens of lawsuits against the federal agencies he now oversees.

He reported $856,559 in referral fees from Wisner Baum, the law firm where he served as co-counsel suing Merck over the Gardasil HPV vaccine, and he stated he intends to keep collecting those contingency fees even as HHS Secretary.

He took a $100,000 licensing fee for use of the "Make America Healthy Again" brand.

On the publishing side, he is positioned to earn $2 million to $4 million in advances from Skyhorse Publishing for two books, including the vaccine-skeptic title "Unsettled Science", on top of $413,500 in separate Skyhorse consulting fees for book ideas and short pieces of writing, plus a $1,000 advance for his 2023 book "Vax-UnVax: Let the Science Speak."

What Autism Really Is (And What the Science Actually Says)

The federal government is currently hunting for “autism fraud” in all 50 states at the same time RFK Jr. is trying to “cure” autism. On one hand, the diagnosis is being painted as fake, something providers hand out for Medicaid money.

On the other hand, the diagnosis is being painted as a national emergency that will collapse the country if not stopped.

You cannot have it both ways. Either the diagnosis is real or it isn’t.

If you click here, you’ll see that the diagnostic does not list the autism criteria as, ‘incapable of paying taxes, holding a job, swinging a bat, writing a sonnet, going on a date, or operating a toilet without assistance.’

It’s very, very common for individuals to conflate autism with intellectual disability or comorbidities such as seizures ore severe behavioral issues. That is not always the case. These are commonly co-morbid but they are not exclusive.

This misunderstanding has led to confusion about what autism actually is and what the support needs actually look like. If you only ever see TV tropes like The Good Doctor, The Big Bang Theory, or Atypical, you might walk away thinking autistic people are just a little quirky and socially awkward, while ignoring anyone with higher support needs entirely.

If you listen to Autism Speaks, you'll think high support needs autistic kids will ruin your marriage and bankrupt you (they literally said this in a commercial, by the way).

Under the DSM-5, Autism is categorized by levels of support needs, which can shift dramatically. Someone you've labeled "mild" might be low support one day and high support the next.

The term "Asperger's" was dropped from clinical use for exactly this reason, along with the disturbing history behind the name. Hans Asperger, the Austrian pediatrician the label honored, actively participated in the Nazi euthanasia program. Severely autistic children were sent to be killed.

What Cause Autism?

Autism is, first and foremost, genetic.

Twin studies, where researchers compare genetically identical twins to see how often both of them are autistic, consistently find that 77 to 90 percent of the twins are both autistic, meaning autism is overwhelmingly inherited.

Researchers have already pinned down several specific genes involved, including ones with names like CHD8, PTEN, SCN2A, and SHANK3, plus a section of chromosome 16 (called 16p11.2) where extra or missing pieces can also lead to autism.

Autism can be inherited in several ways:

• De novo variants: A single random mutation that wasn’t in either parent. These tend toward higher support needs and developmental impact.

• Polygenic risk: Hundreds of common variants each adding a little risk. This route is tied to higher intelligence, so many autistic people here are gifted rather than delayed.

• Rare inherited variants: A pile of rare variants passed down through the family. This is where forms caused by conditions like like Fragile X Syndrome (FMR1 mutation) are.

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This didn’t start in May. Delaney Hall has been in and out of the news since it reopened in 2025. That May, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka was arrested for trespassing and Rep. LaMonica McIver was charged with assaulting federal officers. Baraka’s charges were dropped. McIver’s weren’t. She’s pled not guilty and her appeal is now pending before the Third Circuit.

The facility held detainees from 2011 to 2017, then closed. ICE reopened it in early 2025 as the first federal detention center of Trump’s second term, handed to the GEO Group on a 15-year contract worth $1 billion. Your money. And that billion is just the floor. It’s a guaranteed base, about $60 million a year, a fixed-price deal, so GEO gets paid for a minimum number of beds whether anyone’s in them or not, plus more per detainee per day when they pack the place fuller.

