A pregnant woman in a small town in Louisiana walks into a building on a state highway. The sign outside says Pregnancy Center. The waiting room looks like a clinic. A volunteer in a white coat hands her a clipboard with an intake form.

Her name.

Her address.

Her last menstrual period.

Whether she has ever been pregnant before, and what happened.

Whether she drinks, smokes, or uses drugs. Whether she has ever had a sexually transmitted infection.

The name and contact information of the person she lives with. Her income. Her ethnicity.

Her marital status.

Her education.

She fills it out — and she believes she is in a medical office. The forms reference HIPAA. The volunteers ask the kinds of questions most doctors ask. And there is an ultrasound machine in the back room.

Three years later, a Sales and Customer Service Specialist for Next Level CMS demonstrates the company’s database in a training video. The video is accessible on the open internet for a period of weeks or months. It contains the full names of 13 women who visited The Unexpected Pregnancy Center in New Iberia, Louisiana, along with their due dates, last menstrual periods, and whether they received an ultrasound or a pregnancy test. In another section of the video, a map shows where each woman lives.

A nonprofit watchdog, the Campaign for Accountability, finds the video. Researchers cross-reference the names with social media profiles and confirm the women are real people living in or near New Iberia. WWNO, the New Orleans NPR affiliate, independently verifies the match.

The women do not know.

This piece is about how that happened, and how it is happening still, and why almost no one is going to stop it.

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I want to slow down here, because the regulatory architecture beneath this story is the part that gets skipped, and the part that, once you understand it, makes the rest of the story unsurvivable as anything but deliberate.

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) is the federal law most Americans assume protects the privacy of their medical information. It is the very law that requires the form you sign at every doctor’s office. It is the law that makes a pharmacist whisper. It is the law that determines whether a hospital can tell your employer why you missed work — or whether they can discuss your medical information with your spouse.

It does not apply to crisis pregnancy centers.

It does not apply to crisis pregnancy centers because the vast majority of them are not licensed medical providers. They do not bill insurance. They do not employ physicians. They do not perform diagnostic procedures. The Congressional Research Service — Congress’s nonpartisan research arm — confirmed this in plain language: “some nonprofit entities, often referred to as ‘crisis pregnancy centers,’ may offer a limited range of free pregnancy options, such as counseling, but may not provide licensed medical services. Such entities might receive information about visitors’ reproductive health such as pregnancy status and length of gestation. However, such an entity may not be subject to the HIPAA Privacy Rule if it does not qualify as a health care provider, and may not be covered by the FTC Act if it is a nonprofit”.

Read that twice. The Federal Trade Commission Act, which prohibits deceptive trade practices and which covers most non-HIPAA entities that handle health data — period-tracking apps, fitness trackers, telehealth platforms — does not apply to crisis pregnancy centers either, because most of them are nonprofits, and the FTC Act exempts nonprofits.

In the entire federal regulatory landscape governing the privacy of personal health information, there are two main frameworks. Crisis pregnancy centers are exempt from both. They sit in the only legal gap in American health-information regulation that exempts an entity from both federal frameworks.

A 2024 piece in Health Affairs by Carmel Shachar, a health-law expert at Harvard, described the situation precisely: “Generally, a crisis pregnancy center that provides services for free and does not bill health insurance does not meet the definition of a covered entity under HIPAA and therefore the HIPAA Privacy, Security, and Breach Notification Rules (HIPAA Rules) do not apply”. That was an HHS official’s response to NBC News, under the Biden administration, when asked whether a recent regulation strengthening HIPAA protections for reproductive health data covered CPCs.

The administration that wanted HIPAA to apply to these facilities concluded it could not.

This would be a regulatory failure if the facilities in question were small, scattered, and operating in isolation. They are not.

As of 2019, there were approximately 2,600 crisis pregnancy centers in the United States, in contrast to 780 abortion clinics. Newer estimates put the number at 2,500 to 4,000, with the centers speaking with over one million people each year. Scholars estimate that in post-Dobbs America, 57 percent of the population lives closer to a CPC than to an abortion clinic, and in thirteen states, that figure is 99 percent.

The largest network among them is Heartbeat International, which says it has over 3,600 affiliates around the world. Heartbeat operates a 24/7 hotline called Option Line that, by its own promotional account, has spoken with over 8 million women since 2003.

Eight million women. None of them protected by HIPAA. None of them protected by the FTC Act. All of them giving information to an organization whose stated mission is preventing abortion.

In 2017, Heartbeat International introduced what it called a “game-changer” in its work: a centralized data infrastructure called Next Level CMS. Heartbeat’s president Jor-El Godsey announced the system at the organization’s annual conference in Chicago. Next Level promotes itself as a system that “harnesses the power of big data” and that “makes sure that no client ever falls through the cracks from the moment you say ‘Hello.’”

Privacy International, the British digital rights organization that first investigated Next Level in 2019, documented what the system collects from women who visit affiliated centers: “name, address, email address, ethnicity, marital status, living arrangement, education, income source, alcohol, cigarette, and drug intake, medications, medical history, STI history, name of referral, pregnancy symptoms, pregnancy history, medical testing information, and eventually ultrasound photos”.

That is more comprehensive than what most actual medical providers collect at intake. And it is being collected by an organization to which no medical privacy law applies.

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There is a moment in a 2022 recording from Heartbeat International’s Annual Conference, captured in the documentary Preconceived and reproduced in a 2024 essay by Susannah Baruch, the Executive Director of Harvard Law School’s Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, that I want to put on the record carefully. A speaker at the conference, addressing other CPC operators, says this:

“We’re pulling data, pulling data, pulling data, pulling data down to the point that I’m tracking the SIM card in your phone. So, I can tell if I served you an ad, you didn’t click on it, but you came to my site down the road.”

Read that as many times as you need. The speaker is describing tracking individual women across devices, by the SIM card identifier in their phone, to measure whether digital advertising eventually drove them to a Heartbeat-affiliated center. This is surveillance-industry methodology. This is the data architecture of targeted advertising. It is being applied to women looking for pregnancy resources in the most vulnerable moment of their lives.

Heartbeat’s own promotional video for Next Level, also captured in Preconceived, calls the system a “data mine” and says: “The data that will be collected actually will benefit everyone! It will be open to everyone! We will have, with Next Level, our own data mine, that we can truly use to find answers to the kind of questions that will make us even more effective.”

A data mine. Open to everyone. The pronouns are doing work in that sentence — the “everyone” is not the women whose data has been mined.

The Louisiana breach in May 2024 is the case I want to return to, because it is the moment when this stopped being theoretical.

Investigative reporter Jessica Valenti, in her newsletter Abortion, Every Day, obtained training videos from Heartbeat International and reported on them. The videos showed Khristey Reeves, a “Sales and Customer Service Specialist” for Next Level, demonstrating how to use the software to thousands of CPC affiliate trainees. In the demonstration, Reeves scrolled through real client records belonging to thirteen women who had visited The Unexpected Pregnancy Center in New Iberia, Louisiana.

Visible on the training video: full names, due dates, last menstrual periods, ultrasound and pregnancy test status, ethnicity, marital status, living arrangement, education, employment, income.

The Campaign for Accountability, after finding the video, filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. That complaint is what produced the official HHS acknowledgment that crisis pregnancy centers are not HIPAA-covered entities. The complaint that began as an attempt to hold one CPC accountable produced a federal government finding that the entire industry is exempt from federal privacy law.

The Campaign for Accountability subsequently asked Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill to investigate The Unexpected Pregnancy Center for violations of the Louisiana Deceptive Trade Practices Act and the Louisiana Database Security Breach Notification Law. The center’s website continues to assure clients that “your visit and any information you share with us is completely confidential” and that the center “will not share any personal information about you or your visit with anyone outside of our organization”.

The thirteen women’s data was, for a period in 2024, on the open internet.

This is not the first warning.

In September 2022, three months after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, when the privacy of reproductive health data became, overnight, a question of legal exposure, Senator Elizabeth Warren sent a formal letter to Heartbeat International president Jor-El Godsey raising specific concerns about Next Level CMS. The letter cited Heartbeat’s own promotional language about “harnessing the power of big data.” It noted that women contacting CPCs share “sexual and reproductive histories, test results, [and] ultrasound photos”. And it raised the specific concern that “the lack of transparency and lack of protection will allow the data Heartbeat International and its affiliates collect to ‘be used in pregnancy- and abortion-related prosecutions’”.

Heartbeat’s response, as reported by Valenti, was to retain the First Liberty Institute, a religious-liberty legal organization, to push back on Warren’s questions. First Liberty attorney Jeremy Dys accused Warren of “encouraging attacks at crisis pregnancy centers” and wrote that her “calculated rhetoric encouraged vandals who have unleashed their criminal activity across the country”. Heartbeat’s lawyers assured Warren that “confidentiality has been a core principle for life-affirming organizations for decades”.

Two years later, the names of thirteen women were on the open internet.

I want to be explicit about the stakes, because they are not abstract.

There are at least three named cases in the recent American legal record of women being prosecuted for pregnancy outcomes — stillbirths, miscarriages, abortions — using their digital data as evidence.

Latice Fisher in Mississippi.

Purvi Patel in Indiana.

Jennie McCormack in Idaho.

Their cases involved internet search history, text messages, and online activity used by prosecutors to build cases against them.

The infrastructure to prosecute pregnancy outcomes already exists in this country. Search histories have been subpoenaed. Text messages have been obtained. Period-tracking apps have produced data used in legal proceedings. The CPC database is one more source feeding the same machine.

Tara Murtha, director of strategic communications at the Women’s Law Project, puts the question precisely: “Given its anti-abortion mission, why should anyone trust that Heartbeat International would not share personal data it is storing with law enforcement investigating women where pregnancy and abortion are criminalized?”

There is no good answer to that question from Heartbeat’s side. The organization’s stated mission is to prevent abortion, and the centers it operates collect comprehensive personal information from women who, in many cases, are considering or have had abortions. This includes states in which many of those centers operate, and now criminally prosecute abortion. Legal protections that would normally prevent this kind of information from being shared with law enforcement do not apply.

The conditions for what advocates call “an abortion surveillance state” are not being built. They have been built. The architecture is already standing. What is missing is the prosecution that establishes the precedent. Once that prosecution happens, the rest of the system is already in place to do its work.

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Some movement, recently, but not enough.

Following the Campaign for Accountability complaint, HHS issued a formal letter acknowledging that CPCs are not HIPAA-covered. In response, Heartbeat International began advising affiliates not to invoke HIPAA in their patient communications, and the smaller umbrella organization NIFLA issued similar guidance. But the guidance is voluntary. The Record reported in July 2025 that some CPCs continue to mislead women about HIPAA protections.

There is also a live case at the Supreme Court. The New Jersey Attorney General’s office issued a subpoena to a chain of CPCs, First Choice Women’s Resource Centers, to investigate concerns about misleading donors, unlicensed practices, patient privacy violations, and false medical claims. The chain refused to comply. The case has now reached the Supreme Court, which is being asked to decide whether the state’s subpoena power can compel disclosure from a CPC. A ruling in favor of the centers would meaningfully limit state-level accountability for the entire industry.

Heartbeat International’s current public position, as stated in a recent letter to The Record, is that affiliates voluntarily implement privacy and security practices that align with HIPAA standards.

Carmel Shachar’s response: the centers are “benefiting from the reputation of HIPAA without having the accountability of HIPAA”.

I have been writing about Project 2025 for the past year, page by page. The Health and Human Services chapter, written by Roger Severino, explicitly calls for the federal government to redirect funding to crisis pregnancy centers. Saving America by Saving the Family, Heritage’s 2025 supplementary publication, makes the same recommendation, but more aggressively.

The legal infrastructure protecting CPCs from accountability — the First Liberty Institute, NIFLA, the NIFLA v. Becerra precedent that struck down California’s CPC disclosure law — is the same legal infrastructure built into the Project 2025 implementation pipeline. The funding pipeline is the same pipeline. The personnel pipeline is the same pipeline. There is one apparatus, and the CPC data infrastructure is one of its arms.

The women who walked into The Unexpected Pregnancy Center in New Iberia did not walk into a rogue facility. They walked into a node of a national network deliberately funded, legally protected, and politically expanded by an administration whose foundational document calls for exactly this kind of infrastructure. The breach was not a glitch. The breach was a feature of a system working as designed.

The thirteen women in New Iberia are real. They live in a small town in Louisiana today. Some of them, presumably, still do not know that their names appeared on a training video that was, for a period, accessible to anyone with an internet connection. Some of them, presumably, have continued to receive services from The Unexpected Pregnancy Center, which still states on its website that client information is held in strict confidence.

The women whose data is in the Next Level CMS database — the women who came through the doors of any of Heartbeat International’s 3,600 affiliated centers since 2017 — number in the millions. Their information is held by an organization with no legal obligation to protect it, no legal obligation to delete it, and no legal obligation to notify them if it is shared, sold, lost, leaked, or subpoenaed. That information sits inside a database whose own promotional materials describe it as a “data mine.” It sits inside a database whose architects, in a 2022 conference recording, openly describe tracking SIM card identifiers on clients’ phones.

A senator has raised this. A state attorney general has raised this. A Harvard health-law expert has raised this. The Congressional Research Service has raised this. Time magazine has raised this. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has raised this. The ACLU has raised this. Privacy International raised this in 2019, six years before the rest of us caught up.

The system is still standing. The data is still being collected. The breach in Louisiana, the only documented case of an actual public exposure, produced an HHS letter that confirmed the centers were never bound by federal law in the first place. The fix that emerged was a voluntary advisory from the largest umbrella organization, which advised its affiliates not to invoke HIPAA in their patient communications. The data collection itself was not affected. The database remains operational. The training videos are still being made.

A pregnant woman walks into a building on a state highway. The sign outside says Pregnancy Center. She fills out the form. She believes she is in a medical office.

She is not.

She is in a node of a national surveillance infrastructure, built deliberately, protected legally, and aligned with an administration whose explicit policy goal is to make her decision about her pregnancy a matter of state interest. What she gives them, they keep. What they keep, they share. What they share, in a country building toward the criminal prosecution of pregnancy outcomes, is evidence.

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At 5:20 yesterday evening, three judges on the Fifth Circuit ruled that Mifepristone — a drug approved by the FDA in 2000, prescribed to more than five million people, with a safety record stronger than Tylenol’s — would no longer arrive by mail. Patients who had, for the better part of five years, received the medication after a telemedicine consultation will now be required to present themselves in person at a clinic.

For some of them, the nearest clinic is a hundred miles away.

For others, it is across a state line.

For all of them, including those who live in states whose constitutions explicitly enshrine reproductive freedom, the federal court system has just decided that the protections their states wrote, ratified, and defended do not extend to the mailbox.

This news is heavy. Given the state of the world and the speed at which the headlines arrive, it may not have set in with you yet. It hasn’t fully set in with me. So let me break down the ruling, and we can sit with it together.

The Fifth Circuit’s decision targets a delivery mechanism, not a right. The court did not overturn any state’s protection of abortion. It did not strike down a single ballot initiative.

It did not need to.

What it did was reach into the federal regulation of the United States Postal Service and decree that a particular medication, lawful in dozens of states, may no longer travel through the mail to reach the patients those states have agreed to protect. The right remains. The route to the right has been closed.

This is the part I want every reader in California, New York, Massachusetts, Michigan, Alaska, and every state where reproductive freedom is currently codified to understand: your state constitution is not a firewall.

It is a wall that protects you from your own state government, and a federal ruling that operates on the infrastructure between you and your medication does not need to climb that wall.

It walks around it.

The protections you fought for, that you canvassed for, that you rang doorbells in November weather to defend — those protections are intact and largely irrelevant. They cannot put a pill in your hand if the federal courts have decided the pill cannot travel.

That is the architecture of what just happened.

A ruling like this does not land evenly. It never has.

The woman in San Francisco with a credit card, a flexible job, and a partner who can drive her four hours each way to a clinic and back will eventually get her medication. The ruling is an inconvenience for her, an outrage, an insult — but she will get the pill. The system is built to bend, in the end, for women like her.

The woman who is built to break is the one without the credit card.

The one working two jobs, neither of which will give her a day off.

The one whose nearest clinic is across a state line, whose car will not survive.

The one who is undocumented and cannot risk the highway.

The one whose pregnancy is the result of a rape she has not told anyone about.

The one whose partner monitors her phone.

The one in rural Mississippi, in rural Alabama, in the parts of Texas where the clinic network was hollowed out years ago, and the mail, until tonight, was the only thing left.

The Black woman, whose maternal mortality rate in this country is already three times that of a white woman, and for whom every additional hour of unwanted pregnancy is not an abstraction but a measurable risk to her life.

The Indigenous woman whose access to reproductive care has been routed through a federal Indian Health Service that has, historically, been the agency removing her reproductive autonomy rather than protecting it.

The teenager whose parents do not know.

The trans man for whom every clinic visit is a negotiation with paperwork and personnel that may or may not see him as a person at all.

These are the patients the mail was briefly reaching. The Fifth Circuit has just decided that the country can do without reaching them. That is what the ruling is.

It is a decision about which women count, made by judges who will never need the medication, on behalf of an administration whose authors have written, on the page, that the women who count are the ones inside marriages they approve of.

I want to say this without ornament: the women who will die because of this ruling will be poor, and they will be disproportionately Black, and they will be disproportionately rural, and they will be disproportionately young, and the people writing the ruling know this, and the people who wrote the document the ruling came from know this, and the people who voted for the candidate who promised to deliver this know this.

There is no version of this ruling in which the harm is distributed evenly. And it’s by design.

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The Heritage Foundation’s Mandate for Leadership, the 900-page document the country has come to know as Project 2025, contains a chapter on Health and Human Services that, in plain and unembarrassed language, calls for exactly this (starts on page 449). The FDA must reverse its approval of Mifepristone, the chapter instructs, on the grounds that the original approval was politicized and unlawful.

The Comstock Act of 1873 — a postal regulation written before women could vote, drafted by a man who believed contraceptive pamphlets were obscenity — must be revived to criminalize the mailing of abortion medication anywhere in the country, regardless of the laws of the state receiving it.

The Department of Health and Human Services must be renamed the Department of Life. The phrases reproductive health, reproductive rights, and abortion must be deleted from federal statutes. IVF, the document says, should become “fully obsolete and ethically unthinkable.” Birth control pills are framed as a public health crisis requiring intervention.

This was published in 2023. It was distributed openly. The candidate spent his second campaign denying he had read it. Within four days of his second inauguration, Time found that nearly two-thirds of his executive actions mirrored, wholly or in part, proposals from the document. The Center for Progressive Reform’s tracker, as of early this year, has logged 53% of its administrative agenda implemented or initiated within twelve months.

Today’s ruling is part of that 53%. It is on schedule. It is a deliverable.

Roger Severino, who drafted the HHS chapter, served as the agency’s civil rights office director during the first Trump administration.

The Comstock revival has been advanced for years by Jonathan Mitchell, the lawyer who designed Texas’s SB8 bounty system.

The judges who issued today’s order sit on a Fifth Circuit that has been remade, lifetime appointment by lifetime appointment, since 2017.

The personnel were assembled before the policy was finalized.

The policy was drafted before there was an administration to staff.

They prepared for years.

They prepared in public.

They told us what they were going to do.

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There is nothing new about a state regulating women’s bodies through the mail.

The Comstock Act was, in its original form, exactly that — a law passed in 1873 to allow the federal government to seize, and prosecute, anything sent through the postal system that the state considered indecent. Margaret Sanger went to prison under it for mailing pamphlets about contraception. The law has never been repealed. It has only been ignored. What the Fifth Circuit has done, in effect, is decide that the time of ignoring it is over.

The administration of women’s reproductive lives through state machinery is also not a new project. It is, in fact, one of the oldest projects this country has run. Black women bore children for the ledgers of their enslavers, and the children were the ledger. Indigenous women were sterilized in Indian Health Service facilities, frequently without consent, into the 1970s. Tens of thousands of poor women across the South — disproportionately Black, but not exclusively — were sterilized through state-run programs whose subjects were sometimes told they were undergoing routine appendectomies.

The state has been deciding which women bear children and which women do not for the entirety of its existence.

The paperwork changed. The project did not.

And it is not only an American project. My mother was born in West Germany in 1968, into the long shadow of a regime that, two and a half decades earlier, had run reproductive control through both faces of the same coin — Lebensborn programs to produce the children the state wanted, and forced sterilization to prevent the children the state did not. She was placed in an orphanage. The orphanage has since burned to the ground, taking her records with it. I do not know my grandmother’s name. I do not know the circumstances under which my mother was given up, or taken. I can’t advocate for her line because I don’t have it.

The line was unmade by paper, and then by fire, and then by silence.

I write this down because I want to be honest about what the inheritance is. The women I come from are women whose histories were erased, sometimes by fascism and sometimes by ordinary American cruelty, and the country I am raising my children in is now reaching, with deliberation and on schedule, for the tools that did the erasing.

I promised my children I could protect them. I meant their rights, too.

It is a particular kind of privilege to have ever believed I could. The mothers in this country who have known, for generations, that the state would not protect their children — Black mothers, Indigenous mothers, immigrant mothers, the mothers of disabled children, the mothers of trans children — have never had the luxury of the promise I made.

I made it anyway. I want to be honest about that before I go any further.

I want to write that line straight, without softening it, because softening it would make it bearable, and I do not want it to be bearable. I made the kind of promise that mothers make — the one about the dark, the one about the world, the one a mother makes by the hand she puts on the back of a child’s head when the child is afraid. I meant the promise to extend further than the dark. I meant it to extend to the country. I meant it to cover the right of my children to make decisions about their own bodies, to live in states that recognized them, to receive medical care without the moral feelings of strangers gating the door.

I cannot keep that promise tonight. I may not be able to keep it tomorrow. The protections I assumed would hold — Roe, the Voting Rights Act, the administrative state, the independence of the courts, the basic notion that an institution can resist a bad-faith executive — have come apart faster than I can describe them to my children, and I am the one who described the country to them in the first place. I told them what was true. The country has decided to make me a liar.

So. What do we do.

Fund the providers still mailing pills tonight, in the states that will let them, until the federal courts take that route too. Fund the litigators. Fund the abortion funds, the shield-state networks, the practical-support organizations driving women across state lines. Vote in every cycle and at every level, in margins so wide the federal courts cannot pretend the public did not choose. Elect prosecutors who will not enforce these laws. Elect attorneys general who will sue to block them. Elect governors who will protect providers within their borders.

