Martin Vasquez

The Party That Renamed the DoD to Department of War Now Says America Is Not at War

Martin D. Vasquez — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 15:33:16 GMT

The Trump administration’s effort to redefine basic words reveals a strategy designed to evade the law, dodge accountability, and erase history as it happens.

Six months into a military conflict that has killed thousands, displaced millions, and consumed roughly half of America’s precision munitions stockpile, the Republican Party has settled on a remarkable legal defense. The war with Iran, they argue, is not a war at all.

It is a position that requires ignoring not only the plain meaning of the English language, but the administration’s own actions. In September 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order renaming the Department of Defense as the “Department of War,” a name Secretary Pete Hegseth championed as a return to a more aggressive military posture. “We’re going to go on offense, not just on defense,” Hegseth said at the time. The House Armed Services Committee later voted to codify the name change in the fiscal 2027 defense bill. And yet when the War Powers Resolution’s 60-day deadline arrived on May 1st, 2026, that same administration told Congress the opposite. “The hostilities that began on February 28, 2026, have terminated,” Trump wrote to House Speaker Mike Johnson. The Department of War, it seemed, was no longer at war.

This is rhetoric in its oldest and most dangerous form. Not persuasion through argument, but persuasion through the manipulation of meaning itself. If the word “hostilities” can be redefined to exclude a naval blockade, ongoing airstrikes, and the enforcement of a military perimeter around an entire nation, then the legal obligations attached to the word vanish along with it. No hostilities means no war. No war means no need for congressional authorization. No authorization means no accountability, and no accountability means no war crimes.

The strategy has a grim internal logic. On February 28th, 2026, the first day of Operation Epic Fury, a U.S. Tomahawk missile struck the Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab, a small city in southern Iran. The school was a girls’ primary school. Classes were in session. At least 120 schoolchildren, most of them girls between the ages of 7 and 12, were killed. Independent investigations by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and Al Jazeera concluded that the strike was likely carried out by U.S. forces and was likely deliberate. CNN reported that commanders bypassed warnings about outdated targeting data. The Pentagon’s own Inspector General found that the Department had systematically failed to implement its civilian harm prevention protocols.

President Trump immediately denied that the United States had attacked the school. That denial was later contradicted by the military’s own internal assessment, which found that U.S. forces were likely responsible for the strike. More than six months later, the completed investigation remains classified, and no one has been held accountable. More than 40 senators signed a letter to Hegseth demanding answers. More than 150 House members raised alarms about the broader civilian toll. The administration has provided no public accounting.

This is not the first time Republicans have reached for redefinition as a governing strategy. Trump declared “hostilities terminated” on the same day the 60-day War Powers deadline expired, a move that legal scholars across the political spectrum called novel, unsupported, and flatly contradicted by five decades of precedent. The Just Security legal analysis project at NYU Law called the administration’s argument “deeply flawed.” The Lawfare blog, published through the Brookings Institution, noted that prior administrations had at least tried to frame separate military actions as independent engagements, while the Trump administration was attempting to redefine an ongoing, continuous military campaign as intermittent by pointing to a ceasefire that both sides repeatedly violated.

When the ceasefire collapsed entirely on July 8th, the administration simply restarted the clock. Trump sent a new letter to Congress on July 10th declaring that a fresh 60-day period had begun, effectively granting himself another two months of unauthorized war. The legal theory amounts to this: any temporary pause in shooting, no matter how brief and no matter how many other military operations continue during that pause, resets the constitutional requirement for congressional approval. By this logic, a president could wage a permanent war by periodically ordering a few days of reduced fire.

Congressional Republicans have largely gone along with it. The House initially rejected a war powers resolution in early March, with only two Republicans voting in favor. When a second vote passed in June with four Republican defections, GOP leaders had already delayed the vote for weeks, sending members home early rather than allowing a vote they expected to lose. Today, as the MSNBC analysis published this week documented, the Republican-led House returned from a five-week recess and left again without taking a single vote on the conflict. Most GOP lawmakers say no vote is needed.

The pattern extends beyond the legal definition of war. The renaming of the Department of Defense itself was an act of rhetorical redefinition, designed to signal aggression while simultaneously arguing that the resulting aggression does not legally constitute what the name implies. The administration calls Hegseth the “Secretary of War” but insists that what his department is conducting is something less than war. Words are bent to fit the political need of the moment. War becomes hostilities. Hostilities become terminated. Terminated becomes a technicality that allows the fighting to continue.