Then they squeeze the people inside for even more. GEO runs detainees through a Voluntary Work Program that pays as little as $1 a day to cook, clean, and do laundry, free labor a Washington jury already ruled broke state minimum wage law, ordering GEO to pay $23.2 million, a ruling they’re now fighting all the way to the Supreme Court. They hand you a dollar, then upcharge the hell out of commissary and phone and tablet calls, where a whole day of your labor buys about one 14-minute call to your kids or a single meal without worms.

How the Protests Started in 2026

This information is coming directly from the detainees themselves, who had letters smuggled out in February and May of this year.

In May members of congress sent a letter to the newest leader of DHS

So picture what your tax dollars are actually buying. Slave wages of a dollar a day. Basic supplies marked up to the sky. Food with worms in it. Covid and the flu tearing through pregnant women, the elderly, the blind, the disabled, and no doctor in sight.

We are paying for this. Every cage, every marked-up phone call, every untreated illness, billed to you and cashed by them.

And that $1/day slave wage? I’ve written about this before, and that entire concept is how this strike started.

The same people GEO pays a dollar a day to cook the meals, scrub the toilets, shovel the snow, and keep the lights on simply stopped. Delaney Hall runs on immigrant labor, detainees cooking, cleaning, and repairing the place for as little as $1 a day and sometimes for nothing at all, so when 300 of them walked off the job, they were aiming straight at GEO Group’s bottom line. That’s the part that should sink in. The machine only runs because the people trapped inside it are forced to run it. Take their hands away and the whole profitable nightmare grinds to a halt. The American Prospect

And that is exactly the leverage they reached for. They refused food and they refused the work together. The hunger and labor strikes began when detainees stopped eating and stopped showing up for their jobs to protest the conditions inside.

When you have nothing left, when they’ve taken your freedom, your health, your due process, your dignity, your body and your labor are the only things still yours to withhold. So they withheld them.

And no, they weren’t even asking for more “ethnic foods” that they like, despite what DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin says.

The release of the elderly, the pregnant, the sick, the kids. The bare minimum of being treated like a human being.

That’s how this started. A dollar a day, extremely up-charged phone calls, worms and mold in the food, and people who decided they were willing to starve themselves today for a better tomorrow for those around them. Real humanity. One could argue there is more humanity inside chains at Delaney Hall than there is inside of the entire United States government.

Delaney Hall: Where It Stands and Why It Matters

Delaney hall was originally built in the year 2000, sitting at 451 Doremus Avenue, Newark, NJ 07105. It’s original function was a private, for-profit facility built by Community Education Centers to house inmates more cheaply than the state could, all for profit. GEO Group bought that company in 2017, which is how the same private prison giant ended up running it as an ICE detention center today.

Doremus Avenue is a heavily industrialized, and reportedly, toxic stretch in Newark's Ironbound neighborhood, sometimes called the "Chemical Corridor."

It’s a street with a natural gas plant, a sewage treatment facility, and an animal fat rendering plant, the state's biggest trash incinerator, the contaminated remains of an old Agent Orange factory, along with a series of chemical storage containers behind acres of fencing. There are industrial trucks coming day and night, and planes always flying overhead.

The toxins and the humans are stored in the same place, because somewhere, somebody decided they were all disposable.

When the Cameras Showed Up

Once the strike pulled press and protesters to Doremus Avenue, the state showed up swinging. Not at GEO, but at the people standing outside.

Inside, guards pepper-sprayed detainees, beat them with batons, shipped the strike leaders off to other facilities, and shut down family visits. Detainees told a visiting congressman it was punishment for the strike.

Outside was the same. ICE agents and then state police pushed past the barricades, sprayed chemicals at protesters and reporters, and blocked the exits. An AP photographer broke her leg covering it and still had to argue her way out, because police had sealed the street. Footage shows agents shoving a protester into the path of a semi and smashing his leg.