All of this is necessary. None of this is sufficient.

I want to say that out loud, because the piece I have just written has spent two thousand words demonstrating that the people running this country prepared for fifty years to take what they are taking, that they did it on the page, that they are executing on a schedule that was published before the election they did not need to win cleanly. If that is true — and it is true — then the answer to what do we do cannot, with a straight face, be only vote harder. The piece’s own diagnosis forbids it.

Tracy Chapman recorded Talkin’ ‘bout a Revolution in 1988, when she was twenty-four years old. The song has been waiting on the shelf of American political music for almost forty years.

Don’t you know, she sings, they’re talkin’ ‘bout a revolution. It sounds like a whisper.

It does. It has been sounding like a whisper for some time. The whisper is getting louder in rooms I did not expect to hear it in.

I do not use the word revolution lightly, and I do not use it as metaphor. I mean a fundamental reordering of what we are willing to comply with. The doctors who will keep mailing pills regardless of the ruling. The pharmacists who will keep dispensing. The patients who will keep receiving. The networks of mutual aid that kept abortion accessible before Roe and will keep it accessible after — the Jane Collective in Chicago performed an estimated eleven thousand abortions between 1969 and 1973, in defiance of Illinois law, with a safety record cleaner than the legal medical system of the time.

The infrastructure of refusal already exists in this country’s history. It is being rebuilt right now, in kitchens, in cars, in the trunks of people who drive other people to clinics.

We are going to need it.

The exhaustion you feel is engineered. The conviction that the only thing left is to keep performing the procedures of a democracy being dismantled in front of you — that is engineered too.

Refuse the engineering.

Find your people.

Build what comes next.

The list of organizations to donate to is real, and you should donate, and the list is also not the list that is going to save this. The list that is going to save this has not been written yet.

We are going to have to write it.

I am writing this down to be on the record. Ten years from now, I want to remember the day in May of 2026 when a federal court took the mail away from the women of America. I want to remember what I knew, and when I knew it, and what I told my children, and what I had to tell them later. I want to remember that the document was readable. That the architects were named. That the country had been told.

The mail used to carry a pill. It carried, with the pill, a particular kind of freedom — the freedom to receive medical care without performing your geography for a stranger, without driving for a day, without explaining yourself at a clinic door, without being seen. That freedom was, briefly, a fact. It was a fact for five years. It is no longer a fact tonight.

I promised my children I could protect them. I meant their rights, too. The rights are being taken from them on a schedule that was published before they were old enough to read. I am going to spend the rest of my life trying to keep the promise anyway.

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It doesn’t flatten. It doesn’t numb. It doesn't pass.

It compounds.

I am writing this on April 30, and I want to tell you what tipped it. It wasn't one headline. It was the cumulative arithmetic of a decade, then the Supreme Court, and then the slow, public gutting of the Voting Rights Act — a law my grandmother's generation called a victory and treated as finished. I watched it come undone, and I understood, in the particular way the body understands before the mind catches up, that nothing my foremothers called won was ever actually secured. They handed us a country and told us it was free. It was not free. It is still not free. And the bill for that lie is being collected, with interest, from the women who were told the fight was over and from the women who were never allowed to believe it in the first place.

I am a white woman. The "we" I was raised inside is the we the movement protected, the we the histories were written about, the we whose grandmothers were photographed at the marches and whose names ended up in the textbooks. I am writing from inside that inheritance, not outside it. The omissions I am about to name are partly mine to answer for. If this essay has any standing to indict the women who came before me, it is because I am refusing to continue what they began, not because I imagine I was never part of it.

April 30 is, among other things, a day of foundings. On this date in 1789, George Washington took the oath of office at Federal Hall, and a republic began that counted Black people as three-fifths of a person and counted Indigenous nations as nothing at all. On this date in 1803, the United States bought a territory from a country that did not own it, and the people whose land it actually was learned about the transaction later. On this date in 1993, a physicist released the source code for the World Wide Web into the public domain, and for a brief moment, the world believed knowledge would now belong to everyone. None of these foundings delivered what they promised. Each of them required a later generation to either redeem the omission or live inside it.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was an attempt to redeem Washington's omission. It took a hundred and seventy-six years. It took bodies on a bridge in Selma and bodies in jails across the South and bodies that did not come home. And it has been, in the years since, slowly unmade — first in 2013, when Shelby County hollowed out its enforcement, and now further still, in the rulings my generation has watched arrive like weather. The country is asking for the omission back. And some of us are pretending to be surprised.

I was five when my father told me I could be anything I wanted to be. I remember the room. I remember believing him. It is one of the few sentences from that age that has survived intact in me, etched into the rusted panels of a brain that has forgotten almost everything else from that year. He believed it when he said it. That matters. He was not lying to me. He was telling me what his generation had been told to tell their daughters, and he was telling it to me in the specific dialect of American optimism that the late twentieth century had perfected and was about to stop being able to keep its promises about.

I was seventeen when I was pregnant with my first child. I was full of hope and full of a longing I did not yet have language for — the longing to give my child the life I had been told was waiting for me. My mother carried me toward that life through something she could not name. She was a German orphan, adopted into an American family, and the displacement she began with had never been given words by anyone in a position to give them. She inherited a silence older than she was. I inherited the silence she added to it. Years ago I went no-contact with her, for reasons that are mine and that I am not going to perform on this page. What I will say is that the silence between us now is not the same as the silence she carried. Hers was inherited. Mine is chosen. But the shape of it — the way silence transmits weight without explanation — is recognizable to me, and it is one of the things I am most determined not to pass on. You inherit the architecture of what was never spoken. You spend your early life trying to give your own children a softer version of what you were handed, without knowing exactly what it was you were handed. You just know it was heavy. You just know that some of the weight is now yours, and some of it you have set down on purpose.

I was nineteen when I had my second. By then the country had begun to clarify itself. The promises my father made me at five were not, it turned out, going to be honored by the economy that received me. They had been honored, partially, for his generation. They had been honored, more selectively, for my mother’s. They were not going to be honored for mine. Not because I had done anything wrong. Because the structure had changed underneath us, and no one in a position to warn us had bothered to.

I want to be specific about what changed, because vagueness is how this conversation gets dismissed. Millennials had it hard is a shrug. The actual mechanisms have names.

The housing market is not a market in any sense my father would have recognized. It is an asset class. Homes are no longer primarily places where families live; they are instruments through which capital extracts rent from the people who need shelter. A one-income household cannot sustain a home for two, much less for five. This is not a personal failure of budgeting. This is the predictable outcome of three decades of policy that treated housing as a vehicle for wealth accumulation by people who already had wealth, paid for by people who were trying to acquire shelter. My generation walked into adulthood and discovered the door we had been told to walk through had been priced into another tax bracket while we were still in school.

My husband can be hired on his military career. I cannot be hired on my education. He carries health insurance for our family because the country has decided that healthcare belongs to employers, and his employer is the federal government, and mine is a degree that the same federal government helped finance and now declines to make economically viable. The student loans I carry are not, structurally, an investment that paid off. They are a tax on having tried. The current administration’s posture toward higher education is not reform — it is the slow criminalization of the credential itself, the suggestion that the people who took on debt to do what they were told to do are now suspect for having believed it.

I want to say this plainly. My generation entered the labor market in 2008 or in the decade that followed, into wages that had stopped tracking productivity decades earlier, into a housing market priced by the people who had told us to ride it out, into a healthcare system tied to jobs that were being restructured into contracts, into an educational debt structured for an economy that no longer existed by the time we graduated. We were then handed two pandemics and told to be resilient. We were called lazy by the people who had eaten the ladder behind them. We were told our problem was avocado toast.

This is the cumulative arithmetic. This is what lives in the body when the body refuses to settle. It is not a feeling. It is a balance sheet. It is documented in every wage chart, every housing index, every debt-to-income ratio, every census of who owns and who rents and at what age. The data does not require my testimony. I am offering my testimony anyway, because data alone has not been enough to make the people in charge stop pretending.

And I want to be careful here, because this is where the essay could go wrong. Not every millennial absorbed this evenly. The decade I am describing hit a Black millennial woman differently than it hit me. It hit an Indigenous millennial woman differently still. It hit a millennial woman with disabilities, a queer millennial, a millennial without family wealth to fall back on, in ways that compounded what I am describing rather than mirrored it. The housing market that priced me out of a single-family home priced others out of housing entirely. The student debt that taxed my having tried became, for others, a foreclosure of the trying itself. The healthcare-by-employer system that constrains my family’s choices became, for others, the absence of healthcare. The same decade. Different bills.

This is the part the older generations of feminists most often got wrong, and I will get to that. For now I want only to say: when I describe what my generation carried, I am not describing a single experience. I am describing a pattern that fell unevenly on people who were already standing on uneven ground.

What I can say from where I stand is this. I was raised on a promise. I had children inside the dawning recognition that the promise would not be kept. I have spent my adulthood watching the gap between what I was told and what is actually available widen into something my body now registers as chronic. I am not unique in this. Most women I know my age are carrying some version of it. We keep apologizing for being tired. We should stop.

The country told my father to tell me I could be anything I wanted to be. The country then arranged itself, deliberately, so that I could not. That is not a coincidence and it is not a tragedy. It is a decision, made by people whose names are knowable, in policies that are documented, with consequences that are now being lived inside the bodies of an entire generation of women. And the women who came before us — the ones who called the fight won — did not warn us. Could not warn us. Would not warn us. We will get to which of those it was.

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The women who came before me were not, most of them, evil women. I want to start there, because the indictment that is coming will be easier to dismiss if it sounds like one. They were women operating inside the constraints of their own century, fighting for what they could see, often at real cost to themselves. I am not going to flatten them into villains. I am going to do something harder, which is to hold them accountable as adults who made choices, some of which were strategic, some of which were cowardly, and some of which were both.

In 1848, at Seneca Falls, the women who gathered to declare the rights of women did not invite Black women to the table in any meaningful way. Frederick Douglass was there. Sojourner Truth was not. The Declaration of Sentiments named the wrongs done to women and did not name, with any seriousness, that some of those women were also enslaved, and that the wrongs done to them were of an entirely different magnitude and required an entirely different reckoning.

In 1869, when the Fifteenth Amendment was being debated, the white leadership of the suffrage movement made a choice. Faced with the possibility that Black men might receive the vote before white women did, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony chose, openly and on the record, to oppose Black male suffrage if it meant white women would have to wait. They used the language of white supremacy to make the argument. They said, in print, that educated white women should not be ruled by what they called ignorant Black men. This is not a smear. It is documented. You can read the speeches.

In 1913, when suffragists marched on Washington, Black women who came to participate were told to march at the back of the procession. Ida B. Wells refused. She walked into the white Illinois delegation and took her place there anyway. She had to insist, in 1913, on her own presence in a movement that called itself a movement for women.

In 1920, when the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified and the vote was declared won, it was won for white women. Black women in the South would wait another forty-five years. Indigenous women on reservations would wait, in many cases, longer. The white suffrage movement, having achieved its goal, largely declared victory and went home. The work of completing the franchise was left to Black women, Indigenous women, and the men and women of color who had to organize, again, from scratch, against the same country that had just been congratulated for its progress.

In 1963, when Betty Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique and named the problem with no name, the problem she named was the problem of educated white middle-class housewives who felt unfulfilled in their suburban homes. The women who were cleaning those homes, raising those children for wages, and going home to their own families on the bus at night had a different problem. Friedan’s book, which is sometimes credited with launching second-wave feminism, did not name them. The movement that followed it took decades to seriously reckon with the fact that the we it was organizing on behalf of had been drawn so narrowly that most of the women in the country were not inside it.

In 1965, the Voting Rights Act was passed. It was the redemption of an omission a hundred and seventy-six years old. It was won not primarily by the suffrage movement’s heirs but by the civil rights movement, by Black organizers and Black churches and Black women whose names are mostly not in the textbooks my generation was given. Fannie Lou Hamer. Diane Nash. Amelia Boynton, beaten unconscious on the Edmund Pettus Bridge so that the country could no longer pretend not to see. The Voting Rights Act was passed because Black women had refused to accept that 1920 had been a victory for them.

In 2013, the Supreme Court gutted the enforcement provisions of that act in Shelby County v. Holder. In the years since, the rest of it has been hollowed out further. And the white feminist movement that called 1920 a victory and went home is now, in many corners, asking why the women of color it never fully fought for are not showing up to fight for it.

I am writing this as a woman who is part of the we that was included. My grandmother could vote. My great-grandmother could vote. My foremothers were photographed at the marches and their names made it, in some cases, into the textbooks. The freedoms I was raised to believe were universal were, in fact, distributed. They came to me through a movement that secured them by deciding, again and again, that the women on the other side of the color line could wait. They were told they could wait. They waited. And the waiting was paid in lives I will never know about and bodies whose names were never recorded.

This is the inheritance I am refusing. Not because it is comfortable to refuse it. It is not. It would be far more comfortable to do what most of the women in my position have done historically, which is to receive the inheritance, enjoy its protections, and decline to look closely at how it was secured. The discomfort of looking is the smallest possible price, and even that price is one most of us have not, collectively, been willing to pay.

I am not going to perform that discomfort here. Performing it would be its own kind of evasion — the white woman publicly anguished about her position, asking to be absolved by the visibility of the anguish. That is not the work. The work is to name the omission, name my place inside it, and then act differently. The essay is one small part of acting differently. Most of the acting differently happens off the page, in the rooms where decisions are made, in the votes that are cast, in the money that is moved, in whose voice gets centered when a fight is being organized, in whose freedom is treated as the precondition for everyone else’s instead of the optional addendum to it.

The women who came before me failed by their omissions. I want to be precise about what I mean by that. They did not fail to win. They won, repeatedly, the things they organized to win. They failed by deciding, in moment after moment, that the we they were fighting for could be drawn narrowly without losing its moral authority. They failed by treating Black women’s freedom and Indigenous women’s freedom as separate fights to be taken up later, by other people, with other resources. They failed by going home in 1920, and by writing in 1963 as if most of America’s women did not exist, and by not standing, in numbers that mattered, with the women who finally won what they had declared won forty-five years earlier.

We were never free until we all were free. That sentence is not a slogan. It is a description of a fact that the suffrage movement declined to act on, that second-wave feminism was slow to internalize, and that the gutting of the Voting Rights Act is now teaching my generation in a vocabulary the body cannot misread. The freedoms we were raised to believe were finished were never finished. The fight was not won. What was deferred is now coming due, and it is coming due on women who were told the war was over and on women who were never allowed to believe it.

I am writing this as a woman who has come to understand, in the rusted panels of a brain that learned at five that I could be anything, that the anything my father promised was a promise he had received from a country that had never delivered it to most of its women. He was telling me what he had been told to tell me. The lie was older than he was. And it is mine, now, to refuse to repeat.

I do not know if I dare look into the future. I want to say that plainly, because the essay will be dishonest if I pretend to a hope I do not have.

When I look forward, what I see is not a vision. It is a movie I watched in a theater with my children. Wall-E. A planet abandoned by the people who consumed it past the point of habitation, populated by the small persistent forms of life that outlasted us. I see corporate greed that has grown so total it no longer requires our consent, only our continued participation. I see overconsumption metastasized into a culture that has confused acquisition with meaning and exhaustion with virtue. I see another uphill battle, and I see that I have passed it down to my children, who did not ask for it and who will fight it anyway because the women in our line do not, apparently, get to opt out.

When I let the future come closer than that, what surfaces is more personal and harder to defend. I see a cabin. I see a garden. I see my hands in soil that does not require me to perform optimism for it. I feel the desire — not as fantasy, as a bodily pull — to become reclusive, to step all the way into my connection with the Earth and live with her, alongside her, on terms older than the country I am indicting. I do not know if that desire is wisdom or surrender. I am not yet sure I need to know. What I know is that the Earth has been here longer than the suffrage movement and longer than the Voting Rights Act and longer than the Constitution that excluded most of the women now reading this, and she will be here after. The relationship to her is not an escape from the fight. It is a relationship that predates the fight and will outlast it, and tending it is not a betrayal of the work. It is one of the few forms of work that has not yet been corrupted.

I see pain. I see fear. I see control — being exerted over my body, my daughter’s body, the bodies of women whose names I will never know, in the country we are currently being told is a democracy. I am not going to pretend the future is brighter than the evidence warrants. The essay has been about refusing exactly that kind of pretending, and I am not going to abandon the discipline at the end.

But I want to say something carefully, because it is the only thing in this section that resembles hope, and I want to protect it from being misread as optimism.

I see a shift in my children’s generation. My daughter turned eighteen two days ago. The country she just became a voting member of is the country I have been describing in this essay, and she walked into her majority already knowing it. She did not need to be told. She can name things I did not have language for until I was an adult. She inherited my fight — I did not want that for her, but it happened, and we are both adults enough now to say it plainly — and she brings a lens to that fight that I did not have at her age. She sees the connections faster. She sees the names I had to be taught to see. She does not have to be argued into the recognition that the women who were left out of 1920 are the women whose freedom is now the load-bearing question of the entire republic. She arrived already knowing.

That is not hope. That is evidence. The generation behind us is, in the parts of it I have access to, more clear-eyed than mine was at their age. They did not have to be brought, painfully, to the recognitions that took my generation a decade of unlearning. They started where we ended. They will end somewhere we cannot yet see.

This is what I want to hand them, and this is what I refuse to.

I refuse to pass down the trauma that cannot be broken. I refuse to pass down the silence my mother carried and added to and that I have, in my own way, been working not to add to further. I refuse to pass down the practice of declaring freedom won while some of us are still in the fight. I refuse to pass down white feminism’s oldest move — the calling of a victory while the women on the other side of the color line are still bleeding for it. I refuse to pass down the inheritance of selective liberation. I refuse to be the generation that does to the next what was done to mine, which is to lie to them about what was actually secured.

What I want to hand them is smaller and harder.

I want them to not forget the women before. The Black women. The Indigenous women. The trans women. The gay women. The disabled women. The undocumented women. The women whose names did not make it into the textbooks because the textbooks were written by people who did not consider them women in the full sense of the word. I want my children to know, in the way you know a thing in the body and not just in the mind, that the freedoms they are walking around inside of were paid for by women who were told to wait and waited and were sometimes killed for the waiting. I want them to refuse, as a matter of practice, the framing that anyone’s freedom is finished until everyone’s is.

I want them to know that a band aid will not work. The fights ahead of them are not going to be won by gestures, by hashtags, by the kind of activism that costs nothing and can be performed from a phone. The fights ahead are going to require what the women who are not in the textbooks already knew the fights required: bodies in rooms, money where it counts, votes cast in elections nobody is paying attention to, presence in places where presence is uncomfortable and possibly dangerous. Grit. Not the kind that lives in self-help books. The kind that lives in the people who keep showing up for fights they were told were already won.

I want them to inherit my refusal to lie to them about whether the war is over.

And I want them to inherit something my mother could not give me and her mother could not give her and the country could not, structurally, manage to give to most of its women: the practice of naming what was never named. The willingness to say the thing out loud, in the room, while the people who do not want it said are still in the room. The discipline of not letting silence do its inheritable work. My children are already better at this than I was at their age. They will be better at it than I am now. They will hand it forward in a form I cannot yet imagine, to a generation I will not live to fully meet, and the essay I am writing tonight is one small piece of the practice they will refine.

I do not know if I dare look into the future. I do know what I am doing in the present, which is writing this down, in my own name, with my own location in the story disclosed, while the country is in the middle of asking for an exclusion back that should never have been on the table. I am writing it for my children, all three of them, who are receiving this essay from a mother who is no longer willing to pretend. I am writing it for the women in my generation who have been carrying this in their bodies and apologizing for being tired. I am writing it as a record, so that if the worst version of the future arrives — the Wall-E version, the controlled version, the version where the omission is permanent — there will be at least this small evidence that some of us saw it coming and refused to call it freedom.

A band-aid will not work. This will take serious grit. The women before us knew that. Some of them said so. Most of us did not listen.

We are listening now.

Pete Hegseth was on the Hill today.

It was his first appearance in front of Congress since the war in Iran began nine weeks ago — a war that the President of the United States promised would last only weeks, a war that, according to defense reporting, has burned through approximately $25 billion in munitions, that has no supplemental funding request attached, no articulated strategic endpoint, and that, by the Pentagon’s own admission, has left Iran’s nuclear program in roughly the condition we found it. Hegseth’s response to lawmakers asking reasonable questions was to accuse congressional Democrats and dissenting Republicans of being “reckless, feckless, and defeatist.”

This is coming from the man who has, in just the last several months, fired the Army’s top officer, fired the Navy Secretary, fired the chief of the Army Chaplain Corps, blocked the promotion of four colonels — two of whom are women, two of whom are Black — without public explanation, and limited press engagement during an active war — to outlets the administration finds friendly.

This is the man running the Department of Defense. During a war.

I want to stop here because there is a temptation, when you are watching this in real time, to keep stacking the outrages on top of each other until the volume drowns out the part where you are supposed to feel something. Every day, there is a new cabinet official saying or doing something that, in “normal” times, would end a career and possibly a presidency. And every day we move on, because there is more coming tomorrow.

So instead, today, I am going to take inventory. Not everything. Just enough to see the pattern.

The single largest national security threat to the United States is the executive branch of the United States.

I want to write that more carefully than I usually would, because I do not say it for effect. The biggest adversary the American people face is not Iran. It is not China. It is not Biden. Or Obama. It is not whatever bogeyman is being conjured this week to justify the next emergency power. It is a President and a cabinet who are, by any reasonable measure, wholly unqualified for the offices they occupy, and whose decisions are inflicting damage that will take a generation — at minimum — to repair.

This is the inventory of one year:

The dismantling of independent agencies. The purge of senior military leadership for what increasingly looks like loyalty tests. A war launched without congressional approval, now bumping against the 60-day War Powers deadline that the administration is attempting to ignore. A $1.5 trillion defense budget request — a 50% jump, the largest single-year increase in a generation — submitted by people who have demonstrated, repeatedly, that they cannot be trusted with the budget they already have. Federal immigration agents have used lethal force on civilians — in incidents like Renée Good and Alex Pretti that the public watched unfold in real time. We know Keith Porter was killed. We know multiple people have died in custody. And children, women, and men are still suffering in detention centers. The judiciary is being openly defied. The press is being sorted into approved and unapproved tiers.

I am leaving things out. You know I am leaving things out. That is the point.

Here is what you need to understand, if nothing else from this essay:

There is a 920-page manual, written by more than 350 people, published by the Heritage Foundation in 2023, distributed openly for two years before the election, and titled Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise. You may know it as Project 2025. The Heritage Foundation spent $22 million preparing the personnel infrastructure for it — a “Conservative LinkedIn” of more than 20,000 vetted candidates, ready to staff the administration “from Day One.” The President spent the campaign claiming he had nothing to do with it. Within four days of his second inauguration, an article by Time found that nearly two-thirds of his executive actions either mirrored or partially mirrored proposals from the document.

As of February of this year, the Center for Progressive Reform’s tracker — one of several independent trackers monitoring this — found that 53% of Project 2025’s domestic administrative agenda had been implemented or initiated in the first twelve months. 283 of 532 specific recommended actions. In one year.

The architects are not advisors. The architects are the building.

Russell Vought, who co-authored the section on the Office of Management and Budget, runs the Office of Management and Budget — the office he himself has called the “nerve center” of executive power. Stephen Miller, who built the immigration enforcement blueprint through his organization America First Legal, sits at the center of the deportation regime. Brendan Carr, who wrote the FCC section, runs the FCC. Pam Bondi, who advocated for Project 2025 before being appointed Attorney General, served as the Justice Department's head until her departure. The list goes on, and that’s the point. Heritage’s own internal saying, recycled from the Reagan years, is “personnel is policy.” They built the personnel apparatus before they wrote the policy. They wrote the policy before there was a candidate. They built the candidate to fit.

The Heritage Foundation has been doing this since 1973. Their first Mandate for Leadership was published in 1981. Two-thirds of it was implemented by Ronald Reagan. The 2015 edition, written for the first Trump administration, also saw roughly two-thirds of its recommendations adopted. We are now on pace to exceed both. By design.

This is the part I cannot get over: it’s all in Project 2025. It was published. It was readable. Anyone who wanted to know what was coming could have known, and many of us did. And the structural response — from cable news, from the opposition party, from the institutions whose job it was to take the warning seriously — was to treat the proposed mandate as too extreme to be real, and the candidate as too unserious to carry it out.

The document was real. The candidate is executing it. The chaos you are watching is not failure. The chaos has always been the cover.

It is what gets you to react to Hegseth’s hearing as a hearing instead of as one square in a fifty-three-percent completed grid. It is what makes you mistake the latest cabinet outrage for the outrage. It is what wears you down so that, by the time the next agency is gutted, you are too tired to notice. The exhaustion isn’t just a side effect — it’s the only strategy this administration has.

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On Saturday night, at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, a man named Cole Allen sprinted through the magnetometer at the Washington Hilton with a long gun and made it within one staircase of the ballroom where the President was sitting. He was stopped by a Secret Service officer who took a round to the chest plate and returned fire. This is the third apparent attempt on this President’s life in under two years.

The security failure is staggering. The dinner was not designated a National Special Security Event despite the presence of the President and most of his line of succession under one roof. A man with a shotgun got through a Secret Service checkpoint inside a hotel where he had been a guest for two days. Whatever you think of this President, and you know what I think, a country whose protective services cannot keep the President alive at a black-tie event is a country that is failing at the most basic function of itself.

The same administrative incompetence that has metastasized through every other agency has metastasized here. It is not a coincidence, and it is not a mystery. It is in the document. Schedule F revival, mass civil service firings, ideological loyalty over institutional competence — when you fire people for being insufficiently aligned, you do not get a more loyal federal workforce. You get a less competent one. The Secret Service is not magically exempt. Neither is the FAA. Neither is the CDC. Neither is anyone else whose job it is to prevent ordinary catastrophe on any given Tuesday.

But the easy story being told around this attempt — already in cable hits, fundraising emails, and White House press releases — is that we are in a spiral.

Political violence is not new in the United States. It is the country’s founding instrument.

This continent was taken from Indigenous nations through three centuries of war, broken treaties, forced removal, deliberate famine, and boarding schools designed to destroy children. Black men, women, and children were enslaved here, then terrorized, then segregated, then mass-incarcerated through a continuous chain of legal and extralegal violence that the state either carried out or refused to stop. The Klan was not a fringe. Lynching was not a fringe. Tulsa was not a fringe. Jim Crow was the law. The point of the violence was always the same — to enforce a racial and economic hierarchy — and the perpetrator, overwhelmingly, was the state itself or actors the state declined to prosecute.

That is the baseline. That is what political violence in America actually is.

And the colonization brain that produced it has never gone anywhere. Project 2025 is the most recent articulation of it, dressed up in policy language and strategic memoranda — a vision of a “biblically based” definition of family that excludes anyone who is not a married mother and father, of an end to “nearly all” federal equity efforts, of mass deportation, of religious carve-outs that legalize discrimination, of dismantled public education, of unitary executive power that places one man above the law. It is the Lost Cause with an HR department. It is the same project the country has run for four hundred years, with newer branding and a more efficient personnel pipeline.

It is in the federal immigration agents who used lethal force against civilians in Minnesota in January and faced no public accounting. You see it in the blocked promotion of four colonels without explanation. It is in a war on Iran, sold to the public with the same civilizational logic that has justified every other war we should not have fought. The cabinet testifying before Congress this week is a cabinet that says the quiet part out loud, on purpose, as a brand.

So when I am told that the most pressing danger to American democracy is a 31-year-old man who jumped a magnetometer at a hotel in Washington, I want to say, gently and clearly: no. The most pressing danger is the institutional violence that has been continuous on this land for hundreds of years, and that is, right now, accelerating along the lines of a 920-page plan. The contemporary data — yes, including the recent uptick in left-wing attacks tracked by the Center for Strategic and International Studies — sits inside that frame. It does not replace it. Right-wing extremism is still responsible for roughly three-quarters of domestic terrorism deaths since 2001, and the state is responsible for far more than that, if we are willing to count honestly.

I am not interested in assassins. Not because the diagnosis is wrong — fascism is the right word, colonization is the right word, and I will continue to say both — but because we know how spirals end and we know who pays. It is never the men in the inventory above. It is Black people. It is Indigenous people. It is immigrants. It is women. It is whoever is already on the wrong side of the hierarchy that the violence was built to enforce. That is the lesson of every century of American history. We are not exempt from it now.

If the GOP and the Heritage Foundation can dismantle a democracy in one year — and they have, they are, and the inventory above is not exhaustive — then the Democratic Party has no remaining excuse. None.

The other side spent fifty years building toward this. They built a think tank in 1973. They built a personnel pipeline. They built a 920-page operating manual, with appendices. They spent $22 million staffing a future administration before they had a future administration to staff. They prepared. And they did not do it in secret. They did it on television, in op-eds, in foundation reports, in podcast interviews, in glossy magazines. They told us, repeatedly, exactly what they were going to do.

The Democratic response — for the entirety of those fifty years, and especially for the four years they had the executive branch most recently — was to govern as if the warning were not real. To assume institutional inertia would do the work that political will refused to do. To treat the Heritage Foundation like a debate club opponent instead of a fifty-year insurgency. To run on the dignity of the office while the office was being prepared, again in public, for demolition.

I am writing this as someone who unapologetically votes for Democrats. I am writing this as someone who will continue to keep voting for Progressive and Democratic candidates, because the alternative is more of the same — and Project 2025. But I am also writing this as someone who is exhausted by the gap between the urgency of the moment and the response of the people we have elected to meet it. The bench is there. The voters are there. The institutional knowledge is there. What is missing is a willingness to fight inside the rules with a fraction of the energy with which the other side has fought, for half a century, outside of them.

We are drowning. It is not a national crisis anymore; it is a global one, with a war in the Middle East dragging into its tenth week and a President who said it would be over by now. And the opposition party is still litigating press releases.

I am writing this down to be on the record. I want to be able to look back and remember what it felt like, today, to sit with all of this at once. The Hegseth hearing on C-SPAN. The shooter from Saturday in custody. The inventory is growing every week. The 920 pages becoming, slowly, the country I live in. The exhaustion, which is the point — exhaustion is always the point — and the refusal, which has to be the answer.

Read Project 2025. That is the first thing. Stop reacting to the chaos as chaos and start reading it as execution. The next outrage is already written. So is the one after that.

We do not get to look away. And we do not get to lose ourselves trying to stop it.

She came to me in my lowest.

I was getting sober. Navigating the aftermath of an abusive marriage. Trying to find my footing inside a life that had been systematically dismantled — by circumstances, by other people, and honestly, by me. I was not, in that season, someone who was very good at taking care of anything. Years of abuse and trauma had finally caught up. I was white-knuckling most days.

And then there was Penny.

She didn’t judge me. She didn’t hurt me. She just listened. She stayed close on the days I couldn’t explain and didn’t try to. She held my deepest secrets, the ones I’ve never said out loud to another human being, and she carried them without ever once making me feel small for having them.

She showed me how to be patient. How to be attentive. How to be responsible for something outside of myself when I was still learning how to be responsible for myself. She reminded me how to love — not just her, but me.

I’ve been sober for twelve years. She was there for all of it.

Penny Lane saw thirteen national parks. She swam in Resurrection Bay in Seward, Alaska. She swam in the Pacific. The Atlantic. The Gulf of Mexico. She hiked mountains. She was an excellent canoe partner — when she wasn’t launching herself overboard to swim.

She rode on the back of my four-wheeler for years. She had a seat. It was hers.

She shit in every body of water she ever came across. Every. Single. One. She was scared of most things and absolutely fearless about this one specific thing.

She hated moose. Especially when they were in her yard.

Once, when we were stationed in Florida, someone who didn’t live there walked into our apartment. A stranger. Penny’s response was immediate and unambiguous: she greeted them with full enthusiasm, tail going, ready to make a friend. Thankfully, it was a friendly accident. She was, in this one respect, a terrible guard dog and an excellent example of how to meet the world.

She was there through the TDYs, when my active duty husband’s schedule made the days long and the nights longer. She was there when I walked across the stage for my Associate’s degree. Then my Bachelor’s. Then my Master’s.

She helped raise my children. She loved them with the same patience she gave me. She was so tolerant — of the noise, the chaos, the years of us figuring out who we were as a family.

She held me while I cried. A lot. And she was there for the best parts too. Every single milestone, she was somewhere nearby.

She won’t be here for my Doctorate.

She won’t be there for my future Sober Birthdays — the ones that feel like the most honest celebration I know. She won’t see my kids get married, or have children of their own. And I don’t know why, but that’s the part that hurts the most. The milestones she carried me toward, and won’t get to see.

I can’t bring myself to put her toys away. I haven’t washed her blankets. I’ve genuinely never mourned this deeply, and I’ve mourned some things.

What will life look like without her? I don’t have an answer. I have her lessons. I have twelve years of sobriety she helped build, brick by brick, without ever knowing that’s what she was doing. I have the version of myself she called forward — patient, attentive, capable of love — and I’m going to have to trust that version to keep going.

Penny Lane.

She came to me when I needed her most, and she stayed for everything that came after. She swam in every ocean. She hated the moose. She loved us without condition, limit, or agenda — the way only dogs know how.

I miss her. I will miss her for a long time.

Thank you, my girl. For all of it.

Special recognition to @mrs.frazzled and @cheyenne.l.hunt, whose work helped bring this story to light. This is what it looks like when women refuse to stay quiet.

Eric Swalwell needs to drop out. And then there needs to be an investigation.

Those are two separate demands. Both matter. And the order matters more than you think.

Today, the San Francisco Chronicle published a report from a former staffer alleging that Swalwell sexually assaulted her on two separate occasions while she was too intoxicated to consent. The outlet corroborated her account with medical records, friends she had confided in, and a former boyfriend. This wasn’t anonymous; it wasn’t a rumor. It was reported, sourced, and published by a credible outlet.

Swalwell called it “lies.” His attorney sent a cease-and-desist to her counsel. His campaign said opponents “teamed up with MAGA conspiracy theorists.”

Let’s be clear about what that response is: it’s the playbook. It’s the same playbook we’ve watched powerful men run for decades — discredit the woman, politicize the accusation, and wait for the news cycle to move on.

We don’t get to be outraged when Republicans do it and go quiet when it’s ours.

That’s not a value system — it’s tribalism with better branding.

Democrats have spent years — correctly — arguing that survivors deserve to be heard, that power protects itself at the expense of the people it's supposed to serve, and that accountability isn't selective. If we mean any of that, it cannot stop at the party line. It especially cannot stop at the party line when the accused is a front-runner, when he has union backing, when he has the establishment’s fingerprints all over his campaign. That’s precisely when the principle gets tested — that’s precisely when it matters.

The former staffer in this case worked for Swalwell — she was his subordinate. That power imbalance isn’t incidental — it’s entirely the point. The people most at risk of harm from powerful men are almost always the ones with the least structural protection. Congressional staff have limited recourse.

Their careers depend on the networks that those men control.

Their references come from the same offices where they were harmed.

Their silence is not a mystery; it’s a rational response to a system that was never designed to protect them.

But she came forward anyway. She handed her medical records to reporters, she consented to her friends being interviewed, and let a former boyfriend speak on the record. She did everything that women are told to do — document it, corroborate it, find a reputable outlet, go through the proper channels.

And Swalwell’s first move was to threaten to sue her.

That is not the behavior of an innocent man confident in the facts. That is the behavior of a powerful man who has spent years counting on people to stay quiet — and is now watching that calculation fall apart in real time.

Buy Me A Coffee. Every Bit Helps.

Rep. Jimmy Gomez resigned as Swalwell's campaign chair and called on him to exit the race. The California Teachers' Association (CTA) suspended its endorsement, calling the allegations "incredibly disturbing and unacceptable" — this from the same union that endorsed him just eleven days ago. San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond, and former Controller Betty Yee all called on him to drop out. Sen. Ruben Gallego withdrew his support. Sen. Adam Schiff pulled his endorsement and said Swalwell should withdraw from the race. Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi called on him to drop out, saying the matter "must be appropriately investigated with full transparency and accountability." The chair of the California Democratic Party called the allegations "deeply disturbing" and said survivors deserve to be heard.

These are the right responses. They should have come faster, but they are the right responses, and they should have company.

What they are not is sufficient.

Because dropping out of a governor’s race is not accountability. It is the minimum required to stop actively benefiting from a position you should not hold while these allegations are being investigated. Dropping out is the floor. The floor is not the finish line.

Here is what you need to understand about how Congress actually handles this.

Sexual relationships between members and their own staff are already explicitly prohibited under the House code of conduct. This has been the rule since 2018, when the MeToo movement finally forced Congress to put something on paper. A violation of that rule is already on the table — right now, today. The House Ethics Committee does not need to wait for a conviction. It does not need a criminal referral. It needs the political will to open an investigation, and it needs to open one before Swalwell has the opportunity to make that investigation impossible.

Because here is the trap built into the system: the House Ethics Committee loses jurisdiction the moment a member is no longer sitting. We watched this play out in real time with Matt Gaetz — he resigned from Congress the same day Trump nominated him as attorney general, and the Ethics Committee immediately lost jurisdiction over him, nearly burying a years-long investigation into sexual misconduct allegations. If Swalwell drops out of the governor’s race and quietly runs out the clock on his congressional term, loses his seat, resigns before an investigation concludes — it ends. The investigation dies with his membership. There is no mechanism to pursue it after the fact. No appeal. No transfer to another body. It simply closes.

That means “drop out” and “investigate” are not two steps you take in sequence. They have to happen at the same time, or the investigation never takes place. A quiet exit followed by a gracious statement is not accountability; it’s the disappearing act dressed up as contrition. It’s how powerful men have escaped consequences for decades — not by fighting, but by leaving just fast enough.

Congressional Democratic leadership needs to demand the Ethics Committee open an investigation now. Not after the primary. Not after a statement. Not after focus groups tell them how to frame it. Now. Today. While he is still a sitting member and jurisdiction still exists.

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And while we’re here, let’s talk about what happened thirty days ago.

Last month, the House voted 357 to 65 to kill a resolution that would have required the Ethics Committee to publicly release reports on congressional sexual misconduct investigations. The resolution would have brought transparency to a process that currently operates almost entirely behind closed doors — where investigations can be opened, conducted, and quietly closed without the public ever knowing they happened.

Both parties voted to kill it. Together. In a House that agrees on almost nothing, they found overwhelming bipartisan consensus to keep those records sealed.

The stated reason was that public disclosure could chill survivor cooperation. That’s not an entirely unreasonable concern. But it is a concern that is very easy to raise when the alternative is accountability, and very convenient for the people whose records are being protected. The same institution that has historically used non-disclosure agreements, confidential settlements, and the sheer weight of its own prestige to silence staff now wants credit for protecting survivors by keeping its own misconduct records private.

Ask yourself who that system was built to protect.

So when Democratic leadership stands up today and says the right things about survivors deserving to be heard — and some of them will, and some of it will even be genuine — ask them what they were doing thirty days ago when they had the chance to build a system that actually protects those survivors. Ask them why the default setting of Congress, regardless of party, is to protect the institution over the people the institution harms. Ask them what changed between their vote last month and their statement today, other than the name attached to the allegation.

Swalwell is the story today. The system is the story every day.

There is a version of Democratic politics that treats accountability as a weapon — something you deploy against the other side and holster when it gets too close to home. That version of Democratic politics has a very clear message to every survivor in a congressional office: we believe you, unless believing you is inconvenient. We stand with you, unless standing with you costs us something.

That is not a party worth defending. That is not a movement worth building. And it is certainly not a contrast worth drawing with an opposition that we correctly criticize for exactly the same pattern.

We don’t protect survivors only when it’s convenient. We don’t hold men accountable only when they’re politically expendable. The moment we start calculating whether a woman’s account is worth believing based on who she’s accusing — that’s the moment we lose the right to call ourselves the party that stands for something different.

The woman who came forward today deserves better than to become a talking point in a primary that moves on without her. She deserves an investigation. She deserves a process that doesn’t evaporate the moment the man she’s accusing finds a way to exit gracefully. She deserves a party that means what it says.

Eric Swalwell should drop out.

The Ethics Committee should open an investigation before he gets the chance to make that moot.

And the Democratic Party should stop asking for our trust until it stops voting to bury the evidence.

Melania Trump did not issue a written statement through a press office.

She walked into the Grand Foyer of the White House, stood at a podium, and read a prepared speech on camera. For a First Lady who has spent years carefully rationing her public appearances, a televised statement from inside the White House is the institutional equivalent of a five-alarm response.

Donald Trump told MSNBC he didn’t know about it beforehand. Several of her own staff, per NBC News, didn’t know what she would say.

Make of that what you will. Either she went rogue, which is its own story, or the White House is performing distance from a statement it absolutely helped craft. Neither option is boring. Both are worth tracking.

What she said, stripped of the framing: she was never friends with Epstein. She and Donald attended some of the same parties because “overlapping in social circles is common in New York City and Palm Beach.” She first crossed paths with Epstein in 2000, at an event she attended with Trump. She acknowledged the email to Maxwell — called it “casual correspondence,” a “trivial note” — and moved on. She denied being a victim. She denied that Epstein introduced her to her husband.

Then she called on Congress to hold public hearings for Epstein’s survivors.

We’ll come back to that.

The Email She Called a Trivial Note

The email in question comes directly from the publicly released FBI Epstein files.

It reads: “Dear G! How are you? Nice story about JE in NY mag. You look great on the picture. I know you are very busy flying all over the world. How was Palm Beach? I cannot wait to go down. Give me a call when you are back in NY. Have a great time! Love, Melania.”

This was sent in October 2002 — the same month a New York Magazine profile ran on Epstein in which Donald Trump called him a “terrific guy.”

The sender and recipient were blacked out in the original release. The email ends “Love, Melania” and begins “Dear G.” The DOJ and the White House have not disputed its authenticity. Melania’s own statement today addressed it directly.

“Trivial note” is doing significant work here. It is technically accurate and substantively misleading in the same breath. The note is brief. It is also warm, familiar, and addressed to a woman who was, at that moment, actively facilitating Epstein’s crimes. “JE” is not a distant reference — it is first-initial familiarity with a man Melania now describes as someone she barely knew.

The statement did not address that gap. It papered over it with the word “trivial” and kept moving.

The Connective Tissue

Before the White House statement landed, a post from Amanda Ungaro was already circulating. Ungaro addressed Melania directly:

“I was around you for 20 years… I stayed close to your family… So shut your mouth… Because I will expose everything I know.”

I have the screenshots.

To understand why that post carries weight, you need to know who Amanda Ungaro is — because she is not a random name on the internet.

Ungaro is a Brazilian former model. She was 18 years old when she first met Melania Trump — on Donald Trump’s plane, traveling from Miami to New York — while she was in a relationship with Paolo Zampolli, who was 33 at the time. That relationship lasted nearly two decades. They have a teenage son together. During those twenty years, according to a New York Times report, Zampolli repeatedly dangled marriage and a path to legal status before her, then pulled it back. Her last visa expired in 2019. He never followed through.

She is also mentioned in the Epstein files, which indicate she was on Epstein's plane as a teenager.

In June 2025, Ungaro was arrested in Miami on workplace fraud charges at a medical spa. She was in custody. She had not yet posted bail.

Zampolli found out and made a call.

He contacted David Venturella, a senior ICE official, and explained that his ex was in the country illegally. Per the New York Times, Venturella then called ICE’s Miami office to ensure agents would pick Ungaro up from the jail before she was released. During that call, Venturella noted the case was important to someone close to the White House. Ungaro was taken into federal custody before she could post bail. She was ultimately deported to Brazil. Zampolli now has custody of their son.

Zampolli acknowledges making the call. He describes his motivation as “curiosity” — says he was asking about the process, not requesting a favor. The Department of Homeland Security says her arrest and deportation had nothing to do with political connections.

What is not in dispute: a woman who had spent twenty years inside this social orbit, who had been kept in legal limbo by the man at the center of it, was deported after he made a call to a federal official who cited his White House proximity as the reason to act. She lost her custody case. She lost her ability to return.

And then, from Brazil, she posted a warning to the First Lady of the United States.