Another video shows a man standing peacefully on the street, then getting thrown and dragged back by “state police.”

This is The United States of America. It’s New Jersey. And this is unacceptable.

A first person perspective of the chaos outside of Delaney Hall (Source: @hudson.images)

“An AP reporter broke her leg covering the Newark protest and still had to negotiate her way out because police blocked every exit” (Source: @amay.a100)

ICE and DHS held the facility. Sherrill sent in state police, who threw up a half-mile barricade and went at protesters in riot gear. Then Newark PD took over the perimeter, and Mayor Baraka, who’s fought this place from the start, put the neighborhood under a 9 p.m. curfew, which the activists say is now being used to shut their protest down too.

The one person moving freely through all of it was Nick Sortor, a pro-Trump content creator who went “undercover” into the “ANTIFA” protest camp, fed the “rioters” footage to Fox, and cheered the arrest buses with “this is the way.”

The state’s own Democratic governor, Mikie Sherrill, got turned away at the door. Then she announced “protest zones,” fenced-off pens where the public was told to go to protest — dubbed ‘First Amendment Zones’ as if the First Amendment stops at the gate.

Health inspectors who tried to actually inspect the place were let in halfway and sent home.

In a move that raised more than a few eyebrows, she took to Threads — where she either knowingly misrepresented the events to shield the aggressors, or simply repeated whatever narrative was handed to her. Suddenly, her much-touted “first amendment zones” and carefully cultivated ally persona begin to look far less like genuine principle and far more like a calculated effort to protect something else entirely: her campaign.

She posted that masked people attacked the barrier in the protest area, threw projectiles, used the barriers as weapons, and lit tires on fire, putting protesters and police in danger.

Instead, footage shows that it was police knocked the barrier down. Police escalated against people peacefully protesting in the “first amendment zones” she set up. When the Democratic governor of New Jersey is doing PR for The Deparmtent of Homeland Security, tells you how deep this goes.

New Jersey State Police push past barricades outside the Delaney Hall Detention Facility 5-30-26 (Source: @bgonthescene)

Now, as of June 2nd, the city of Newark, where the facility is located, has announced they’re suing the facility for a full health inspection access.

White Nationalists at Delaney Hall and Inside DHS

In one video outside of the facility, you can clearly see Trump flags and the original 13-state Betsy Ross flag of 1777, hanging on the fencing at Delaney Hall, behind the officers who are only there because people are protesting the conditions inside. They are about as subtle as a foghorn in a library.

See, DHS and ICE are (evidentially) full of white nationalists.

To them, the Betsy Ross flag showcases the idea of returning to how things used to be. These are well-known white nationalist dog whistles, and the thing about dog whistles is they give plausible deniability, so someone can claim they’re innocent while signaling something else entirely to the people who know the code. And what’s even more disturbing is what looks like a deliberate humiliation ritual, where POC officers are made to stand in front of the Betsy Ross and Trump flags.

This same week, Trump’s former border patrol chief Gregory Bovino, who got pushed out in January, turned up at a “remigration” summit in Porto, Portugal, sharing a stage with neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers. The man who organized it, Afonso Gonçalves, founded the far-right, anti-Muslim group Reconquista, named for the historical expulsion of Muslims from the Iberian Peninsula.

Afonso Gonçalves once said, “Weimar conditions require Weimar solutions,” a grotesque reference to the rise of Nazi Germany.

So, one could argue that it’s intentional that Bovino posted the tweet with the ‘Roman salute’ before attending. DHS flies the flags at the fence while the men who used to run its operations fly to Europe to network with fascists.

The walls of Delaney Hall were built to keep people in. Last June, four men punched through one and ran. This May, 300 people had to starve themselves just to be heard through them. This alone shows why they will not let anyone past the doors.