Zampolli is not a peripheral figure in this story. He is the structural link between Melania’s entry into Trump’s world, the modeling pipeline through which she came to this country, a woman he kept visa-dependent for two decades and then had removed, and a name that appears multiple times in the Epstein files. Per those files, Zampolli and Epstein once discussed buying a modeling agency together.

There is also a photograph recovered from Epstein’s home — found inside a drawer — showing Trump, Epstein, Melania, and Maxwell together.

Melania’s statement today said she first met Epstein in 2000.

The photograph has not been dated.

bekah day

A Message From Amanda: The Epstein Survivor Who Was Deported By The Trump Administration Speaks Out

As you all know, I have been talking about Paolo Zampolli since July of 2025 and I recently was able to connect with Amanda Ungaro, who shares a son with Paolo Zampolli, and was victim and witness of Jeffrey Epstein’s operation…

Read more

7 months ago · 5956 likes · 230 comments · bekah day

The System

None of this requires a conspiracy to explain. It requires understanding the system these people moved through.

The modeling world of the late 1990s and early 2000s was not just fashion. It was access. Young, often foreign women entered the United States through intermediaries who controlled their careers, housing, visas, and social introductions. Opportunity and dependency, delivered together, by people who needed you to be grateful for both.

NPR reporting on Epstein's network documented that his recruitment relied heavily on these environments. The modeling circuit was not the only pipeline. It was one of the clearest — a conclusion reached not just by investigators, but by more than three dozen Epstein survivors themselves. I've reported on this pipeline before. Read it here.

Zampolli operated fluently in that structure. He didn’t build it. He knew how to run it.

This is what gets lost when coverage chases individual guilt: the environment manufactured proximity wholesale. It normalized the connections before anyone thought to question them. So when fragments surface — an email, a photograph, a post from a woman claiming twenty years of access — they don’t appear from nowhere. They appear because they were never fully examined the first time around.

“Now Is the Time For Congress to Act”

Here is where Melania’s statement gets interesting and deserves scrutiny.

She closed by calling on Congress to hold public hearings specifically for Epstein’s survivors — to give them the opportunity to testify under oath, on camera, in front of the country.

This sounds like accountability. It is not accountability. It is a redirect.

Here is what Congress could actually do right now:

Roughly 2.5 million documents in the Justice Department’s Epstein investigative files have not been publicly released. Of the 3.5 million pages published, many are heavily redacted, including, critically, the names of co-conspirators. Lawmakers who reviewed unredacted versions of the files found that powerful men's names had been blacked out. Rep. Jared Moskowitz emerged from reviewing the documents saying there are “lots of co-conspirators” and that “they’re trafficking girls all across the world.” CNN

The DOJ has withheld roughly 3 million pages of documents and redacted hundreds of thousands more, based on privileges Congress expressly rejected in the Epstein Files Transparency Act. The law's own authors — Reps. Massie and Khanna — have said it isn't being complied with. Members are only allowed to review documents on four DOJ computers at a satellite office open only during business hours. At that pace, it would take more than seven years for members to review even the limited set of files DOJ has made available.

Congress does not need survivors to testify publicly to name co-conspirators. The names are in the files. The files are being protected. The agency now responsible for releasing them is run, in an acting capacity, by Todd Blanche, Donald Trump’s former personal criminal defense attorney.

Asking survivors to testify publicly is retraumatizing by design. It is spectacle dressed as justice. It centers the pain of the people Epstein harmed rather than the accountability of the people who enabled him. It is, in the specific context of a statement designed to redirect attention away from an inconvenient email and an inconvenient photograph, a very tidy closing move.

Congress can compel full, unredacted release of the co-conspirator files. It can enforce the law it already passed. It can subpoena the acting Attorney General, who is currently running the DOJ, while the Epstein files remain incomplete.

It does not need to put survivors on television to do any of that.

The Record

Melania Trump delivered a live, televised statement from the White House Grand Foyer on April 9, 2026.

Trump told MSNBC he was unaware of the statement beforehand. A CNN source says he was. Both things were said today.

The 2002 email to Maxwell is sourced from the publicly released FBI Epstein files. Melania acknowledged it. She called it a trivial note.

A photograph of Trump, Epstein, Melania, and Maxwell was found inside Epstein’s home.

Zampolli introduced Trump to Melania. He has stated he helped secure her U.S. visa. He contacted a senior ICE official following Ungaro’s arrest. He acknowledges the contact and disputes its characterization.

Amanda Ungaro publicly claimed twenty years of proximity. The screenshot is verified.

2.5 million Epstein documents remain unreleased. Co-conspirator names have been systematically redacted in violation of the law Congress passed to prevent exactly that.

What is not independently verified: The full scope of Ungaro’s claimed relationship with Melania Trump. Any allegation of criminal conduct by Melania Trump.

There is no verified evidence that Melania Trump participated in or had knowledge of Epstein’s crimes. That is not a hedge — it is the floor. What exists is documented social proximity, a sourced email reflecting it, a photograph placing her in the same frame as Epstein and Maxwell, and a response that used the machinery of the White House to frame the story before the story fully arrived.

What “Overlapping Social Circles” Covers

Melania Trump’s statement today established a baseline. She was not friends with Epstein. She was not a victim. She barely knew him. The email was trivial. The social overlap was normal.

That baseline will hold in the short term. First statements almost always do.

What it does not address: why a woman with no meaningful connection to Epstein had his first name on her fingers in a warm 2002 email to his primary enabler. What it does not address: the photograph. What it does not address: the woman claiming two decades of proximity who posted a warning hours before a White House response arrived.

The Epstein story is not over. It’s not even close to over. The co-conspirator names are in files still protected by the DOJ, now run by the president’s former defense attorney. The survivors whom Melania wants to see testify publicly have already been failed, repeatedly, by every institution that was supposed to protect them.

What they are owed is not a hearing. What they are owed is the full, unredacted truth — about who knew, who helped, and who has spent the last several years making sure the files stay incomplete.

That is what Congress can do.

The agency responsible for releasing those files is now run by Donald Trump’s former criminal defense attorney. The woman calling for survivor hearings gave her statement from the building where he works.

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Compound Damage

This week, the United States is fighting a war that is making its economic crisis worse, cutting the housing program that keeps veterans off the street while sending new ones to the front, and marking the one-year anniversary of a tariff policy that was supposed to make America wealthy again, with a trade deficit that hit an all-time high.

Every bad policy choice the Trump administration has made is now multiplying the others. The Iran war is driving up energy costs that compound the tariff damage. The same administration pushing tax cuts has gutted housing programs. Housing cuts are leaving veterans homeless while the war machine needs more bodies.

That isn’t just dysfunction — that’s compound interest.

And this week, the bill started coming due.

The Talks Are Going Great. Iran Hasn’t Heard.

On Thursday, March 26th, Trump posted on Truth Social that he was extending his pause on striking Iranian energy sites by ten days, writing that “talks are ongoing” and “going very well.” Three days later, Iran’s parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf publicly rejected the negotiations, saying Iran could not be forced into submission. That same day, Trump told reporters that Iran had agreed to most of the United States’ demands.

One of these parties is describing a different conversation entirely. The record suggests it isn't Tehran.

Why It’s in the Damage Report

The Trump administration has spent five weeks insisting that the war they started on February 28th — the strikes that killed Supreme Leader Khamenei and senior Iranian military officials, that closed the Strait of Hormuz, that drew retaliatory missiles into six Gulf states — is actually going well, actually nearly over, actually producing results. The pattern is consistent: Trump announces progress, Iran denies it, and the strikes continue. Meanwhile, more than 3,400 people are dead across the region, gas prices have crossed $4 a gallon for the first time since 2022, and The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has raised its inflation forecast for G20 economies to 4%.

The war is going badly. But the larger problem is that the administration appears to be describing a war that isn't happening — and hiding behind that description to avoid answering for the one that is.

This morning, Trump posted on Truth Social that “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran.” He told Iran to open the strait, or they’d be “living in Hell.” He signed it: “Praise be to Allah.” The 10-day pause expires tomorrow at 8:00 pm. The talks that were going “very well” appear to be over.

Trump says the talks are going well; Iran says there are no talks. Somewhere between those two statements, people are dying.

Trump extends pause on Iranian energy strikes (CNBC) | Trump extends pause, Witkoff 15-point proposal (CBS News) | Iran parliament speaker rejects negotiations (Al Jazeera) | Are there talks? Depends on which side you ask (NBC News) | 35 days of attacks mapped (Al Jazeera)

We Support the Troops. Just Not with Housing.

The Trump administration has proposed cuts that would slash or eliminate several HUD programs that keep veterans housed, including Housing Choice Vouchers, Community Development Block Grants, and the Fair Housing Initiative Program. Analysts estimate that up to 600,000 people could lose rental assistance if the reductions go through, with a meaningful share at immediate risk of being displaced.

The HUD-VASH program — the joint HUD-VA initiative that pairs housing vouchers with VA case management for unhoused veterans — has not been formally cut. But the broader voucher program it runs through has been targeted for cuts in consecutive budget proposals. And the VA case managers who make it function are already stretched thin across a system, losing staff to federal workforce reductions driven by DOGE.

Why It’s in the Damage Report

The administration is currently asking Americans to support a war being fought, in part, by the same veterans it is preparing to leave without stable housing. This is a policy sequence, not a political talking point. You can track it in the budget.

The cuts to housing, Medicaid, and SNAP don’t exist in a vacuum. They are the domestic costs of a defense posture that now includes a full-scale war in the Middle East with no defined end. The people absorbing that cost are not the people making the decisions.

The same government sending veterans to fight in Iran is writing a budget that leaves their counterparts homeless.

600,000 at risk from housing cuts (Center on Budget and Policy Priorities) | HUD-VASH program overview (VA Homeless Programs) | Virginia voucher holders fear cuts (Virginia Mercury)

Liberation Day’s One-Year Anniversary. Bring Cake.

April 2nd marked one year since Trump walked into the White House Rose Garden with an oversized posterboard and announced sweeping tariffs on virtually everything the United States imports, calling it “Liberation Day” and promising factories would come “roaring back.”

One year later: the U.S. goods trade deficit hit an all-time high in 2025. The manufacturing sector lost more than 80,000 manufacturing jobs in the months following the announcement. The average American household is facing roughly $1,500 in additional costs due to the 2026 tariff structure. And the Supreme Court struck down the broadest tariff authorities earlier this year — though many remain in place through other legal pathways.

Why It’s in the Damage Report

The tariffs didn’t fail by accident. They failed by design — or rather, they succeeded at what tariffs actually do: tax imports in ways that fall hardest on domestic consumers and manufacturers who depend on imported materials. Economists said this would happen. Farm organizations are now warning that the agricultural sector is on the edge of collapse. Retailers absorbed what they could and passed the rest on. The Iran war arrived on top of all of it, driving energy costs up and erasing whatever margin was left.

The anniversary is a receipt.

A year ago, Trump promised Liberation Day would make America wealthy again. The bill for that promise is $1,500 per household — and that’s before you factor in the war.

Liberation Day one-year review (NPR) | Tariffs handcuffed farmers and manufacturers (National Taxpayers Union) | $1,500 average household cost (Tax Foundation) | Tracking tariff impact (CNN)

The War Is Making Everything Else Worse. On Purpose or Not.

The Iran war is not contained to the Middle East. Energy costs have risen to their highest levels since Russia invaded Ukraine. The OECD downgraded global growth forecasts and sharply raised inflation projections. In the Philippines, the president declared a national energy emergency. The Strait of Hormuz — through which roughly 20 percent of the world’s oil passes — remains effectively closed. Consumer goods companies are tacking on fees on top of existing tariff-driven price increases. J.P. Morgan has flagged a serious recession risk heading into midyear.

Why It’s in the Damage Report

The Iran war and the tariff regime were both sold as instruments of American strength. Together, they are functioning as instruments of American inflation. The supply chain disruptions, the energy cost spike, the market volatility, the global growth downgrades — these aren’t unrelated side effects. They’re what happens when you layer an active war over an already-stressed trade policy without a plan for what comes next.

There is no exit strategy visible from here. Not for the war. Not for the tariffs. Not for the people absorbing the cost of both.

Two policies sold as strength. One economy absorbing both of them. The people who made these decisions will be fine. Everyone else is doing the math.

The damage is compounding.

Middle East special issue, economic impact (ACLED) | J.P. Morgan recession risk (J.P. Morgan) | US-Israel war on Iran overview (House of Commons Library)

The Meritocracy Sign Is Covering Something.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has blocked or delayed promotions for more than a dozen Black and female senior officers across all four branches of the military. Nine U.S. officials confirmed the scope to NBC News — every branch affected, no exceptions. In the Army alone, four colonels were removed from a promotion list before it reached the Senate: two Black men, two women, all with combat records and no disciplinary history. Three Marine officers — two women and a Black man — were passed over with full support from their own leadership. A Navy promotion list has sat on Hegseth’s desk for over a month. Air Force promotions have stalled.

When Army Chief of Staff General Randy George asked to meet with Hegseth to discuss the blocked promotions, Hegseth refused. Then he fired him. George’s term wasn’t set to expire until 2027.

The Pentagon’s response: “Meritocracy, which reigns in this Department, is apolitical and unbiased.”

Why It’s in the Damage Report

The word “meritocracy” is doing a lot of work here for a department that can’t explain why decorated combat veterans with spotless records were removed from promotion lists with no charges, no investigations, and no stated cause. Officials say Hegseth’s criteria have included past support for COVID vaccine mandates, perceived ties to DEI programs, association with former Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley, and — by the pattern of every single removal — being Black or female.

This is the same Pentagon currently fighting a war in the Middle East — a war that requires a fully staffed, fully functional military. The same Pentagon that needs to recruit from a country where the military is nearly 40% nonwhite and female enlistment has been rising steadily for two decades. When you tell those people the ceiling is lower than they thought, they notice. A retired senior officer put it plainly: Unexplained interference like this “will certainly cast a shadow across our officer corps."

Hegseth is telling everyone watching what the ceiling looks like now.

They called it meritocracy. The officers they blocked had combat records, spotless files, and the full support of their own leadership. The only thing they had in common was what they looked like.

Hegseth blocks promotions across all four branches (NBC News) | Hegseth blocks Black and female Army officers (NPR) | Hegseth fires Army Chief of Staff Randy George (Military Times)

Meanwhile, Four Humans Are Flying Around the Moon.

On April 1st, NASA launched Artemis II from Kennedy Space Center — the first crewed mission beyond Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in December 1972.

Fifty-four years later.

Four astronauts: Commander Reid Wiseman, Pilot Victor Glover, Mission Specialist Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen are currently en route to the Moon aboard the Orion spacecraft, which the crew named Integrity. The lunar flyby happens tomorrow, April 6th.

Victor Glover is the first Black man to travel beyond low Earth orbit. Christina Koch is the first woman. Jeremy Hansen is the first non-U.S. citizen. The launch went smoothly on the first attempt, which veteran launch watchers described as genuinely shocking for this rocket. From inside Orion, pilot Glover said from space that the launch "totally takes you by surprise, even though you're expecting it" — and that he had a huge smile across his face.

Why It’s in the Damage Report

Because this one is ours. All of it — the engineering, the years of work, the people who built and rebuilt and delayed and tried again. And because this week, the same government that is purging Black officers and women from military leadership watched a Black man and a woman leave Earth orbit for the first time in human history. No administration gets credit for that. The people who built those systems, trained for those missions, and sat in those seats do.

It’s worth pausing. Not everything this week was damage.

This week, the government told Black officers and women that there is a ceiling. Four hundred thousand kilometers away, Victor Glover and Christina Koch are proving there isn’t.

LIVE Coverage of Artemis II

Artemis II launch day updates (NASA) | Liftoff: NASA launches historic Artemis moon mission (NASA) | Artemis II begins its journey to the Moon (CNN)

If this landed — share it with someone who needs to see it. This is independent, reader-supported journalism. Paid subscribers keep it going.

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Today, Donald Trump fired Pam Bondi, Attorney General for the United States.

He called her “a Great American Patriot.” He praised her for guiding the country to “the lowest murder rate since 1900.” He said he loves her. He wished her well in the private sector. He thanked her for her service.

Then he handed the Justice Department to his personal defense attorney, Todd Blanche.

This is the part where a lesser political writer would call the irony “rich.” I’m going to call it something more precise: it is a confession. The United States Department of Justice is now run, in an acting capacity, by the man who defended Donald Trump in his criminal trials. Not a former prosecutor with institutional credibility. Not a Senate-confirmed AG nominee with a governing philosophy. Todd Blanche — Trump’s guy, Trump’s lawyer, Trump’s legal human shield — is now the nation’s top law enforcement officer.

But I want to talk about how we got here. Because Bondi’s exit doesn’t happen in isolation. It’s the second act of a story that started exactly four weeks ago, when Kristi Noem got the same treatment: effusive praise, a soft landing in a made-up title (Special Envoy for the Shield of the Americas, which sounds like a direct-to-streaming superhero film), and a door quietly closing behind her.

Two women. Two firings. Two spectacular exits. And in both cases, a scandal perfectly timed to follow them out.

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The Pattern Is the Point

Let’s be clear about what the pattern is, because naming it matters.

Trump does not fire loyal women the way he fires disloyal men. When he fired men who crossed him — Comey, Esper, Milley — he torched them publicly, attacked them on social media, and spent years trying to prosecute them. When he fires women who aren’t disloyal enough, he gives them a warm send-off and a private-sector pivot. “We love Pam.” “Kristi did tremendous things.”

The message encoded in the niceness is this: you were useful, you are no longer useful, and we are parting ways before anyone gets too embarrassed.

Bondi failed to prosecute Trump’s enemies — not for lack of trying — the DOJ under her watch sued states, fired career prosecutors, went after James Comey, Letitia James, Adam Schiff, and Jerome Powell with varying degrees of legal coherence. But federal judges kept dismissing the cases. Grand juries kept declining to indict. The machinery of vengeance that Trump wanted her to run kept jamming. She didn’t deliver. So she’s out.

Noem failed to be competent enough to justify the chaos she caused. Her tenure at DHS included ICE agents shooting and killing American citizens in a botched operation in Minnesota, a $220 million non-bid advertising contract that looked a lot like self-promotion on the federal dime, constant feuding with the heads of other agencies, and the persistent open secret of an affair with Corey Lewandowski — a rumor so well-established in Washington that Noem declined to deny it under oath at a congressional hearing while her husband sat in the gallery. She became a liability before she became an asset. So she’s out.

The lesson the cabinet is supposed to absorb from both exits is not “be more ethical.” It’s “be more effective.” Deliver results. Don’t embarrass the boss. Don’t get subpoenaed over documents that make him look bad. Don’t let federal judges make you look incompetent.

The lesson the rest of us should absorb is different: the job was always to serve him, and when that service became complicated, they became disposable.

Bondi and the Epstein Problem She Was Never Going to Solve

The Bondi story has a specific shape, and that shape is a file folder that doesn’t exist.

In February 2025, in a Fox News interview, Bondi told America that Jeffrey Epstein’s client list was “sitting on my desk right now to review.” It was a moment of confident, almost theatrical transparency. I have it. I’m looking at it. Trust me.

Months later, the DOJ walked it back. There was no client list. What Bondi had been referring to, she later explained, was “all the paperwork” — the flight logs, the investigative files — not a specific document naming Epstein’s associates. This is the kind of clarification that sounds like a cover story for a lie, and Trump’s base treated it accordingly. The conservative internet erupted. The House Oversight Committee subpoenaed her. Congressional Democrats and Republicans both said the Epstein files were too redacted to mean anything.

Here is the thing about the Epstein files that no one in mainstream coverage wants to say plainly: they were always going to be redacted. The files were always going to disappoint, because what Epstein’s client list actually contains — if a comprehensive one ever existed — is information that implicates people in Trump’s world, in the bipartisan donor class, in the financial and political infrastructure of the last three decades. The promise of transparency was always a performance. Bondi was handed the performance and told to make it work.

She couldn’t. So now the acting Attorney General is Trump’s former criminal defense lawyer — a man who spent years arguing that the justice system was being weaponized against his client, who is now in charge of that justice system. The circularity is not accidental. It is, in its way, the whole point.

Noem and the Husband Who Knew Too Much (About Bimbofication)

If the Bondi story is a tragedy about institutional capture, the Noem story is something else entirely — it is a farce wearing a tragedy’s coat.

Kristi Noem was fired on March 5th. Her last official day at DHS was March 31st. On that same day — that same day — the Daily Mail published its investigation into her husband Bryon’s alleged “double life,” which included allegations of cross-dressing, explicit messages to online fetish performers, payments totaling over $25,000, and photographs that, when the Daily Mail contacted Bryon directly, he declined to deny.

Noem’s spokesperson issued a statement saying she was “devastated” and the family was “blindsided.”

Here is where it gets interesting.

Political commentator Ryan James Girdusky has said he’d heard rumors as far back as August 2025 — six months before the Daily Mail story dropped — that a top Cabinet official was quietly telling people in Washington that her husband was gay. He subsequently confirmed that the official was Noem. Which means that either Kristi Noem was “blindsided” by something she had apparently been casually mentioning to people in DC for half a year, or she was not blindsided at all.

Axios White House reporter Marc Caputo added another layer: he received the tip about Bryon Noem from a source in February 2026 who described themselves as an undocumented immigrant sex worker seeking “vengeance for DHS’s immigration enforcement.” The woman whose husband was running the crackdown was, allegedly, being undermined by someone whose life the crackdown had upended.

The timing remains unexplained. The Daily Mail story dropped the day Noem’s DHS tenure officially ended — not when she was fired, not in the middle of her tenure, but on the very last day. There are a few ways to read this. One is a coincidence. Another is that someone held the story until she was no longer a sitting Cabinet official, a choice that implies a source with protective instincts toward her, the administration, or both. A third is the theory that Noem herself — having lost her Cabinet post, allegedly having an affair she’s been unsuccessfully hiding for years, and suddenly in need of a new public narrative — let the story go.

The “blindsided wife” is a much more sympathetic character than the “fired DHS Secretary who spent $220 million on cowboy ads and ducked questions about sleeping with Corey Lewandowski under oath.” You do the math.

What nobody seems to want to hold for long is the actual national security implication sitting at the center of this story: Bryon Noem, the husband of the woman who ran the Department of Homeland Security, was allegedly sending explicit content and thousands of dollars to women he met online, at least one of whom may have been undocumented. A former CIA officer told the Daily Mail that if a media organization could find this out, “you can assume with a high degree of confidence that a hostile intelligence service knows this as well.”

That’s not gossip. That’s a counterintelligence problem. And it happened under an administration that made border enforcement and national security its central brand promise.

What “We Love Pam” Actually Means

Trump’s send-offs for women who fail him follow a consistent grammar. Effusive praise. A future role vaguely gestured at. No specific criticism. No accountability for what went wrong on their watch — because accountability would require acknowledging what they were actually asked to do.

Bondi was asked to weaponize the DOJ and couldn’t make it stick. Noem was asked to run an immigration crackdown and created enough collateral damage to become a liability. Neither of them gets to be the villain of this story in Trump’s telling, because making them the villain would require explaining what the job actually was. So they get “we love Pam.” They get “Kristi did tremendous things.” They get transitioned to the private sector, or to a made-up envoy role, and the machinery moves on.

The machinery, today, is Todd Blanche — a man whose entire professional identity is defending one specific client. He is now the top law enforcement officer of the United States.

Bondi is out. Noem is out. The Epstein files are still redacted. The husband’s fetish photos are still in the Daily Mail’s archive. And the person now sitting at the head of the Justice Department spent years in courtrooms arguing that his client was the victim of a corrupt system.

He’s not arguing that anymore. He’s running the system.

This piece was written on April 2, 2026. All sourcing from CNN, NBC News, NPR, ABC News, Axios, the Daily Mail, Slate, and CBS News reporting published today and in the past week.

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In Part One, we examined the structure of authority within the Duggar family and the broader framework in which that structure was situated. However, understanding a system requires more than identifying its organization. It also requires examining how that system responds when it is tested. In those moments, authority is not merely present — so are the mechanisms through which that authority is held and maintained.

The case of the Duggars is not only a matter of individual actions, but of a broader institutional response shaped by a narrowly defined framework of belief and authority. According to later statements from Jim Bob Duggar, the initial disclosure of Josh Duggar’s abuse of minors occurred in March 2002, when he, then fourteen, admitted to touching several of his sisters.

At that point of disclosure, a range of responses was available, including formal reporting, clinical intervention, and external oversight. Instead, the matter was addressed internally. Information was contained within the family and later shared with a limited network of trusted individuals, each step occurring within a structure influenced by the teachings of the Institute in Basic Life Principles (IBLP).

Within that framework, authority is not diffuse — it is organized and directional. Individuals are expected to operate within clearly defined leadership structures, with decision-making concentrated at the top and deference expected from those below. Conflict is typically addressed within the system itself, rather than through external institutions, and maintaining order is often prioritized alongside, or in some cases above, external accountability. These principles are not informal. They are reinforced through seminars, training programs, and affiliated initiatives that provide guidance on family structure, gender roles, and authority relationships.

This pattern was not confined to a single instance. Between 2002 and 2003, additional incidents occurred, and the response remained consistent. The matter was handled within the family, within the church, and through programs associated with the IBLP. In practice, this meant that disclosure remained within a controlled environment shaped by shared beliefs about authority, obedience, and internal resolution. By the time the information moved beyond these boundaries to the point where it could prompt formal action, a significant period had passed.

The significance of this delay becomes clear when considered in light of the legal framework in place at the time. By 2006, when a police report was formally documented, the applicable statute of limitations under Arkansas law had already expired for several of the relevant offenses. While certain crimes, such as rape, were not subject to a statute of limitations, other forms of sexual assault were governed by more restrictive timelines. In many cases, prosecution was required within a defined number of years after the offense or within a limited period following the victim’s attainment of adulthood. Civil claims were similarly constrained, often expiring a few years after the individual reached the age of majority.

In practice, these limitations created a narrow window for legal accountability — one that did not always align with the realities of delayed disclosure in cases involving child sexual abuse. Delayed disclosure is well documented in both legal and psychological research, often resulting from fear, coercion, confusion, or the influence of authority figures. Legal frameworks have not always reflected these realities.

By the time the allegations were formally documented in 2006, that window had closed. Jim Bob Duggar, who had served in the Arkansas State House and operated within a network of legally sophisticated institutional leadership, was not an uninformed bystander to this timeline. The decision to handle disclosure internally and to delay formal reporting for several years had a predictable legal consequence — one that anyone with working knowledge of Arkansas law could have anticipated. Whether that consequence was understood, anticipated, or deliberately sought is a question the record cannot definitively answer. What the record shows is that the delay occurred, was managed, and that when formal reporting finally occurred, prosecution was no longer possible.

The timing of this disclosure is therefore not merely chronological. It is legally consequential. Once the statute of limitations expires, the possibility of prosecution is no longer contingent upon evidence or acknowledgment. It is foreclosed as a matter of law.

In this context, delay is not a neutral factor. Within a system that emphasizes internal handling and controlled disclosure, delay limits — and ultimately eliminates — the possibility of formal accountability. The sequence of events — an internal response followed by delayed external reporting — left legal recourse unavailable for earlier conduct. In this way, the structure of response and the structure of the law intersected, producing an outcome in which the absence of accountability was not incidental, but procedurally reinforced.

This intersection deserves to be stated plainly. A system that handles disclosure internally, within a closed network of shared authority, and that delays formal reporting — whether by design or as a predictable consequence of its own logic — will, in enough cases, outlast the legal window for accountability. That is not a coincidence. It is a function of how the system operates. The law, in this instance, did not fail independently. It was met by a set of conditions that made its failure structurally probable.

The Language of Containment

Alongside the issue of timing, the language used to describe the conduct warrants examination. Even after the abuse was acknowledged, it was consistently framed in softened terms — “inappropriate touching,” behavior described as occurring “over the clothes,” explanations that attributed the conduct to curiosity, not abuse. Such language does not merely describe events. It shapes their interpretation. It narrows the perceived scope of the conduct, reduces its apparent severity, and creates distance between the act and its impact on the people who experienced it.

Within the broader IBLP framework, this type of framing is not inconsistent with the emphasis on preserving order and resolving issues internally. Language becomes a tool of management as much as description. By defining conduct in less severe terms, it becomes more manageable within the system — less likely to trigger external intervention, more easily reconciled with existing authority structures. This does not change the underlying conduct. It changes how that conduct is perceived, processed, and ultimately addressed — or not addressed.

This pattern was also evident when the case became public in 2015. During a nationally televised interview, the conduct was again described in similarly limited, softened language. The framing remained consistent with earlier characterizations, emphasizing containment and a narrow definition of what had occurred. This continuity is notable. It suggests that the language used was not incidental or improvised but reflective of an established approach—one that had been applied consistently for more than a decade and across multiple audiences.

What is most significant about this continuity is not the specific words chosen but what they reveal about the system’s priorities. Across thirteen years — from the initial disclosure in 2002 to the televised interview in 2015 — the framing remained consistent. The system did not reckon with what had happened. It managed it.

What the Pattern Produces

The Duggar case thus reflects more than a series of individual decisions. It illustrates a pattern involving delayed disclosure, the use of minimizing language, and the controlled movement of information within a defined system. These elements operated within a structured environment shaped by the teachings and institutional practices of the IBLP, in which authority is highly centralized and internal resolution is prioritized.

It would be easier to treat this as a closed chapter — a painful history belonging to a family whose television program was canceled more than a decade ago. The record does not allow for that.

On March 18, 2026, Joseph Duggar, 31, was arrested in Tontitown, Arkansas. The charges stem from a 2020 family vacation in Panama City Beach, Florida, where a girl — nine years old at the time — reported that Duggar repeatedly asked her to sit on his lap, covered her with a blanket on a couch, manipulated her underwear, and continued to touch her thighs. She was fourteen when she came forward. According to the arrest affidavit, when her father confronted Duggar directly, he admitted to the conduct. Arkansas detectives later monitored a phone call between the father and Duggar, during which he admitted to it a second time. Joseph Duggar has been charged in Florida with lewd and lascivious molestation of a child under twelve and lewd and lascivious contact. He posted a $600,000 bond and returned to Arkansas.

His wife, Kendra Duggar, 27, was arrested separately on four counts of endangering the welfare of a minor and four counts of false imprisonment — all misdemeanor charges under Arkansas law. Both were given court dates for April 29. Joseph faces the same Arkansas charges in addition to the Florida charges. During the investigation, authorities inspected the home that the couple shares. According to a source cited by People magazine, locks on several rooms were found on the exterior of the doors.

Joseph Duggar is Josh Duggar’s younger brother. He grew up in the same household, under the same authority structure, shaped by the same institutional framework. He was on the same television program. He was presented to the same audience as an example of the same values.

That is not a coincidence to be noted and set aside. It is the point.

The Structure, Continued

To understand how such patterns emerge and persist, it is necessary to consider the broader institutional context in which these practices are embedded.

Founded by Bill Gothard, the Institute in Basic Life Principles promotes a framework centered on hierarchical authority, clearly defined roles, and the expectation that individuals operate within established chains of leadership. These expectations are reinforced not only through teaching but through community structures that shape daily life, relationships, and decision-making.

Within such environments, authority is not merely advisory — it is directive. Questioning leadership may be discouraged or reframed as disobedience, and compliance is often associated with moral or spiritual alignment. These dynamics can create conditions in which individuals are less likely to seek external intervention, even when harm occurs. Resolution is expected to occur within the system itself, often under the guidance of those already positioned within its hierarchy.

What the Joseph Duggar arrests make visible is something the Josh Duggar case alone could not fully establish — that the system described in Part One did not produce a single anomaly. It produced a pattern. Two brothers. Two sets of charges involving children. One household. One framework. One institution standing behind it, providing the language, the structure, and the justification for the response at every stage.

A system is not defined by what it prevents. It is defined by what it consistently produces.

When examined in this way, the response observed across the Duggar cases is not unpredictable.

It reflects the structure from which it arose.

What comes next is the harder question.

The IBLP did not exist in isolation. It existed within a broader cultural and political movement — one that found in the Duggar family not an embarrassment to be managed, but a useful image to be amplified. Understanding how that happened, who enabled it, and what it means for the present requires examining the infrastructure behind the image.

That is the subject of Part Three.

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On January 20th, 2025, Donald Trump signed an Executive Order seeking to end Birthright Citizenship. It is worth being precise about what that means. An Executive Order is a directive to the executive branch. It is not legislation. It does not amend the Constitution. And when it conflicts with a 157-year-old constitutional amendment, the courts have something to say about that.

Every lower court that has weighed in has ruled the order unconstitutional. Not most of them. All of them. The birthright citizenship case, known formally as Trump v. Barbara, reached the Supreme Court today. And the justices spent the morning making clear they are not particularly persuaded by the administration’s position.

The verdict cannot be assumed by how the Justices appear to be positioned through oral arguments. Justices press both sides. But when skepticism is distributed across ideological lines — including from justices appointed by Republican presidents, and especially President Trump — that is not just noise. That is a signal.

Chief Justice John Roberts told Solicitor General D. John Sauer that his argument was “quirky.” Roberts noted that the narrow historical exceptions Sauer cited — children of ambassadors, children of enemies during hostile invasion, children aboard warships — do not logically extend to what the government is actually asking for: the exclusion of an entire class of people. Roberts was blunt: “I’m not quite sure how you can get to that big group from such tiny and sort of idiosyncratic examples” (CNBC).

Justice Brett Kavanaugh pointed to the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, which mirrors the language of the 14th Amendment. His point was direct: if Congress had intended to exclude children of undocumented immigrants from citizenship protections, it had every opportunity in 1952 to use different language. It did not.

Justice Neil Gorsuch observed that there is “precious little” historical discussion of domicile — a concept that is foundational to the government’s entire argument. Justice Elena Kagan noted that part of Sauer’s case rests on “pretty obscure sources.” At one point, the States’ Attorney Sauer, when pressed directly by a justice, responded that he would have to “think that through.” At the Supreme Court. In the most high-profile constitutional case in years.

For the first time in American history, a sitting President of the United States attended oral arguments before the Supreme Court. Trump was present while his Solicitor General argued the case, then left after approximately an hour. Whatever its intent, the gesture did not appear to move the room.

The Only Path Forward for Trump

A constitutional path remains available to Donald Trump. It would require amending the Constitution — something that has not happened in 34 years. The last amendment, the 27th, was ratified on May 7, 1992. U.S. House of Representatives. It concerned congressional pay. It took over two centuries from its original proposal to ratification.

The Constitution has been amended 27 times. The Bill of Rights comprises the first 10 amendments, passed as a package in 1791. Of the more than 11,000 amendments proposed throughout American history, 27 have succeeded. Amending the Constitution requires two-thirds of both chambers of Congress, followed by ratification by three-quarters of the states — 38 out of 50. In the current political environment, over an issue this consequential, that is not a theoretical obstacle. It is a practical wall. Which is why the administration is attempting to reinterpret the existing text rather than change it.

What the 14th Amendment Actually Says — and Why It Was Written

The citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868. It reads: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.”

It was not written in a vacuum. It was written in direct response to Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393 (1857) — one of the most consequential and reviled decisions in the history of the Supreme Court. Dred Scott held that Black individuals descended from enslaved people were not citizens and had no standing before the federal courts. Chief Justice Roger Taney wrote that they had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” The 14th Amendment was the constitutional repudiation of that ruling.

Birthright citizenship as it applies under that clause was further established in 1898, in United States v. Wong Kim Ark. Wong was born in San Francisco to Chinese immigrant parents. When he returned to the United States from a visit to China in 1895, he was refused re-entry. The Supreme Court ruled 6-2 that children born on American soil to immigrant parents are citizens. That precedent has stood for 127 years. The administration is asking the Court to look past it.

What Trump Has Claimed

In posts on Truth Social, Trump has argued that the 14th Amendment pertains only to descendants of enslaved people. He has also claimed that the United States is the only country in the world to practice birthright citizenship.

Neither claim is accurate.

The text of the citizenship clause says “all persons born in the United States.” It is not limited by identity. Courts have applied it universally for over 150 years. And the United States is not an outlier — nearly 33 countries recognize some form of birthright citizenship, including Canada, Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina.

The administration’s core legal argument is that the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” functions as a parental immigration status test — that it turns not on where a child is born, but on the legal status of their parents at the time of birth. That reading would require the Court to set aside Wong Kim Ark, disregard the plain text of the amendment, and accept an interpretation that no court has ever adopted. Today, the justices did not appear inclined to do so.

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Who Gets Caught in the Machinery

The 14th Amendment covers everyone born on American soil, with three established exceptions: children of foreign diplomats, members of occupying foreign forces, and — as was the legal reality until Congress intervened — members of Native American tribes. Native Americans were not granted birthright citizenship under the 14th Amendment when it passed in 1868. Tribal membership was treated as a separate sovereign allegiance. Congress extended citizenship to Native Americans by statute in 1924, through the Indian Citizenship Act. Their citizenship rests on a different legal foundation than the 14th Amendment framework — a distinction that is frequently overlooked in this conversation and matters considerably.

The more immediate concern being raised by legal scholars is not abstract. If Trump’s order were upheld, tens of thousands of children born in the United States every month to undocumented parents would have no citizenship — not here, not necessarily anywhere. Stateless, undocumented, with nothing to pass on to their own children or the generations that follow. Penn State’s Population Research Institute estimates the repeal of birthright citizenship would result in 2.7 million additional undocumented people living in the United States by 2045 — people who, under the existing framework, would have been citizens.

The 14th Amendment was written specifically to protect Black Americans — to constitutionally reverse a Supreme Court ruling that had stripped them of legal personhood. If the Court were to accept the administration’s interpretive framework and dismantle the plain-text meaning of the citizenship clause, the implications extend further than the administration has been willing to say explicitly. Legal scholars raise this not as a near-term prediction but as a demonstration of what the logic actually licenses. You do not reinterpret a constitutional provision of this magnitude without opening doors you did not announce.

History, in these matters, tends to walk through them.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson arrived at oral arguments today carrying the weight of the previous day as well. On Tuesday, in Chiles v. Salazar, she stood alone as the only dissent in an 8-1 ruling that struck down Colorado’s ban on conversion therapy for minors — reading her dissent from the bench, a rare act reserved for decisions a justice considers consequential enough to say out loud. Not a single colleague joined her. Today, she returned to the same courtroom and took the administration’s argument apart on its own terms. Jackson is descended from enslaved people whose citizenship was established by the very amendment at the center of this case. She pressed the Solicitor General on the practical implications of his position — asking, pointedly, “So, are we bringing pregnant women in for depositions?” — and told him plainly that he faced “a number of hurdles.”

Two days. Two cases. Both times, she said the quiet part out loud.

What Happens Next

A ruling is not expected for months — most likely in June. Today’s arguments were a data point, not a decision. But the signal from the bench — across ideological lines — is that the administration is facing considerable resistance.

The Constitution has recognized birthright citizenship for over 150 years. An Executive Order is a directive. It is not law. And the provision it is attempting to override was written for people this country once refused to recognize as human beings.

That is the record. The Court has read it.

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17…18…19 Kids and Counting

America was introduced to the Duggar family in 2008, and many viewers initially tuned in purely out of curiosity. What they encountered was a carefully constructed image of a devout Christian family living a simple, disciplined, and “wholesome” life. Long skirts, strict gender roles, and older daughters caring for younger siblings were presented not as barriers, but as virtues. Romantic relationships were tightly controlled — no kissing before marriage, only courtship, chaperones, and purity. This lifestyle was framed as moral clarity, as stability, and as something worthy of admiration.

But beneath that carefully curated image was something far more complex. What audiences were not shown — and what many did not know at the time — was that this was not simply a family making unconventional choices. It was a system. And while some may have been aware of aspects of that system, it persisted quietly and largely without interruption for years.

Reality television does not document; it packages. What viewers saw on 19 Kids and Counting was not unfiltered reality, but a version of life that had been shaped, edited, and scripted for public consumption. Disorder was reframed as structure, control as discipline, and rigidity as values. The result was a narrative that felt comforting to some, particularly at a time when Americans felt culture was often unstable. The Duggar family came to represent something predictable and certain. And that sense of certainty made their lifestyle not only visible but somewhat appealing.

Over time, the family was not just watched — they were admired. With millions of viewers tuning in each week, their influence extended well beyond entertainment. What appeared on screen began to shape broader perceptions of family life, gender roles, and authority. Yet certainty, when constructed in this way, can come at a cost.

The dynamics presented on television did not exist solely within one household. They reflected a broader cultural framework — one that prioritized obedience and authority over transparency and accountability. In such environments, problems are often handled internally, reputations are carefully protected, and speaking out can carry significant consequences. These conditions do not merely allow harm to occur — they can enable it to continue.

As the Duggar family’s visibility increased, they ceased functioning as a private family and became a public symbol — and symbols are powerful. They shape expectations and influence what audiences come to accept as appropriate or even desirable. When warning signs and inconsistencies appeared, they were frequently minimized or reframed. Within a system built on deference to authority, questioning is not only discouraged — it is treated as disobedience, or even sinful. Silence, in this context, is not always maintained through secrecy, but through systematic structure.

That structure was evident within the family itself. The oldest daughters were not only helping — they were parentified, taking on significant responsibility for raising children who were not their own while being taught that submission was their highest calling. When the show was on the air, we would often see the oldest girls in the kitchen, cooking for the rest of the family. The sons, meanwhile, were raised in an environment where accountability appeared inconsistent and, at times, absent. At the center of these dynamics was a belief system that blurred the line between faith and control. When authority is framed as divinely ordained, questioning it does not simply feel inappropriate — it can feel morally wrong.

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Michelle and Jim Bob’s relationship reflects many of these dynamics. The two met as teenagers in a small Southern Arkansas town, and they married just three days after Michelle graduated from high school. Their relationship developed during a formative time, when identity, personal autonomy, and beliefs were still developing. Early relationships are not inherently problematic — though entering into a lifelong commitment at such a young age raises important considerations. Adolescence is a critical period — exposure to diverse perspectives, environments, and experiences contributes to individual development. When that period is put under pressure, particularly within a single, dominant framework, it can limit the range of choices individuals later perceive as available to them.

In this case, the dynamic was further shaped by the introduction of a shared belief system. Michelle was not initially raised with the same religious convictions as Jim Bob, but later adopted them, a shift he has publicly attributed in part to his own influence. While influence within relationships is not inherently problematic, its impact can be amplified when it occurs during formative years. When a person’s worldview is still developing, the beliefs of those closest to them often carry significant weight, shaping not only what they believe but what they understand to be true or acceptable.

The broader implications of this dynamic become more pronounced within environments that emphasize authority, submission, and rigid roles. Early commitment in such contexts can make it more difficult to question, adapt, or leave when circumstances change. While some individuals may grow together in healthy ways, it is important to acknowledge the structural limitations that can accompany these arrangements. What may appear as a personal love story can also reflect a broader system of influence and control.

By 2006, law enforcement had already investigated allegations of sexual abuse in 2002-2003, though no charges were filed due to the statute of limitations having expired. Despite these earlier concerns, the Duggar family’s platform continued to expand following the 2008 debut of their television series. The show continued, the audience grew, and the public image remained intact.

What the public saw wasn’t the truth. It was the version that could be sustained. As a result, this narrative is not solely about the actions of one individual or one family. It raises larger questions about the systems surrounding them — questions about who knew, when they knew, and what is protected when reputation is at stake. It also invites reflection on how often audiences mistake presentation for truth.

Ultimately, the Duggar family became more than a household. They became a cultural product — one that reflected and reinforced a specific set of values related to gender, authority, obedience, and control. And when those values are repeatedly presented without scrutiny, they do not remain confined to a single context. They spread through the media, religious communities, and social networks that replicate similar structures.

This is how systems protect themselves — not through secrecy, but through normalization. Harm does not always operate in silence. In some cases, it exists in plain sight — carefully edited, carefully framed, and widely accepted.

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The Institute in Basic Life Principles (IBLP), founded in 1961 by Bill Gothard, became a significant force within segments of American fundamentalist Christianity, promoting teachings centered on authority, strict gender roles, and a “biblical” model of family structure (IBLP). Through seminars, training programs, and initiatives such as Embassy University, Gothard’s influence extended to millions of followers, most notably, the Duggar family, whose public image would later reflect many of these same principles. Another key component of this network was the Advanced Training Institute (ATI), a homeschooling program developed by Gothard that operated until 2021 and was widely used by families within IBLP, including the Duggars. However, IBLP functioned as more than a collection of theological beliefs — it operated as a structured framework emphasizing obedience, submission, and clearly defined roles within both the family and broader social order.