The people inside already did the hard part. They stopped eating. They stopped working. They aimed the only thing they had left, their bodies and their labor, straight at the people cashing the checks. Delaney Hall doesn’t run without immigrant labor. Neither does this country. Ours.

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If “under-babied” sounds made up, that’s because it is. The word has a Margaret Atwood quality to it, the kind of phrase you’d expect penciled into the margins of The Handmaid’s Tale. Except Gilead is fiction, and the American pro-natalist movement isn’t, and it’s already made it through the doors of the White House.

The Eugenics Movement of 2026

Pronatalism sells itself as a rescue mission against "mass extinction" and "demographic collapse," asking people to have more babies so America won't run short of workers later. And no, that's not a sensationalized spin. Treating children as future labor supply is literally what the studies they cite say.

And sure, it’s easy to look at numbers like that and feel scared.

Which is, conveniently, the point. The fixation on the fertility rate was never really about the fertility rate. It’s about convincing you that there is a crisis, that the crisis demands a solution, and that the solution is theirs.

America already has a solution to this, and it happens to be the same thing the country was founded on: immigrants.

The industrial economy that pro-natalists tend to mythologize was built by immigrants. By 1920, immigrants and their children made up 40 percent of the American workforce and accounted for nearly half of the country's labor force growth over the previous four decades. It’s been 106 years, and that statistic has not changed much. Between 1995 and 2022, immigrants and their children accounted for roughly 70 percent of all civilian labor force growth.

The Congressional Budget Office projects that starting in 2030, annual deaths in the U.S. will outpace annual births, and without immigration, the population begins to shrink that same year. America has a way out of its own demographic panic. It has always had one.

And yet, the pronatalist movement — like Vice President JD Vance, Simone and Malcolm Collins, Peter Thiel, and Kevin Dolan — are explicitly against immigration to solve this issue. So, is it really about preventing societal collapse, or is it white nationalism dressed up as social science?

This isn’t a new idea. It’s not even a new script. Nazi Germany used nearly identical rhetoric. Falling birth rates. Racial purity, and a focus on how their people were not reproducing. It was disgustingly effective.

"Our people aren't having enough children to replace themselves. That should bother us." — J.D. Vance, National Conservatism Conference, 2019.

Vance has explicitly stated that in his eyes, immigration is not an acceptable solution to falling birth rates. He wants more babies born here, and not the immigrant kind. He got that from Viktor Orbán, who openly opposes immigration as a fix for population decline, and pushes baby bonuses instead.

The ongoing push to remove immigrants may have been designed, at least partly, to create a labor crisis. As a crisis creates fear, and fear creates change.

In 2014, Orbán said he wanted to build an "illiberal state" in Hungary. He wanted to get rid of the liberal democracy in Hungary. Liberal democracy is not a leftist buzzword. It is the system America was built on, where elections determine power but the constitution limits what that power can do to protect individual rights.

Over time, Orban created a government that allowed him to stay in power for over 15 years. So, understand that when Vance flew to Budapest last month and told a crowd, "We have got to get Viktor Orbán reelected as prime minister of Hungary!" He was endorsing everything he stands for.

Orbán has also spent his regime being viciously anti-LGBTQ rights, and frankly, existence. He banned legal gender changes, same-sex adoption, and any classroom mention of gay or trans people, then capped it off by amending the constitution in 2025 to recognize only two sexes. He was recently voted out, but the damage is written into law.

And that’s a sentiment we see echoed throughout the entire pro-natalist movement. JD Vance, as a senator, introduced a bill — the companion to Marjorie Taylor Greene’s House version — to make gender-affirming care for trans youth a federal felony nationwide.

Vance has consistently asserted the view childlessness is associated with sociopathy and has advocated for granting parents greater voting power than non-parents.

Simone Collins, the movement’s most recognizable face and the architect of Pronatalist.org, does not extend her concern for “the children” to all of them. She opposes gender-affirming care for youth and refers to trans people as members of a “trans cult,” revealing that the project was never simply about more children, but about the right kind of children, raised in the right kind of values.

Trump’s second term is using Orbán’s Americanized playbook

On day one, Trump signed an executive order stating that there are only two sexes based on conception, there will be no federal gender-affirming care funding, no gender on passports, and no trans people in sex-segregated federal spaces.

There’s even been talk of implementing a Nazi-era practice to give mothers medals for having more babies. This practice, of course, has happened much more recently with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who reinstated the “Mother Heroine“ award for women with 10 or more children, and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has described reproduction as a “national cause.”

And they’re not hiding it. While JD Vance — whose wife is pregnant — has spent time mocking “childless cat ladies” for not reproducing, they rest of the movement is openly bragging that they are — and to them children are power. Their own army of tiny, ideological foot soldiers to drag their nationalist ideologies into the future. A voting bloc in diapers, if you will.

Simone Collins has claimed that feminists who do not reproduce will simply be bred out of existence. The future is inherited by whoever bothers to populate it, and so the only way to escape a "Handmaid's Tale future," she says, is for feminists to manufacture more citizens loyal to their cause.

The Pro-Natal Organizations — and the Network Underneath

This is not a grassroots movement. It has never been a grassroots movement.

Simone Collins didn’t stumble into pronatalism from a mommy blog. She came out of Peter Thiel’s orbit, having worked for his ultra-secretive, invitation-only forum called Dialog — a closed-door gathering of executives, elected officials, and academics that functions like the Bilderberg Meeting, but quieter. In 2025, Dialog purchased land in the Washington, D.C. area for a planned campus. Reported members include Scott Bessent, Cory Booker, Ted Cruz, Tulsi Gabbard, Jonathan Haidt, Reid Hoffman, Jared Kushner, Elon Musk, Eric Schmidt, Larry Summers, and Thiel himself — a who’s-who of people very publicly concerned about who is, and is not, reproducing. Meanwhile, Malcolm Collins’s brother works directly on Musk’s DOGE team. The network is not a coincidence. It’s an org chart.

The clearest window into what this movement actually believes is NatalCon — a conference that bars journalists, charges tickets up to $10,000, and openly mingles Heritage Foundation staffers with speakers who traffic in eugenics and far-right race science. It has been promoted by Elon Musk — who has fathered fourteen children by four different women — and by British YouTuber Carl Benjamin, who broadcast Musk’s promotional tweet on the NatalCon website like a badge of honor.

The speakers list is a tour through the far-right internet’s anonymous underbelly, now bold enough to show their faces. Raw Egg Nationalist. . Indian Bronson. Cremieux. Yuri Bezmenov (almost certainly a pseudonym, since the original Yuri Bezmenov was a Soviet KGB defector who died in 1993). Jonathan Keeperman.

For years, nearly everyone in this network operated behind pseudonyms. It is only recently — as their ideas have come to fruition inside of actual government policy — that they’ve felt comfortable attaching real faces to them.

NatalCon’s founder, Kevin Dolan, was a senior data scientist at Booz Allen Hamilton until 2021, when the company learned he was running a racist, antisemitic, homophobic anonymous Twitter account tied to the white-nationalist “Deseret Nationalist” (DezNat) movement.

He lost his job, his security clearance, and his cover all at once. He has since described NatalCon as a way to “unite the clans“ of the right.

The first NatalCon in 2023 featured alt-right blogger Charles Haywood, who called the Civil Rights Act of 1964 the single greatest mistake in American history. This was not a fringe moment organizers distanced themselves from. It was the program.

At the gene-editing panel, Diana Fleishman used “mentally ill people breeding” as a casual rhetorical example before catching herself mid-sentence. And lest there be any confusion about what NatalCon actually is, Dolan himself has stated plainly that the pronatalist and eugenic positions are “very much aligned.“

This gathering is the transition point into the next part of the project: genetic editing.