In 2014, Gothard resigned from IBLP following allegations from at least 34 women accusing him of sexual harassment and misconduct, many of whom reported that they were minors or very young adults at the time of the alleged incidents. An internal investigation conducted by IBLP described his behavior as “inappropriate,” though it concluded that the conduct did not rise to the level of criminal wrongdoing, and no criminal charges were filed. Gothard has denied all allegations. Despite his resignation, the broader ideological framework he promoted was never fully dismantled. His teachings, materials, and institutional influence continue to circulate within IBLP-affiliated communities, illustrating how systems built on belief structures often persist independently of any single leader.

One of the most revealing aspects of Gothard’s framework is found in Embassy University, an alternative educational program that explicitly rejects the concept of adolescence. According to IBLP materials, adolescence is described as a “myth,” attributed to psychologist G. Stanley Hall, and individuals are instead encouraged to transition directly from childhood to adulthood at approximately age twelve (IBLP). This premise allows enrollment beginning at age twelve and treats preteens as fully responsible individuals. Such a position stands in direct contrast to established research in developmental psychology, which demonstrates that cognitive development, emotional regulation, and decision-making capacities continue to mature well into late adolescence and early adulthood.

Rejecting adolescence as a developmental stage does not eliminate these realities; rather, it reframes expectations in ways that can place adult-level responsibility on individuals who are still developing, while simultaneously increasing their vulnerability within hierarchical systems. Redefining adulthood at such an early age has broader implications for how authority, consent, labor, and accountability are understood. When individuals are positioned as fully responsible before reaching developmental maturity, the balance of power shifts further toward those in positions of authority. While proponents may frame these ideas as historically or biblically grounded, such claims require careful scrutiny. Although some cultures have recognized early rites of passage, these practices do not equate to granting full adult autonomy at the age of twelve, especially in modern societies. What emerges from this framework is not a simple theological distinction but a redefinition of childhood itself — one that carries significant implications for how power is distributed and maintained.

Within this context, the Duggar family can be understood not merely as participants in this belief system, but as one of its most visible public representations. Their family structure closely mirrors the principles promoted by IBLP, including centralized authority, an emphasis on female submission, and limited exposure to external influences. Through the reality television series 19 Kids and Counting, these dynamics were broadcast into millions of American homes, not as ideology, but as lifestyle. Over time, this visibility contributed to the normalization of a specific set of values related to gender, authority, and family structure. Jim Bob Duggar’s involvement in politics — including his service in the Arkansas State House — further extended this influence beyond the private sphere, demonstrating how belief systems can intersect with public life through both formal and informal channels.

The Duggar family’s religious commitments were shaped by both personal experiences and theological interpretation. Jim Bob Duggar has described adopting strict standards for relationships early in life, including commitments to date only individuals who shared his religious convictions. Michelle Duggar, by contrast, was not raised with the same beliefs but later converted, a shift that Jim Bob has attributed in part to his influence. Their religious practices intensified following a miscarriage after the birth of their first child, after which they were advised that birth control may have contributed to the loss. As a result, they rejected birth control entirely and adopted a belief system that framed fertility, family size, and even loss through a deeply religious lens. While such decisions are not uncommon within certain religious traditions, in this case, these beliefs became central not only to their private lives but also to the public image they presented.

The timeline of events involving Josh Duggar further complicates the public narrative. This timeline is significant because it predates the family’s rise to national prominence through reality television. Despite these earlier concerns, the Duggar family’s public platform continued to expand following the 2008 premiere of 17 Kids and Counting. In subsequent years, federal charges related to child pornography were brought against Josh Duggar in 2021, resulting in a conviction that was later upheld on appeal.

Taken together, these elements reveal a broader pattern that extends beyond any single individual or event. Systems built on rigid authority structures — particularly those reinforced by religious or ideological frameworks — can create environments in which questioning is discouraged, and accountability becomes difficult to enforce. When such systems are amplified through media exposure, they have the capacity not only to persist but to be normalized. The Duggar family’s visibility transformed a specific set of beliefs into a widely recognized cultural model — one that shaped perceptions of family, gender roles, and authority for millions of viewers. As a result, this is not solely a story about what occurred within one household, but about how systems of belief, power, and representation interact in ways that can both obscure and sustain harm over time.

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Since the beginning of President Donald Trump’s second term, the landscape of American cities has changed.

You can feel it if you follow the news closely.

What used to happen quietly — early morning arrests, overnight operations, administrative detentions, routine enforcement — is now unfolding in the middle of neighborhoods, in front of our eyes, recorded on video, and in front of crowds.

In South Burlington, Vermont, federal immigration agents surrounded a home while protesters gathered nearby. The situation escalated quickly into a chaotic standoff that included a multi-vehicle crash and multiple arrests after peaceful protestors confronted federal agents for hours (Vermont Public; WCAX).

Scenes like this are typically rare in Vermont.

Now, these instances are becoming part of a pattern.

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Minnesota: The Largest Immigration Operation in the Country

Vermont wasn’t sudden.

Neither was Minnesota.

This has been building for months — ICE raids, shootings, mass arrests, and communities pushed to the edge.

Minnesota was the warning shot.
Vermont is the continuation.

Beginning in late 2025, federal authorities launched Operation Metro Surge, which officials described as the largest immigration enforcement operation in U.S. history.

At its peak:

• More than 3,000 federal agents were deployed in the Twin Cities region.

• Approximately 4,000 people were arrested during the operation.

Schools closed as families were too afraid to send their children. Medical appointments were missed. Businesses lost workers. Entire immigrant communities withdrew from public life.

And the enforcement didn’t happen quietly.

Protests spread not only across Minnesota but across the country.

Earlier this year, two civilian observers, Renee Good, Alex Pretti, and in Los Angeles, Keith Porter, Jr. — all U.S. citizens — were killed in separate encounters with federal immigration agents during the crackdown. Their deaths ignited national outrage, sparked investigations, and fueled a movement of demonstrations demanding accountability (Reuters).

When Federal Power Shows Up on Local Streets

Part of what makes these events so volatile is where they are happening.

Not at the border.

But in neighborhoods.

In Minnesota, ICE activity became so visible that community groups began organizing neighborhood alert systems and networks to track ICE agents and warn residents.

The country donated to the frontlines. Volunteers patrolled streets with whistles, radios, and cameras. They watched school entrances. They documented vehicles and alerted neighborhoods with whistles when federal agents appeared (Reuters).

For many families all over the country, leaving home has become too dangerous.

Parents are keeping children home from school. Medical appointments have increasingly been missed. Businesses have lost workers as people have withdrawn from public life out of fear.

So the communities have stepped in.

This week in Vermont, residents watched as federal vehicles surrounded a home — protesters filling the street outside. When federal enforcement arrives in the middle of a neighborhood, the reaction is rarely quiet.

Communities notice.

Neighbors gather.

People step outside to see what is happening and to decide how they will respond.

What unfolds next is not often just an arrest.

It becomes a moment that pulls an entire community—and a country —into the conflict.

Formal systems move slowly while informal networks activate almost immediately. Neighbors rely on group chats and mutual aid networks. Some turn to school communities or religious groups for support.

These networks can quickly coordinate ride shares, food delivery, childcare, and legal assistance.

This type of mobilization is commonly referred to as mutual aid—a form of community response that often emerges after political unrest, natural disasters, and economic crises (Spade, 2020).

It is not centrally organized. It is not directed by institutions.

It emerges from the simple reality that when something happens in the middle of a neighborhood, people do not experience it as policy.

They experience it as something happening to their neighbors.

Source:

• Spade, D. (2020). Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis.

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The Legal Battles Are Just Beginning

Federal agents’ use of force has sparked lawsuits, court rules, and appeals.

In Minnesota, civil liberties groups swiftly challenged the violations of federal agents deployed during Operation Metro Surge. The ACLU filed a lawsuit on behalf of local residents and activists. Their suit claimed that federal officers were detaining legal observers, retaliating with force against protesters, and using crowd-control weapons in ways that violated First Amendment protections.

In January 2026, U.S. District Judge Katherine Menendez (MN) issued a preliminary injunction restricting the tactics immigration agents could use against demonstrators and observers. The ruling barred agents from arresting or detaining individuals who were engaged in peaceful protest or simply observing enforcement actions, unless officers had reasonable suspicion that a crime had been committed.

The court also prohibited agents from using pepper spray, tear gas, or other crowd-control munitions against peaceful demonstrators or bystanders documenting the operations.

The case marked one of the first major judicial responses to the enforcement surge, and it underscored how quickly immigration operations had expanded into a broader constitutional dispute.

Other cases emerging from the crackdown have revealed chaotic detention practices and aggressive enforcement tactics. In one widely reported incident, a Minneapolis-area asylum seeker was held in custody for 50 days before a federal judge ruled the detention unlawful, ordering his release after determining that immigration authorities had no legal basis to keep him imprisoned.

Legal advocates have argued that cases like this illustrate systemic problems with how arrests and transfers were conducted during the surge, including allegations that detainees were rapidly moved across state lines in ways that complicated their ability to challenge their detention in court.

Meanwhile, the state of Minnesota and the Twin Cities filed their own lawsuit against federal officials, accusing the government of deploying immigration agents in ways that violated residents’ rights and undermined local authority.

Together, these cases have transformed what began as an immigration enforcement campaign into something much larger.

What started as an immigration crackdown is now evolving into a broader legal battle over civil liberties, federal authority, and the limits of protest rights in American neighborhoods.

Courts are now being asked to answer questions that go far beyond immigration policy itself:

• How far can federal agents go when conducting enforcement operations inside communities?

• What protections do observers and protesters have when they document those operations?

And when federal authority collides with local resistance, who ultimately sets the boundaries of power?

Why This Feels Different

Immigration enforcement in the United States is not new.

For decades, federal agents have carried out arrests, detention, and deportation operations across the country. But what feels different now — to many Americans watching events unfold — is the scale, the visibility, and the location of those operations.

Instead of quiet arrests carried out of public view and in the middle of the night, enforcement is unfolding in the middle of neighborhoods, in front of crowds, and often on camera.

It is not simply immigration enforcement itself. The United States has enforced immigration law for more than a century, though Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was only created in 2003 as part of the Department of Homeland Security following the September 11 attacks.

What feels different now is the scale of federal deployments, the hostility and violence surrounding arrests and peaceful protests, and the growing number of confrontations between federal agents, local communities, and the courts.

Large federal operations in cities.

Neighborhood arrests captured on video.

People have been murdered in front of our eyes.

Crowds confronting federal agents in the street.

Because many of these events are unfolding in real time, often recorded on phones and shared across social media, the public is seeing federal immigration enforcement in a way that was far less visible in previous decades.

The standoff in Vermont may fade from headlines in a few days.

We shouldn’t let it.

But the larger story is still unfolding.

Across the country, communities are watching immigration enforcement happen in real time — sometimes with cameras, sometimes with protests, and sometimes with courts stepping in after the fact.

And the debate about where federal authority begins — and where local communities push back — is far from over.

Resources

Know Your Rights

Immigration Legal Resource Center

Stand With Minnesota

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February 28, 2026 — I woke up at 6:24 a.m.

Usually, waking up an hour before my circadian rhythm has been trained to wake means my intuition is telling me something is wrong — as if I can feel a shift in the global energy.

And I was right. A lot of us were.

As my husband was getting ready for work, I called across the room and asked, “What’s the time difference between here and Iran?”

His response: “It’s already happened.”

Instantly, I felt my chest tighten. I was scared — scared for my country, scared for my children, scared for our collective future.

There is something uniquely destabilizing about waking up to what seems to be war announced after the fact — decisions already made, and consequences already in motion, with the public invited only to absorb the fallout.

It’s just as unsettling to realize, in real time, that the fears many of us have had about Donald Trump and his presidency, dating back to 2011, weren’t exaggerated.

We weren’t overreacting.

We were right.

While nuclear negotiations with Iran were still ongoing — and further talks were expected to continue — the United States and Israel coordinated a joint attack on Iran, killing the Supreme Leader Sayyid Ali Hosseini Khamenei in the initial strikes.

They called them “preventative” attacks, naming the undeclared war Operation Epic Fury and promising to “obliterate” Iran’s missile industry and “annihilate” its navy. President Donald Trump has said there would be casualties, including U.S. casualties.

As of today, there have already been thirteen.

But these attacks never appeared preventative.

That morning, we all woke up to an overnight-recorded video in which President Donald Trump addressed the nation, wearing a white USA-branded hat. The brim shaded his eyes, while a noticeable discrepancy existed between the color of his ears and his face.

This was not a somber address, either. It was a performance — delivered in costume, wearing a white USA-branded hat whose symbolism now echoes authoritarian imagery long associated with fascism.

Authoritarian movements have always relied on symbols. Nazis had armbands. MAGA has hats.

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In June 2025, the United States carried out military strikes on Iran. Shortly afterward, the White House published an article titled “Iran’s Nuclear Facilities Have Been Obliterated — and Suggestions Otherwise are Fake News.”

In it, President Trump claimed:

“Monumental damage was done to all nuclear sites in Iran… Obliteration is an accurate term… The biggest damage took place far below ground level. Bullseye!!!”

This begs the question: If Iran’s nuclear program was truly “obliterated” in June 2025, then what are we doing in Iran now?

Margaret Atwood may have written about a dystopian state, but the parallels are impossible to ignore.

Christian nationalism has steadily eroded the boundary between religion and governance in the United States. The Establishment Clause of the First Amendment — once understood as a protection against state-sponsored religion — has been increasingly strained. Abortion, marriage, and even expressions of faith are increasingly governed through explicitly religious frameworks.

And the people in power did not stumble into this moment.

They cultivated it.

Christian nationalism promotes a rigid social hierarchy: men at the top, women in supporting roles. Marriage is narrowly defined as between a man and a woman; large families are encouraged, and gender is treated as fixed and binary.

Those whose beliefs align with this worldview are welcomed within the structure of citizenship.

Those who do not are pushed outside of it.

The United States is often described as a 250-year democratic experiment.

Right now, that experiment appears under intense strain.

The rise of Christian nationalism in American politics has not occurred in a vacuum. It has been supported and amplified by a network of policy organizations that work to translate ideological goals into concrete governing strategies.

One of the most influential of these organizations is the Heritage Foundation, a Washington-based policy institute that has played a significant role in shaping conservative policy agendas for decades. In recent years, the organization has led an initiative known as Project 2025, an extensive governing blueprint intended to guide the next conservative presidential administration.

Project 2025 advocates for expanding executive authority, restructuring federal agencies, and reorienting certain areas of public policy around conservative social priorities. Supporters of Project 2025 argue that the project is designed to restore what they view as constitutional governance and accountability within the federal bureaucracy.

However, critics and scholars warn that elements of the proposal could concentrate power within the executive branch while weakening long-standing institutional checks.

And, in many ways, the current moment reflects exactly this shift in how executive power is being exercised.

The significance of these efforts lies not only in their policy recommendations but in the infrastructure they’ve created. Ideological movements rarely translate directly into governance without an organized policy framework. Organizations like the Heritage Foundation provide that framework — they develop legal plans, government strategies, and staffing pipelines that can transform political ideas into government policy.

Understanding this policy ecosystem is vital to understanding the broader political moment. Movements that begin as cultural or religious arguments often become most consequential when paired with institutional planning capable of reshaping how power is exercised within government.

The Heritage Foundation is one of the institutions positioned to do exactly that.

Wars are now announced after the fact, once decisions have already been made and operations are already underway. The public is left to absorb the consequences rather than participate in the debate.

Over time, the constitutional balance regarding war powers has steadily washed away. While the Constitution grants Congress the authority to declare war, presidents on both sides of the aisle have increasingly relied on congressional authorizations, executive authority, or broadly interpreted legal frameworks to initiate military action without formal declarations of war.

In the case of the Iran conflict, war has not yet been officially declared. Instead, the administration has referred to it using a range of terms: an “excursion,” a “massive ongoing campaign,” and, at times, even “war” itself.

Trump administration officials appear before the press to answer questions, but it is increasingly clear that the administration is steadily chipping away at journalists and outlets that openly criticize the presidency. The answers provided are often political in nature, relying on omission, legalistic language, and vague explanations that obscure the reality of what is unfolding.

In response to the expansion of executive war-making during the Vietnam era, Congress passed the War Powers Resolution of 1973 over President Richard Nixon’s veto. The law was intended to reassert Congress’s constitutional authority over war-making under the War Powers Clause (U.S. Const. art. I, § 8, cl. 11) by requiring the president to notify Congress of military deployments and limiting the duration of unauthorized hostilities. The resolution was largely prompted by the Vietnam War and the Nixon administration’s secret bombing campaign in Cambodia.

This gradual shift has normalized a dangerous precedent: military operations can begin before the public fully understands what is happening, why it is happening, or how long it may last.

The result is a democratic deficit.

The decision to enter into conflict — one of the most consequential choices a government can make — is increasingly made without meaningful public deliberation.

And that is what makes this moment so troubling.

A military operation of this magnitude, carried out in the shadow of already escalating regional tensions, raises serious questions about transparency, constitutional authority, and the limits of executive power — or the lack thereof.

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The U.S. Constitution grants Congress, and only Congress, the authority to declare war through the War Powers Clause (U.S. Const. art. I, § 8, cl. 11). This provision was written with a clear intention: to ensure that decisions about war would not rest in the hands of a single person or branch, but in the deliberation of the legislative branch. And yet, over the past several decades, military actions have increasingly begun without formal declarations of war.

Instead, modern conflicts frequently emerge through Authorizations for Use of Military Force (AUMFs), executive actions, or military operations already underway when the public learns about them. Examples include the 2011 intervention in Libya under President Barack Obama and the 2017–2018 missile strikes in Syria authorized by President Donald Trump. More recently, the 2025 U.S. strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities and expanding military operations linked to Venezuela have again raised questions about the extent of presidential war powers without formal congressional authorization.

This is the democratic tension at the heart of the moment. The public wakes up to the consequences of decisions they were never asked to weigh.

At the same time, the language used to justify these actions has evolved. “Preventive war” is a particularly revealing phrase.

A pre-emptive strike is carried out when an attack is believed to be imminent — when an adversary is about to strike, and immediate action is necessary for defense. A preventive strike, however, is something entirely different.

Preventive war is not about stopping an attack that is about to happen. It is about stopping a threat that might emerge in the future. That distinction matters. Because once war becomes preventive, it no longer requires evidence of immediate danger. It only requires the belief that danger could exist. History has shown how dangerous that reasoning can become.

The Iraq War in 2003 was justified in part through arguments about weapons of mass destruction that might eventually threaten the United States. Those weapons were never found. The lesson many believed had been learned was that preventive war carries enormous risks — both strategically and morally.

And yet, two decades later, the language has returned.

This is what makes the contradiction surrounding Iran so difficult to ignore. If Iran’s nuclear facilities were already “obliterated,” as the administration claimed in 2025, then the central justification for a preventive strike becomes unclear.

What exactly is being prevented?

And what intelligence or strategic assessment supports the necessity of escalating military action now?

These questions are not expressions of disloyalty. They are the questions democratic societies are supposed to ask.

Because war, once begun, has a tendency to expand beyond the intentions of those who initiated it. Missile exchanges escalate. Alliances activate. Regional conflicts widen. Markets react. Civilian populations suffer.

History shows that wars often look very different months or years later than they did on the morning they began.

For now, much of the public is still trying to understand what has actually happened. Information is incomplete. Casualty figures remain uncertain. Strategic objectives have been described in broad terms but not fully explained.

What we do know is that a major military operation has begun, and the United States is now more deeply entangled in a conflict with Iran than it has been in decades.

That alone should give the country pause.

Because war is not simply a military event.

It is a political decision.

And political decisions carry consequences far beyond the battlefield.

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Content warning: This article contains material that may be disturbing. Reader discretion is advised.

Patterns are how abuse survives. Every abuser has them. Once you know what to look for, they’re not hard to see. Like a dress pattern laid out on a table, each piece looks ordinary on its own. It’s only when they’re stitched together that the design becomes clear.

My ex-husband had patterns.

There would be an incident of abuse. I would get hurt. I would be hurt. I would withdraw. Then he would pull himself together — apologetic, attentive, almost convincing. That phase never lasted longer than three weeks.

Not once.

For every good day, there were at least fourteen bad ones. The abuse always returned when he was angry, when work frustrated him, when his family upset him, when he didn’t have drugs, when my family upset him. Sometimes it didn’t take anything at all. A mood shift was enough.

And when it came back, it came in every form. Physical violence. Emotional violence. Psychological violence. Sexual violence. He threatened to take my children. He told me no one would ever want me.

The pattern never changed — only the excuses did.

Once you’ve lived inside a pattern, you start to recognize it elsewhere.

Survivors, Abuse, and Pattern Recognition

Survivors learn pattern recognition the way some people learn a second language: not by choice, but by necessity. You learn how tone shifts before the blow. How apologies sound different when they’re real versus when they’re tactical. You learn the length of the calm before the next storm. You learn when to placate, when to disappear, and when to brace.

And you learn that abuse is rarely chaotic. It is structured. Predictable.

What makes abuse so difficult for outsiders to understand is that it doesn’t look like constant violence.

If it did, fewer people would stay.

Abuse survives because it alternates harm with relief. Fear with affection. Threats with promises.

The pattern is the point.

For survivors, that pattern doesn’t end when the relationship ends. It follows you into courtrooms, custody disputes, workplaces, and medical offices. It follows you into your next relationship. And your next friendship. And every single relationship after that.

You start to recognize the same dynamics playing out again — power rebranded as care, control reframed as concern, coercion masked as choice.

That’s why so many survivors recognize Jeffrey Epstein for what he was.

Not because his behavior was unique — but because it wasn’t.

The language in these emails is familiar. The escalation is familiar. The way promises are made and then withdrawn. The way dependence is created and then punished. The way reality is rewritten until the victim starts questioning their own memory. Survivors have lived this before.

What’s most dangerous about abusers with power isn’t only what they do — it’s how effectively they exploit systems that are already primed to doubt survivors.

Courts ask why you didn’t leave sooner.

Police ask why you stayed.

Employers ask why you didn’t speak up.

Friends ask why you went back.

Abusers know this. They count on it.

That’s why pattern recognition matters more than intent. More than motive. More than even individual acts. Patterns are the evidence survivors bring when bruises fade, when emails are deleted, when testimony is dismissed as emotional or biased.

And those patterns are exactly what institutions have been trained to ignore.

Jeffrey Epstein had patterns, too.

“I can’t believe the baby deal is another one of your patterns,” the sender writes, accusing Epstein of trying to convince her she imagined agreements he had made.

That’s how abuse works.

An abuser will make you feel small. They’ll make you feel unsteady. Like you’ve slipped into madness. They’re experts in undermining trust — in facts, in institutions, in yourself.

That’s what gaslighting looks like.

The language here is blunt, angry, and exhausted. This isn’t flirtation — it’s someone realizing that promises around having a child were being dangled, withdrawn, and rewritten.

What stands out isn’t just the reference to a “baby deal,” but the word patterns.

By this point, whatever Epstein was offering wasn’t an isolated promise. It was something repeatable. Predictable. And destructive.

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“You did as little as possible to keep your promise to have a baby and nothing at all since you told me to stop using the monitors.”

This is critical.

It is not a rumor, not a euphemism, not a third-party interpretation. It is a direct account of a promise made and then withdrawn. The same email goes on to describe being told to “get the fuck out” at a moment’s notice, threatened with eviction, and warned she could only remain housed until she ran out of money. This is textbook economic abuse: housing insecurity used as leverage, financial dependence created and then weaponized, threats of eviction used to enforce compliance. It is a pattern long associated with Epstein — and here it is documented in real time.

When someone dangles your life over your head, you comply.

The monarchy is in crisis, and we are watching it unfold in real time. We expected to find former Prince Andrew in the files. Fergie’s relationship with Epstein, however, was not one I had on my Bingo card.

A September 2011 email from Sarah “Fergie” Ferguson — the Duchess of York and Andrew’s ex-wife — complicates the narrative in a way that’s hard to ignore. Writing casually, she tells Epstein she heard from Andrew that he had a baby boy and offers congratulations.

There’s no drama in the message. No hesitation. No sense that she’s repeating gossip or crossing a line by mentioning it. It reads like social information being passed along — something already accepted as true. The email doesn’t identify a mother or confirm a birth, but its tone matters. It suggests that, at least for a moment, the idea of Epstein as a father circulated comfortably among the highest elites, treated not as shocking or implausible, but as ordinary.

Taken alongside Epstein’s documented fixation on reproduction, his repeated promises to women about having children, and his own references to “the baby thing,” the question shifts. It is no longer whether Epstein wanted children — he clearly did — but how many may exist, and who bore them.

If children were born, they were never meant to be public.

And that, too, fits the pattern.

It was about positioning. About familiarity. About being embedded in people’s lives in ways that blurred the line between benefactor, authority, and family.

Epstein’s mother died in 2004. Whoever is referring to him as “Baba” in this email has known him for at least nine years by 2013.

This email from September 2013 reads casually. The sender calls Epstein “Baba,” a term often used to refer to someone as “father,” references “Mama,” and reminisces about Epstein’s mother as if these roles are long-established and understood. This is the language of family, used naturally and without explanation. On its own, it could be dismissed as affectionate shorthand. Placed alongside other emails involving promises of children, disputes over pregnancies, and Epstein positioning himself as a paternal figure, it becomes harder to ignore how often the language of family appears — and how deliberately it seems to be cultivated.

What does Epstein gain from positioning himself as a father or a paternal authority figure?

Trust.

Access.

Control.

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Nicole Junkermann, a German countess, is another name tied to Epstein’s orbit. Her relationship with him has prompted her resignation as a trustee of The Royal Marsden Cancer Charity after dozens of emails surfaced in the Epstein file release.

That context matters when you look at earlier exchanges with Junkermann. In June 2010, she emailed Epstein directly with the subject line: “Will you have a baby with me?” The message is brief and practical — “Where is the best place to do so?” — as if the premise itself required no explanation.

This wasn’t a spontaneous provocation or an abstract idea — It was a question posed plainly and treated as plausible enough to discuss logistics.

Placed alongside Epstein’s later message — “how would the baby thing work, what involvement would you need from me” — a pattern sharpens into view. This wasn’t a one-sided fixation or a rumor circulating without cause. It was an ongoing conversation, revisited over time, framed in terms of feasibility and roles.

Whatever Epstein was offering, entertaining, or implying, it existed within a shared understanding that having a child together was something to be considered, negotiated, and planned.

And that only works if trust is already in place.

And trust doesn’t just open conversations. It sustains them over time.

When a framework is established — where having a child is something to be discussed, weighed, deferred, or repurposed — it doesn’t disappear just because a message goes unanswered. It evolves. It resurfaces. It gets folded into other negotiations. What begins as a possibility becomes precedent.

By 2016, that framework was no longer implicit.

A June 2016 email lays the dynamic bare. The sender reminds Epstein that she once proposed having a baby together — framed not as a relationship, but as a solution: childcare, staffing, even the role of assistant folded into the idea of a child. When he didn’t respond, she writes, she “had Chloé without you.” The message moves seamlessly from reproduction to logistics — lawyers, real estate, restaurant plans — as if these things belong on the same continuum. It’s not romantic, and it’s not hypothetical. It reads like a worldview in which having a baby is transactional, instrumental, and interchangeable with labor. And Epstein’s reply — “I will ask” — does nothing to interrupt that logic.

And then the tone changes.

What had once been discussed in terms of feasibility and logistics collapses into something else entirely. By 2018, the conversation — at least with this person — is no longer about planning or possibility. It’s about denial. And fear.

An October 2018 email reads like a forced retraction. “It’s a total bullshit, my phone is hacked,” the sender writes, before insisting she never had a baby and describing how she “went crazy after miscarriage.” The language is frantic and fragmented, ricocheting between denial and self-blame. It doesn’t read like a calm clarification. It reads like someone trying to erase herself.

We do not know who this sender is. There is no confirmation that she is the same person referenced in earlier exchanges, and it would be irresponsible to assume she is. But the emotional texture of the message matters.

This email carries the imprint of fear. It reads as though something is being held over her head — not stated outright, but powerful enough to force a denial so absolute it turns inward. The urgency, the insistence that nothing happened, the willingness to portray herself as unstable rather than risk another explanation — all of it suggests pressure. Not persuasion. Pressure.

Placed alongside other emails that reference “baby deals,” broken promises, and disputes over whether a child existed at all, this message doesn’t resolve the story. It deepens it. It shows someone trying to claw back control of a narrative after loss — insisting nothing happened while still speaking from inside the wreckage of something that clearly did.

This is what coercion often sounds like on the page. Not explicit threats. Not clear demands. But fear that makes denial feel safer than truth. A reality where retracting your own experience becomes a form of self-preservation.

Once again, the pattern isn’t clarity.

It’s collapse.

Epstein had patterns.

There was at least one child — a baby boy. Other emails show that pregnancy itself was used as a mechanism of control, a way to bind, threaten, and manage women long after the initial abuse.

We’ve all heard the rumors — that Epstein was intentionally impregnating girls to “seed” the world with his DNA. What matters more than the rumor is what the records show: repeated promises around having children, disputes over pregnancies, logistical discussions about reproduction, and eventual denial and erasure. Taken together, they reveal a consistent strategy, not coincidence.

What these emails make clear is this: Jeffrey Epstein was an abuser. A predator.

And these are the very patterns advocates have been urging institutions to recognize for decades. If law enforcement, judges, lawyers, teachers, and leaders are serious about preventing abuse — not just reacting to it — those patterns have to be acknowledged early and taken seriously. Real, lasting change will require that kind of recognition. And it won’t be easy. If any part of this article feels familiar — or difficult — you’re not alone.

If you or someone you know needs support, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is available 24/7 at 1-800-799-SAFE (7233) or thehotline.org. Help is confidential, free, and available whether you’re ready to leave or just need someone to talk to.

This reporting remains open and accessible by design. If you believe in independent investigative work, subscribing (free or paid), sharing, or leaving a one-time tip helps sustain it.

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49 Zorro Ranch Road sits outside Stanley, New Mexico, surrounded by thousands of acres of high desert and open land. From the ground, it looks like privacy. From the air, it looks like distance is engineered into the landscape.

For years, Jeffrey Epstein’s New Mexico property existed at the margins of public attention. His Manhattan townhouse was scrutinized. His private island became infamous. But Zorro Ranch remained quieter — isolated, legally obscured, and never fully examined.

That silence is now breaking.

This week, New Mexico lawmakers authorized the first full investigation into what happened at Epstein’s former ranch, creating a bipartisan truth commission with subpoena power and a dedicated $2 million budget. The decision reflects a growing recognition that Zorro Ranch was not peripheral to Epstein’s world — it was part of it.

Isolation Is Not an Accident

Zorro Ranch was not simply large. It was built to be unreachable.

The property includes a sprawling main residence of more than 33,000 square feet, multiple outbuildings, internal roads, fenced zones, and a private airstrip cut into the desert. The presence of a private airstrip is significant. It transforms the property from a secluded residence into a site capable of discreet arrivals and departures — without commercial oversight or public visibility.

In environments tied to coercion and abuse, isolation is not aesthetic. It is functional.

Remote locations create dependency. Victims rely entirely on those who control transportation, communication, and access to the outside world. Distance slows emergency response. Sparse populations reduce witnesses. Limited infrastructure narrows escape routes.

Stanley is small. Cell service is unreliable. Law enforcement coverage stretches across wide distances. The surrounding land offers few visual interruptions, meaning unfamiliar movement is noticeable — but primarily to those already inside the perimeter.

This does not require speculation about specific acts. It requires recognizing patterns that have been documented repeatedly in abuse cases involving powerful perpetrators: geography becomes part of the mechanism.

Unlike Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse, Zorro Ranch offered containment. A place where people could be brought, housed, separated, and moved with minimal outside visibility.

Infrastructure, Not Lifestyle

An aerial view of Zorro Ranch reveals an important aspect: compartmentalization.

This was not one home with a few barns. It was a collection of distinct structures arranged across vast acreage, connected by internal roads and separated by distance. Compartmentalization limits overlap. It limits witnesses. It limits shared knowledge.

In controlled systems, people do not need to know everything. They only need to know their role.

Systems built for control are rarely accidental. They are maintained.

The People Who Maintained It

Physical infrastructure alone does not sustain a controlled environment. People do.

The day-to-day operations at Zorro Ranch were managed by Brice Gordon and his wife, Karen Gordon, a couple from New Zealand who worked for Epstein. Their responsibilities included overseeing operations, logistics, and access — tasks that are foundational to maintaining privacy and control at a property of this scale.

Reporting surrounding New Mexico’s newly authorized truth commission has identified the Gordons as potential witnesses, and possibly subpoena targets, precisely because of their proximity to Epstein’s properties.

This matters not as gossip, but as structure.

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A Network, Not a Single Property

Zorro Ranch did not exist in isolation from Epstein’s other holdings.

Brice Gordon’s presence at both the New Mexico ranch and Epstein’s property in the U.S. Virgin Islands is significant because it shows continuity of management across locations. When personnel move between sites, they carry procedures, expectations, and norms with them.

That continuity becomes particularly important when examining how Epstein’s properties functioned operationally — not as disconnected residences, but as parts of a broader system.

Sworn Testimony: Zorro Ranch Named Under Oath

Zorro Ranch is not linked to abuse through rumor alone.

It is named in sworn testimony.

In federal court filings and affidavits, Maria Farmer and her sister described sexual abuse by Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, including allegations tied directly to Epstein’s New Mexico property. These statements were made under oath and filed in legal proceedings where false statements carry criminal consequences.

The testimony describes Annie Farmer, Maria’s sister, being flown to Epstein’s New Mexico ranch as a minor and assaulted there. Maria Farmer reported the abuse to the FBI and the New York City Police Department years before Epstein’s final arrest.

These filings matter not only because of what they allege, but because of when they were made — long before public attention forced renewed scrutiny of Epstein’s network.

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The Cost of Speaking Early

Early reporting comes with risk.

Survivors who come forward before public consensus often face disbelief, retaliation, and isolation. Their accounts lack reinforcement from headlines or institutional validation. Instead, they encounter silence — or active discouragement.

Silence is not neutral.

Silence protects systems.

The fact that Zorro Ranch was named in sworn testimony years before meaningful investigation began places it squarely within a pattern of missed intervention. Abuse did not persist because no one spoke. It persisted because institutions failed to act when they did.

Guns: A Reported Burglary — and Unanswered Questions

The firearms associated with Zorro Ranch did not simply “go missing.”

There was a reported burglary.

Internal correspondence shows that after a break-in at the ranch, staff began a detailed, methodical process of accounting for weapons stored on the property. Emails document efforts to access a damaged gun safe, coordinate with specialized locksmiths, photograph weapons, record serial numbers when available, and cross-reference inventory lists against what remained.

According to those records, 33 firearms were reported stolen.

This was not a casual estimate. It was the result of a structured inventory process that included photographs of individual weapons, documentation of ammunition, magazines, cleaning kits, and accessories, and written summaries circulated among Epstein’s staff.

The existence of a burglary does not close the story.
It opens it.

An Arsenal Treated as Routine

What stands out in these communications is not alarm — it is familiarity.

The emails do not question why a remote ranch required dozens of firearms. They do not express shock at the quantity involved. They do not debate whether such an arsenal was appropriate for an isolated desert property.

Instead, the focus is procedural:

• Which firearms were accounted for
• Which serial numbers matched prior inventories
• Which locksmiths could access specialized gun safes
• How documentation would be updated

In one exchange, staff discuss that the gun safe could not be opened because burglars had damaged the locking mechanism, prompting calls to specialty gun-safe locksmiths and coordination with local and state authorities.

This tone matters.

It suggests that firearms were not exceptional at Zorro Ranch. They were expected. Managed. Cataloged. Integrated into routine operations.

Scale Without Explanation

According to one detailed summary circulated internally, 33 guns were missing when the inventory was completed.

The email notes that:

• Each firearm was examined and compared against prior inventory lists

• Serial numbers and photos were reviewed where available

• Ammunition, magazines, and shooting accessories were also documented

• State police were involved in photographing recovered items

• The remaining contents were returned to a safe and relocated for storage

What the records do not explain is why such an extensive collection existed in the first place.

There is no discussion of hunting operations.
No mention of sporting use.
No explanation of security needs that would require dozens of firearms.

The absence of justification is as notable as the documentation itself.

Firearms in Controlled Environments

In controlled environments, firearms are rarely just tools.

Their presence shapes power dynamics. It establishes implicit authority. It reinforces hierarchy — particularly in spaces already defined by isolation, restricted access, and dependence on those who control movement.

This does not require assumptions about how weapons were used.

It requires acknowledging what weapons do in environments where:

• people are remote from help

• transportation is controlled

• oversight is minimal

• and accountability is internal

A burglary explains how the guns left the property.

It does not explain why they were there — or why their presence was treated as ordinary.

Operational Awareness Across Properties: The Virgin Islands Connection

One of the most revealing operational documents tied to Epstein’s network is an email referencing delaying activity because the Coast Guard had been “around a lot lately.”

This email does not refer to New Mexico.

It refers to the U.S. Virgin Islands, where Epstein’s Little Saint James property was located — a site widely recognized as central to his trafficking operation.

That distinction is critical.

The relevance of the email is not geographic. It is behavioral.

The message shows situational awareness and deliberate timing: activity paused, not canceled, in response to law-enforcement presence. There is no panic in the language. Just adjustment.

This matters for Zorro Ranch because of who connects these locations.

Brice Gordon, who managed Zorro Ranch, also spent time at Epstein’s Virgin Islands property. When personnel operate across multiple sites, they carry operational habits with them: how enforcement visibility is monitored, how timing decisions are made, and how risk is assessed.

The Coast Guard email does not prove specific actions occurred in New Mexico.

What it shows is that Epstein’s operation functioned with discipline and awareness — and that those practices existed within the same network of people who managed the New Mexico ranch.

Silence as Strategy

Across Epstein-related documentation, what stands out is not only what is said — but what is absent.

There are no emails questioning morality. No language expressing concern about appropriateness. No debate about whether something should happen.

Only when it should happen.

Only whether now is the right time.

This absence reflects normalization. When harm becomes embedded in systems, it no longer requires justification. It requires coordination. Silence becomes strategy.

Zorro Ranch’s paper trail fits that pattern.

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A New Owner, A New Name — Without Reckoning

In 2023, the ranch was purchased by the family of Don Huffines, a former Republican state senator and current Texas Comptroller candidate. The property was renamed San Rafael Ranch, and Huffines publicly framed the purchase as a spiritual reclamation.

The language was decisive. Redemptive. Final.

But renaming a property does not erase its history.

Rebranding offers psychological closure without material reckoning. It allows discomfort to be resolved through narrative rather than investigation. It reframes a site of harm as a site of renewal — often before the full record is examined.

Accountability works in the opposite direction.

It requires examination before absolution. Documentation before redemption. Answers before closure.

Zorro Ranch cannot be rhetorically reclaimed until it has been historically examined.

The Investigation Now

New Mexico lawmakers have authorized a truth commission with subpoena power and a dedicated budget of $2 million to examine what occurred at Epstein’s New Mexico ranch and why oversight failed for so long.

The state attorney general has reopened related inquiries.

For the first time, Zorro Ranch is being treated not as an afterthought, but as a site requiring full accounting.

Final Thoughts

Zorro Ranch was never just a ranch.

It was isolated by design. Maintained deliberately. Named under oath. Documented in internal correspondence. Managed by personnel operating across Epstein’s network. Adjusted in response to enforcement visibility elsewhere. And allowed to remain unanswered for decades.

The question is no longer whether the property existed within Epstein’s system.

The question is whether we are willing to confront what that system looked like—and why it was allowed to persist.

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The Heritage Foundation (the Foundation) treats the declining birth rate in America as a moral failure of the people — a signal of cultural decay rather than economic strain. From their perspective, the decline “metastasized” in the 1960s, leading to “broken homes and often-broken children that continues today.”

It is not incidental that they reference the 1960s — a decade marked by civil rights expansion, the loosening of rigid gender norms, expanded workforce participation for women, and broader cultural liberalization. To frame that era as the origin of social breakdown is not a neutral historical observation; it is a value judgment about which freedoms were destabilizing.

“The Heritage Foundation is proud of its position on what a family should look like. The natural family is the cell of the social body, and no body can survive the death and decay of its cells.”

The Foundation has long asserted that marriage is the union between one man and one woman, and that the nuclear family is the optimal structure for social health.

But this definition excludes blended families, same-sex couples, adoptive families, children born through surrogacy, and multigenerational households. These arrangements are not fringe realities — they are woven into the contemporary American landscape. When one model is elevated as socially superior, others are implicitly positioned as deficient.

“For the country’s population to replace itself and flourish across generations, a great many citizens must choose to marry, and as a matter of mathematics, couples must on average have at least two children.”

The Heritage Foundation uses mathematics to describe replacement rates, but it does not answer questions of consent, health, capacity, or desire. It doesn’t account for economic instability, trauma, pregnancy complications, infertility, or the systemic racism deeply woven into our systems. Reducing demographics to arithmetic risks transforming reproduction into obligation.

Their framing here is deliberate. They present childbirth as both a biological and moral obligation, shifting the conversation away from the causes of the declining birthrates: unaffordable healthcare, high childcare costs, student debt, and rising home prices. By doing this, the responsibility shifts from institutions to individuals. Then, the issue isn’t the cost of living, or the instability of employment, it’s the choices of the people themselves — their values, their priorities, and their willingness to conform to the social idea of marriage.

It’s important to note the absence of a proposed policy. The political force calling for “natural families” is the same one that frequently opposes expanding access to healthcare, childcare, paid family leave, and wage equality — policies empirically associated with family stability and improved child wellbeing. So the question becomes: is the goal family flourishing, or cultural conformity?

When Policy Becomes Prescription

“As a matter of public policy, however, policymakers should not endorse technocratic fixes to the birth dearth that conflict with human nature or ignore or bypass the known sources of human flourishing. First among these sources are the institutions of marriage and family.”

When the Foundation warns against “technocratic fixes” that conflict with “human nature,” it is making two assumptions at once:

1. That human nature is fixed and knowable.

2. That its fullest expression is heterosexual marriage and biological parenthood.

If the problem is cultural decay, the solution is moral restoration. If the issue is “human flourishing,” the prescription becomes marriage, childbearing, and clearly defined gender roles. Structural supports are seen not as enabling families, but as distracting from the “real” solution: returning to a traditional family order.

In simple terms, the Foundation doesn’t believe we should address declining birth rates with technocratic measures such as paid leave, childcare support, healthcare access, or structural reforms. Instead, they’re subtly telling us that women should return to their traditional roles — get married, have children, make a home.

If marriage and family are the “first sources” of flourishing, what makes those institutions stable in modern society? Research consistently shows that economic security, healthcare access, affordable housing, and work-life balance strengthen family outcomes. In other words, what the Foundation calls “technocratic” may in fact be foundational.

There is also an unspoken gender dimension. Calls to restore family-centered flourishing often translate into expectations about women’s labor — both paid and unpaid. When technocratic supports are rejected, caregiving responsibilities do not disappear; they shift back into the private sphere, disproportionately onto women.

And then there is the word “endorse.” Policymakers are cautioned not merely against overreliance on structural reforms, but against legitimizing them at all. That language signals a deeper philosophical divide: Is the role of government to remove material barriers so individuals can form families if they choose — or to reinforce a particular model of family as socially superior?

The difference is subtle but consequential.

One approach broadens options. The other narrows them.

Ultimately, this is not simply a debate about birth rates. It is a debate over whether demographic trends should be addressed through economic support and personal autonomy — or through cultural realignment toward a defined vision of marriage and family.

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S.3627 — Pregnant Students’ Rights Act

Ideology does not remain abstract. It materializes in policy.