The Two Wings of Pronatalism Cannot Coexist

Once you ask who counts as a “real” American baby, you end up asking who counts as an American at all? The pronatalist movement has an answer. It just doesn’t have one answer. It has two, and they do not fit together.

Let’s start with Vance.

JD Vance has, on the record, called himself “100 percent pro-life” and said he would “like abortion to be illegal nationally.” He’s said abortion “has turned our society into a place where we see children as an inconvenience to be thrown away rather than a blessing to be nurtured.”

Vance even defended Texas SB 8, the law banning abortion at six weeks with no exceptions for rape or incest. He said that whether a pregnancy resulted from rape or incest was beside the point, because two wrongs don’t make a right, and that the real question was whether “a child should be allowed to live, even though the circumstances of that child’s birth are somehow inconvenient or a problem to the society.”

In January 2023, Vance and roughly forty other Republicans signed a letter to the DOJ demanding it enforce the Comstock Act. That’s the 1873 anti-vice law the modern anti-abortion movement has spent the post-Dobbs era trying to revive. The goal: a backdoor national abortion ban.

The case hit SCOTUS this month and failed. SCOTUS Justices Thomas and Alito wrote dissents that read more like instructions for the next case to be filed.

And then there is IVF. When Senator Tammy Duckworth introduced the Right to Build Families Act to codify federal IVF protections, Vance, Mr. Pro-Family, called it “idiotic bait.”

When probed further, Vance admitted he hadn’t actually read it. He voted with the rest of his caucus to block it. When the Senate held a follow-up vote that September, he didn’t show up.

Before any of it, he wrote the foreword to Project 2025 architect Kevin Roberts’s book, Dawn’s Early Light. Vance called the ideas in it “an essential weapon” and that it was, “time to circle the wagons and load the muskets.”

The Republican Party’s 2024 platform contained language that anti-abortion advocates have long wanted in writing: that the Constitution’s 14th Amendment protects the right to life. The significance is that if that right applies from the moment of fertilization, no new law is needed to restrict abortion or IVF. The constitutional protection would already exist.

Project 2025 makes exactly that argument.

Alabama did it first. In early 2024, its Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos stored at fertility clinics are legally children. IVF routinely produces more embryos than are ever used, and the unused ones are typically discarded. Under the ruling, that discard could be treated as the wrongful death of a child. Clinics shut down IVF services immediately. The state legislature stepped in with a law protecting doctors from lawsuits, which got the clinics running again, but nobody struck down the original ruling. The embryos are still legally children. The liability is still theoretically there.

Which brings us, finally, to the other wing. The tech-pronatalist wing. The one currently writing the checks and choosing the names, and despite JD Vance’s “pro-life” stance — the very people he is closely aligned with through his founder and funder Peter Thiel.

They tell everyone else to have more babies, more workers, more bodies to keep the economy afloat, and they wrap it in scripture and call it duty. But they themselves are in a clinic sorting through embryos, discarding the ones that don't meet whatever standard they've decided matters.

Self-proclaimed pronatalist Simone Collins — an autistic woman who would have been a target of eugenics herself — and her husband chose to screen their embryos prior to IVF. But they did not simply screen their embryos for genetic disease the way that most couples using IVF do.

No, instead they used polygenic embryo screening —through companies like Heliospect Genomics and Genomic Prediction (now LifeView) - where each embryo was ranked and scored against the others based on projected traits, IQ, hair color, eye color, characteristics someone decided were worth selecting for.

Then they chose the one that scored highest and had it implanted. They have spoken about this openly. Proudly, even. Malcolm Collins has said on record that they will never choose a child “less privileged in IQ” than either of them, and that their goal is to have children in the "the top 0.1% of people.”

They have 34 frozen embryos ready to go children already named with plans to implant one every two or three years. Their goal is to have between seven and thirteen children total. They’re already at five.

They deny being "eugenicists" on a technicality: by their definition (per Malcolm), eugenics requires state coercion. That said, they're fine with the label "hipster eugenicists,” though.

Their argument boils down to, no, because we don’t work for the state we technically aren’t eugenicists. But it’s peculiar to say that given that Simone ran for political office in 2024.

The argument that they’re just private citizens gets harder to make when one of them ran to become a state lawmaker, and they have many Silicon Valley friends intertwined in the webs of government.

Simone describes her look as “techno-puritan” — “chunky hipster glasses and a lot of modern equipment with a bonnet and linen clothing and weird puritan stuff.” But it is not just a fashion choice. It is also the name of a religion she and Malcolm invented, built around the idea that certain people are genetically superior and destined to lead. The Puritans believed God chose who was saved and who wasn’t. The Collinses believe science can now make that selection for you, before the child is even born.

And they have built a network of people with the money to act on it.

• Peter Thiel has put money into TMRW, a startup that automates egg freezing, and dropped $200 million into a fund pushing fertility services across Asia. One of his former fellows, Noor Siddiqui, went on to found Orchid, which screens embryos for over 1,200 conditions and ranks them by polygenic scores. Thiel Capital then led a $10 million round for Rhea, a Singapore-based company quietly buying up IVF clinics across Asia.

• In America, embryonic gene editing is illegal — so Sam Altman's husband Oliver Mulherin and Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong are funding a startup called Preventive to do it in the United Arab Emirates instead.

• Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian's venture fund 776 is funding Nucleus Genomics. The startup has taken over NYC subway stations with ads urging commuters to have their "best baby” through polygenic screening.

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It starts before you ever walk into a polling place. On their own, none of these things look connected.

On April 29, 2026, in a consequential ruling, the Supreme Court cut a significant part of the Voting Rights Act, the 1965 law that protected voters of color from discrimination.

The next day, Louisiana’s governor Jeff Landry canceled the state’s congressional primary election — even though more than 100,000 people had already mailed in their ballots, and in-person voting was set to start in two days.

A few months before that, the U.S. House passed a bill — known as the SAVE Act — that would require people to show a passport or birth certificate to register to vote. It’s been stuck in the Senate since, but that hasn’t stopped 12 states from making a law of their own.

New Voter ID laws in AL, AZ, FL, GA, KS, LA, MS, NH, OH, SD, UT and WY restrict voter access without a secondary form of ID or a passport. About 146 million Americans don’t have a passport. Millions more do not readily have access to their birth certificates.

And last October, Dominion — the company whose voting machines are used by roughly one in three American voters — was bought by a former Republican election official, who promised the new company would follow Trump’s executive order on elections.

Between 2025 and 2026, at least nine things like this happened.

Some came from the courts. Some from Congress. Some from the White House. Some from state governors. One came from a private business deal. They didn’t happen to the same people by accident; they hit the same groups of voters, in the same stretch of time.

What follows is the story of how they fit together, and what we uncovered when we put them side by side.

First, They Dismantled the Department of Justice

Any strategy that depends on changing the rules starts by neutralizing the people enforcing the old ones.

There's a behavioral concept in political psychology called "regulatory capture” when an organization that's supposed to serve everyone — like a regulatory agency, a court, or a university — gradually gets taken over by a specific group that bends it to serve their own interests instead.

In the case of the DOJ, one could argue that this change was not gradual. The dismantling and replacement of the DOJ is explicitly listed in Project 2025 as one of the top priorities for the new administration. And that’s exactly how they treated it. It was swift.

In 2025, within days of Trump’s inauguration, active litigation protecting voters in Georgia, Virginia, Texas, and Alabama was dropped. By mid-2025, roughly 70% of the Department of Justice's Voting Section career attorneys were gone. At one point, three remained.

Those who remained were not understaffed but still protecting voting rights, no. They had new jobs, and keeping them required falling in line.

Beginning in May 2025, the DOJ sent demand letters for voter data to at least 48 states and Washington D.C.