Consider S.3627:

“This bill requires each institution of higher education (IHE) that participates in federal student aid programs to provide certain information to prospective and enrolled students on the rights and resources for pregnant students to carry a baby to term or students who may become pregnant while enrolled at the IHE to carry a baby to term. In particular, this required information must include a list of community and on-campus resources that exist to help a pregnant student in carrying the baby to term and caring for the baby after birth, information about the accommodations available to help a pregnant student carry the baby to term and parent the baby after birth, and information on how to file a discrimination complaint related to the student’s determination to carry a baby to term” (S.3627)

The emphasis is clear: carry a pregnancy to term. The Act requires colleges receiving federal funding to provide information about resources to support continuing a pregnancy, childcare accommodations, healthcare options, and anti-discrimination protections specifically tied to that decision. On its face, this appears supportive. Title IX already prohibits pregnancy discrimination, and ensuring students understand their rights is important. But the language is directional. The bill does not require institutions to provide comparable information about contraception access, emergency contraception, abortion services, miscarriage management, or broader reproductive healthcare counseling.

Support is not inherently problematic. The question is whether institutional messaging is neutral — or whether it privileges one reproductive outcome over others. That distinction matters, particularly in states where access to abortion or comprehensive reproductive healthcare is already limited. When federally funded institutions are required to distribute information specifically related to carrying a pregnancy to term — and are not required to present the full spectrum of options — the policy emphasis becomes evident.

This approach aligns with broader pronatalist rhetoric that frames childbirth and traditional family formation as civic goods. As the Heritage Foundation has stated, “We make no apology for wanting to persuade more young Americans to marry… raise the next generation…” When viewed alongside that philosophy, S.3627 appears less like a neutral information measure and more like part of a policy orientation that treats childbirth as the socially preferred outcome.

The debate, then, is not whether pregnant students deserve support. They do. The debate is whether public policy should ensure comprehensive, neutral information or guide students toward a particular vision of family formation.

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Motherhood, Managed

“The decline of the American family — which began slowly in the first half of the 20th century — metastasized in the 1960s, leading to an epidemic of broken homes and often-broken children that continues today.”

The Foundation puts forward rhetoric that does more than describe demographic change; it medicalizes it. Words like “metastasized” and “epidemic” frame shifts in family structure as disease — something invasive, spreading, pathological. The implication is not simply that birth rates have declined, but that deviations from a particular family model are socially corrosive.

The Foundation’s position suggests that the concern is not simply increasing birth rates, but increasing births within a specific structure: heterosexual, married, biologically connected households. Their opposition to commercial surrogacy reinforces this. Even technological solutions that could increase births are rejected if they disrupt what they define as the “natural” maternal bond.

As they write:

“Surrogacy, whether achieved through artificial means or not, always intentionally deprives a child of the birth mother who carries and nurtures the child for nine months, and who ultimately bears the child…What if, in 2045, the U.S. can build automated factories with artificial wombs that can gestate human babies from the moment of fertilization until they are full term? This would reduce the opportunity costs of pregnancy, especially for women with high-income potential: No morning sickness, no doctor visits, no pregnancy-related sick days away from work, no risk of gestational diabetes and c-sections, and so on.”

Here, the concern is not simply population replacement; it is the reconfiguration of motherhood itself. The hypothetical scenario of artificial wombs is presented not as innovation, but as dystopia — because it separates gestation from traditional female roles and biological attachment.

The tension is revealing: fertility technology that reduces physical burden or career tradeoffs is framed as destabilizing rather than empowering.

If fertility technology reduces the “opportunity costs” of pregnancy — allowing women to maintain careers without physical burden — that is portrayed as destabilizing rather than liberating. The anxiety is not demographic decline alone, but the erosion of gendered expectations embedded in traditional family life.

In this view, family is not simply a private arrangement. It is a moral institution that must remain biologically and structurally intact to preserve social order.

Birth as Civic Duty

One of the core principles embedded in the Foundation’s conception of the “traditional family” is not simply religious conviction, but a fusion of theology and civic identity. In its effort to “save the American family,” the Foundation draws from Christian moral anthropology, particularly evangelical Protestant thought. Marriage is framed as a covenantal union between one man and one woman. Motherhood is treated not merely as a personal choice, but as a natural and morally significant vocation. The family is positioned as a pre-political institution — existing prior to the state — yet simultaneously described as essential to the survival of the nation.

This framing moves beyond private faith. It connects family structure to national continuity. Birth rates are discussed in terms of replacement, generational flourishing, and cultural preservation. Demographic decline is not simply a statistical trend; it becomes a civilizational warning.

This fusion of religion and national identity is not unique.

As the excerpt above illustrates, religiosity and nationalism can combine to elevate childbearing into an act of civic significance. In that framework, fertility is not merely a private decision — it becomes part of a collective national project. Childbearing is cast not just as family formation, but as participation in historical continuity.

The parallels are instructive. When demographic trends are framed as existential threats — whether due to cultural change, population decline, or civilizational anxiety — reproduction shifts from personal choice to public duty. The concern becomes not simply that fewer children are being born, but that they are not being born within the “right” moral and structural framework.

This helps explain the Foundation’s opposition to surrogacy and certain reproductive technologies. Even technological solutions that might increase birth rates are rejected if they disrupt what is defined as the natural maternal bond. As they write:

“Surrogacy… always intentionally deprives a child of the birth mother… What if, in 2045, the U.S. can build automated factories with artificial wombs…”

The anxiety here is not population replacement alone. It is the reconfiguration of motherhood itself. Artificial wombs are presented not as innovation, but as dystopia — because they separate gestation from traditional female roles and biological attachment.

According to this perspective, family isn’t simply a private arrangement, it’s a moral institution structured to remain biologically and culturally intact — all in the name of preserving social order.

The debate over the “birth dearth” is not simply about numbers. It is about narrative. When declining fertility is framed as moral failure rather than structural challenge, policy shifts accordingly.

Support becomes directional.

Choice becomes conditional.

Family becomes doctrine.

No society can function without families, but the question is whether public policy exists to strengthen diverse families in the world as it is — or to discipline them into a singular vision of what they should be.

In the end, the conversation is not only about birth rates. It is about who defines flourishing — and who decides the form it must take.

Source: Saving America by Saving the Family: A Foundation for the Next 250 Years

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We are uncovering more and more every day in the Epstein files. And while we do, we’re watching — in real time — what most survivors already know too well: what it means to be silenced, isolated, and unheard.

As a society, we have been conditioned to offer support only to the “perfect” survivor — the one who didn’t fight back, who isn’t struggling with addiction or mental health, who left after the first time, who wasn’t “asking for it,” who “knew better” than to wear that.

Even when abuse is undeniable, the first questions are still accusatory:

Why were you there?

Were you drinking?

Did you flirt?

Where were their parents?

The burden is placed on the victim — never the system, never the predator.

People fear what they don’t understand. And it becomes even harder to confront harm when that harm is so normalized, so woven into the fabric of our culture, that we stop recognizing it for what it is. We have made progress in sexual-assault advocacy. But progress is not the same as justice — and we are nowhere near finished.

There are thousands of survivors connected to Epstein’s trafficking network — thousands — and for nearly twenty years, they have come forward asking for accountability, for truth, for basic dignity. Instead, they have too often been met with skepticism, harassment, and a legal system that protects powerful men while failing the people they hurt.

Childhood Conditioning

I grew up in a small, rural town in Southwest Virginia — cattle fields, dairy farms, corn stretching for miles. It was the kind of place where a handful of wealthy families owned most of the land and most of the power.

In sixth grade, a boy from one of those families asked me to be his girlfriend.

I felt lucky.

He was popular.
He played football.

I had already been subconsciously conditioned to want that kind of validation.

On Valentine’s Day, he brought one of those giant balloons to school — the kind with a teddy bear inside, wrapped in a big pink bow. I thought it was for me.

It wasn’t.

He gave it to another girl, broke up with me, and called me a name I still don’t fully understand. Later, he told me he broke up with me because I didn’t want to hold his hand in assembly.

And he was right — I didn’t. He asked. I said no.

I wasn’t taught consent. Most of us weren’t. Our mothers weren’t either.

It wasn’t the first time I knew I had done something that upset a boy, but it was the first time I realized it wasn’t just some of them — it was a lot of them.

Middle school became a revolving door of boyfriends and “love interests.” At the time, it felt normal. Looking back, it wasn’t.

We were raised with a script: graduate, marry young, have children, make a home.

I didn’t plan to follow it — but life has a way of pushing you down familiar paths. I was 17 when my son was born. 18 when I got married. 19 when my daughter was born. 24 when I divorced.

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What We’re Actually Reckoning With

And now, years later, we’re processing something much bigger:

The world isn’t just run by powerful men.
It’s run by powerful men who profit from the sexualization of children while abusing children at the same time.

And that’s not a metaphor.

It’s documented.

Les Wexner built a retail empire that included brands many of us grew up wearing — Victoria’s Secret, PINK, The Limited, Limited Too, Express, Bath & Body Works, Abercrombie & Fitch. Before Epstein’s arrest, Wexner was known as “one of the most successful and respected entrepreneurs in the country.”

In a recently unredacted file released, following pressure from Rep. Thomas Massie, the FBI listed Les Wexner in a section identifying potential co-conspirators related to Epstein’s child sex-trafficking operation. However, even now, Wexner has maintained that he was unaware of Epstein’s sex crimes, but severed ties with him when he uncovered millions of dollars had been misappropriated.

Les Wexner, 88, is scheduled to sit for a deposition before several members of Congress this week, the first time Wexner has spoken under oath since the release of the Epstein files. He will no longer be able to deny the connections to Epstein after he claims to have cut ties.

Jeffrey Epstein is not the first predator to be linked to Wexner; Dr. Richard Strauss, a team doctor at The Ohio State University from 1978 to 1998, where he sexually assaulted at least 177 male students and athletes. Despite claiming innocence, Wexner has been implicated in victim testimony.

Complicating matters further, files show that Epstein held a significant stake in Too, Inc., the company behind Limited Too, Justice, and Brothers — brands marketed directly to tween girls and boys — even after Wexner claims to have cut ties with Epstein. This evidence is circumstantial at this stage. What it does establish, however, is continued financial overlap well after Epstein claimed ties had been severed.

These weren’t abstract investments.

These were the stores we shopped in.
The clothes we wore to school.
The training bras.
The butterfly clips.
The aspirational catalogs.

While these men were trafficking and abusing minors, they were also shaping how minors dressed, how they were marketed, and how their bodies were packaged and sold.

That’s not a coincidence.

That’s control.

And it forces an uncomfortable question:

Who was deciding what little girls and boys should look like — and why do those same men show up again and again in the files?

The Fashion and Modeling Pipeline

Jean-Luc Brunel was the co-founder of Karin Paris and MC2 Modeling Agency (New York and Miami). His agencies supplied models to brands like Nordstrom, Macy’s, Saks Fifth Avenue, Neiman Marcus, and L Brands (Victoria’s Secret and The Limited). Brunel held an 85% stake in MC2.

Brunel lived up to his reputation — within the modeling industry, he was widely known for his preference for young girls and children, his drug use, and his relationship to Epstein. Despite being known for this, brands and agencies continued to work with him, including John Casablancas, the founder of ID Models. This knowledge did not result in professional exile — it resulted in continued access.

As the result of the investigation into Jeffrey Epstein, Brunel was arrested at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris, France in December 2019. In February 2022, Brunel was found hanged in his jail cell. His death foreclosed the possibility of public testimony.

Before the investigation, Epstein secured a $1 million line of credit for MC2. This financial backing further cemented Epstein’s position inside the modeling pipeline.

“He spent recent years recruiting girls in the former Soviet Republics and at schoolyards and volleyball courts in farming towns in the southernmost state of Brazil, home of supermodels Gisele Bündchen and Alessandra Ambrosio, whose fame turned the area into a hot spot for scouts.”

Bringing this full circle, it’s no surprise to find Donald Trump connected to both men through the modeling industry. Trump himself founded Trump Model Management and co-owned Miss Universe, Miss Teen USA, and Miss USA — organizations built on the recruitment, evaluation, and control of young women and girls.

Paolo Zampolli is the founder of ID Models, and the current United States Special Representative for Global Partnerships for the Trump administration. Zampolli introduced Melania to Trump, and even arranged for her U.S. visa.

We’ve been told that Trump met Melania at the Kit Kat Club for a New York Fashion Week party in Manhattan that Zampolli was hosting, and what occurred immediately after that encounter — including subsequent travel and social overlap — remains unclear in the public record. However, the email below leads me to question to authenticity of those claims.

In the early 1990s, Trump even partnered with John Casablancas, an American model and talent agent whose documented behavior toward teenage models have been widely criticized, to elevate Look of the Year, a global competition created to scout teenage girls for Elite Model Management. Trump hosted the event at the Plaza Hotel, served as a judge, and became deeply embedded in Casablancas’s modeling empire — an industry built on access to young women and girls.

That access later became part of Trump’s public record.

In 1992, Donald Trump hosted the competition again onboard the Spirit of New York. “One of the girls on the boat was Shawna Lee, then a 14-year-old from a small town outside Toronto. She recalls how the contestants were encouraged to parade downstairs, one by one, and dance for Trump, Casablancas and others.”

During the same competition in 1992, on board the same ship, another contestant, who was 15 at the time, recalls being asked to walk for Trump and Casablancas.

Following her win as Miss Universe 1996, Trump publicly shamed Alicia Machado for gaining weight, referring to her as “Miss Piggy” and “Miss Housekeeping.” Several contestants from the 1997 Miss Teen USA pageant, some as young as 15, later alleged that Trump walked into their dressing room while they were naked or half-dressed. In a 2005 audio recording with Howard Stern, Trump himself admitted to entering contestants’ dressing rooms while they were changing, claiming his ownership gave him the right to “inspect” them.

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The files have not yet revealed the full extent of Epstein’s relationship with Wexner.

What is clear is this:

Through Wexner, Epstein gained access to money, to power, to industry, and to children.

The same agency machine that conditioned models was the same machine dressing children — subtly teaching them what to aspire to, what to tolerate, what their value was supposed to look like.

The files have revealed to us that Ed Razek, the long-time Chief Marketing Officer of L Brands, and Jeffrey Epstein had a long-standing relationship. Razek, who developed the Victoria’s Secret Angels and their annual fashion show, was the subject of many complaints of “inappropriate conduct.”

From approximately 1991 to 2007, Epstein was the personal financial advisor for Les Wexner — and Wexner granted him power of attorney, authorizing him to sign tax returns, hire people, and manage personal assets. For years, Wexner was described as Epstein’s primary — and for a period, his only known — client.

The DOJ has made an effort to redact Les Wexner’s name — and members of Congress have publicly challenged those redactions, specifically naming Wexner as one of the identities being concealed in some versions of the files. We don’t know exactly why the redactions are happening. But no one redacts names at scale “for fun” — redactions are a form of control: control of exposure, control of narrative, and control of who gets protected while the public stays in the dark. And the obvious question is: if his name appears even in the redacted material, how frequently does it appear in the unredacted record — and in what context?

So what advantage did Epstein have investing in Too, Inc. —> Tween Brands, Inc. —> Ascena Retail Group, Inc. on the NYSE?

Legitimacy — Holding large positions embeds you in mainstream finance. It makes you look like a conventional investor, not a predator building infrastructure.

Proximity — Public-company investing doesn’t give you “control,” but it can give you access: investor events, executive-adjacent circles, philanthropic overlaps, and the soft social permissions that come with being seen as “serious money.” Social capital is currency.

Flexibility — No one asks why you sold shares. Public markets let you move in and out quietly, convert equity to cash quickly, and reallocate without leaving the kind of messy paper trail private ownership can create.

Appearance — Retail looks harmless. It’s “safe” money: consumer brands, nostalgia, mall culture. That’s camouflage.

Obscurity — Investments can be held through trusts and custodians, which can obscure beneficial ownership and create distance between the person and the asset—especially when combined with layered entities.

Presence — Large shareholders can gain access to executives and attend investor events. Not because they’re “running” the business—because money buys rooms. And rooms buy silence.

Wexner stepped down from leadership at L Brands effective May 14, 2020.

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The men who decided what little girls wore are the same men who blamed us for wearing it.

They sold us innocence.
They sold us aspiration.
They sold us beauty standards.

And behind the scenes, they sold us out.

This isn’t about fashion.
It’s not about modeling.

It’s about systems — systems that trained us early to be compliant, desirable, quiet, and grateful for attention.

And it’s about finally telling the truth about what they sold us.

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UPDATE: Saturday, February 7th, 2026

Today, the Guardian published an article with previously unreported details about the whistleblower’s complaint. According to the outlet, the NSA detected a phone call with foreign intelligence and a person closely associated with President Trump last Spring. That information was given to DNI Tulsi Gabbard, who took a paper copy of the complaint directly to the President’s Chief of Staff, Susie Wiles. After Tulsi met with Wiles, she instructed the NSA to transmit the complaint directly to her office rather than publish the report, including highly classified details.

The press secretary from the ODNI responded to the Guardian, in part, with this statement: “This story is false. Every single action taken by DNI Gabbard was fully within her legal and statutory authority, and these politically motivated attempts to manipulate highly classified information undermine the essential national security work being done by great Americans in the Intelligence Community every day…”

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February 5th, 2026

Tulsi Gabbard, Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), has been, and remains, a controversial figure since even before her nomination.

She has been making headlines recently after taking part in an FBI raid of the Fulton County Election Commission in Georgia, despite there being no clear reason for the Director of National Intelligence to be present. During the raid, agents confiscated 700 boxes of 2020 ballots, raising additional concerns about both optics and intent.

Efforts to justify Gabbard’s attendance from the White House have been spent shifting blame between the President and Pam Bondi. To date, there is no clear reason why she was in Georgia; Bondi said she was there because she and Bondi are “inseparable”; Tulsi said she was there at the President’s request; and Trump said that she was there because Bondi requested it.

Making matters worse for Gabbard, this week, The Wall Street Journal reported that a U.S. intelligence official filed a whistleblower complaint alleging wrongdoing by Gabbard. The complaint is reportedly so highly classified that not only has it triggered months of internal disputes over whether and how it can be shared with Congress, but it’s also been locked in a safe for the past 8 months. The complaint said, in part:

“A U.S. intelligence official has alleged wrongdoing by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard in a whistleblower complaint that is so highly classified it has sparked months of wrangling over how to share it with Congress, according to U.S. officials and others familiar with the matter.

The filing of the complaint has prompted a continuing, behind-the-scenes struggle about how to assess and handle it, with the whistleblower’s lawyer accusing Gabbard of stonewalling the complaint. Gabbard’s office rejects that characterization, contending it is navigating a unique set of circumstances and working to resolve the issue.”

How Did We Get Here?

1. May 2025: A member of the US Intelligence submitted a report alleging that a highly classified intelligence report was intentionally restricted for political reasons. The whistleblower also claims an agency lawyer failed to notify the DOJ about a potential crime, despite a legal duty to report it.

2. June 2025: The Whistleblower asks that the report be shared with Congress.

3. October 2025: Christopher Fox is confirmed as the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community. His role is to serve as the senior watchdog overseeing intelligence agencies and whistleblower complaints. Fox was “told by ODNI’s general counsel that “complexity in the classification” of the complaint had contributed to the delay.”

4. This Week: Yesterday, Andrew P. Bakaj, Chief Legal Counsel for the US Intelligence Whistleblower Aid, issued a letter to Director Gabbard, accusing her of intentionally obstructing congressional oversight. Due to the report being so highly classified that it’s been locked in a safe for the last eight months, Bakaj tells Gabbard he will contact the Senate Select Committee on Monday, February 4th, 2026, as a result of her failure to offer a viable path forward with Congress. Bakaj notes that he holds a TOP SECRET security clearance.

The Gang of 8 has since received a copy of the complaint. CNN reports that Rep. Jim Himes said that “after seeing the complaint that he had “ongoing concerns about both the contents and the delay in it being reported to Congress. I will continue to pursue this matter to ensure that proper oversight is conducted.”

The Gang of 8

House of Representatives

• Mike Johnson (R-LA): Speaker of the House

• Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY): Minority Leader

• Rick Crawford (R-AR): Chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence

• Jim Himes (D-CT): Ranking Member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence

Senate

• John Thune (R-SD): Majority Leader

• Chuck Schumer (D-NY): Minority Leader

• Tom Cotton (R-AR): Chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence

• Mark Warner (D-VA): Vice Chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence

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Naturally, it begs to be questioned. Where exactly did this money come from?

We’ve long known Epstein had two billionaire clients: Les Wexner and Leon Black. What we didn’t know was how he built his wealth in the first place. Now it’s becoming obvious — his money didn’t come from brilliance or credentials, but from secrecy, leverage, and financial arrangements that look less like advising and more like exploitation.

Epstein never put anything in his own name. Planes. Boats. Properties. All of it was held across multiple businesses, all of which may still be unknown to the government. He regularly created new entities and transferred real property and funds between them to hide criminal activity. Epstein remained as the head of these entities, holding positions as president, manager, member, or director.

On August 8, 2019 — just two days before his death — Jeffrey Epstein revised his Will. He named Darren K. Indyke, his longtime attorney, and Richard D. Kahn, his accountant, as executors of the estate. Both men also held leadership roles across Epstein’s network of corporations.

Below is a partial list of entities tied to Epstein and what each one controlled. Notice how aircraft, property, and even the island itself were separated into different legal shells — but often managed by the same small circle of people.

Two days before his death, Epstein amended his will to direct that his entire estate be transferred into the “1953 Trust,” effectively placing control of his assets into a private trust structure upon his death.

The Will directs the estate to give his long-time girlfriend, Karyna Shuliak, $100 million, including $50 million to be set up as an annuity for Shuliak. In addition to the money, she was set to inherit most of Epstein’s properties and a 33-carat diamond ring.

The co-executors of the Estate, Darren Indyke, his long- time lawyer, and Richard Kahn, his accountant, were also to be given $50 million and $25 million, respectively.

The Will also directs the forgiveness of several loans:

I can’t imagine Epstein leaving this many victims with his money; removing unnecessary redactions could provide the context we need.

Despite Epstein’s generous bequests of his wealth, no beneficiary will receive money until and unless all creditors are paid, including any judgment against him. The U.S. Virgin Islands has set up a fund for victims, funded by the estate.

By November 2022, the estate had awarded roughly $125 million to over 150 victims.

I will continue to update this page as I uncover new information.

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