Meanwhile, the facts accumulate regardless of what anyone calls them. As of early September, at least 1,701 Iranian civilians have been documented killed by name, including 254 children, according to the Human Rights Activists News Agency. Iran’s Health Ministry places the figure higher. Across all fronts, estimated deaths range from 7,000 to nearly 10,000. The U.S. Navy has expended roughly half its stockpile of THAAD and Patriot interceptor missiles. Barely one quarter of the Navy’s destroyer fleet is ready to deploy. Senior commanders have warned Hegseth in classified assessments that the conflict is degrading U.S. military readiness in other theaters. No ceasefire is currently in force. No negotiations are underway. Trump waved off the idea of a deal entirely on September 2nd.

The children who died at Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School are no less dead because the administration prefers to call the conflict something other than a war. The missiles that struck that school on a Saturday morning, the first day of the Iranian school week, did not check whether Congress had authorized their launch. The legal gymnastics performed to avoid the word “hostilities” do not bring back the girls who were in class that morning, learning their lessons, unaware that they were about to become casualties of a conflict their killers would later insist was not happening.

Redefining words does not redefine reality. It does not change the trajectory of a war the United States appears to be losing, by any honest military or strategic assessment. It does not resolve the Strait of Hormuz crisis, end the economic damage, or restore depleted weapons stockpiles. It does not undo the killing of children. What it does is allow the people responsible to avoid the language that would hold them accountable. That is the purpose of this particular kind of rhetoric. Not to describe the world as it is, but to describe it as those in power need it to be.

By Martin D. Vasquez

Sources:

The White House Is Telling Two Different Lies About the Same War at the Same Time

Martin D. Vasquez — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 14:57:54 GMT

As the president declares victory and the vice president denies there is a war at all, Americans are left paying the price for a conflict with no end in sight and no coherent strategy behind it.

On Thursday, September 3rd, Vice President JD Vance stood behind the podium in the Brady Press Briefing Room for the first time in over 40 days and told the American people something remarkable. When asked about the timeline for ending the war in Iran, now in its seventh month, Vance pushed back on the very premise.

“I wouldn’t call it a war,” the vice president said. “Major combat operations are currently not ongoing, and they haven’t been ongoing in a very long time.”

Hours earlier, President Donald Trump had posted a very different assessment on Truth Social. In a message calling media criticism of the war effort “treasonous,” the president declared that Americans who questioned his military strategy “would rather see the United States LOSE a War that we’re easily WINNING.”

The president says the country is at war and winning. The vice president says the country is not at war at all. And somewhere in between those two statements, children are dying, gas prices are rising, and no one in a position of authority appears willing to reconcile the contradiction.

Two stories, one administration

The messaging gap between Trump and Vance is not a new development. It is a pattern that has deepened over the course of the entire conflict. From the first days of Operation Epic Fury, the joint U.S.-Israeli strikes launched on February 28th, Trump has spoken of the war in maximalist terms. He has declared Iran “totally defeated,” claimed the United States has achieved complete military dominance, and compared the campaign to the world wars in scope and significance.

Vance, by contrast, has tried from the beginning to minimize the scale of the conflict. As early as June 2025, after the Twelve-Day War between Israel and Iran, Vance appeared on Meet the Press and asserted that the United States was not at war with Iran but rather “at war with Iran’s nuclear program.” He has continued threading that same needle ever since, characterizing U.S. military engagement in narrow, almost clinical terms even as the strikes continue.

On Thursday, Vance described recent military exchanges as a “flare-up” and argued that Operation Epic Fury, the large-scale campaign that followed Operation Midnight Hammer, lasted only about six weeks. He dismissed the characterization of the broader conflict as a war.

He said this against the backdrop of three consecutive days of U.S. and Iranian exchanges of fire around the Strait of Hormuz.

The wedding in Kuhestak

Perhaps the most disturbing element of Thursday’s press conference was Vance’s response to questions about reported civilian casualties in southern Iran. On the night of September 1st, U.S. strikes hit the town of Kuhestak in Sirik County, Hormozgan province, near the Strait of Hormuz. According to the Iranian Red Crescent, a strike hit a residential building where a wedding celebration was underway, killing at least four people and wounding more than 60 others. The Hormozgan governor’s office later identified the dead by name, including a four-year-old boy named Amir Ali Karimi.

U.S. Central Command has neither confirmed nor denied responsibility for the strike. Its spokesperson offered a standard statement that the U.S. military “never targets civilians, unlike the IRGC,” while adding that the reports “originated from Iranian state media.”

Vance echoed that position. “We’re investigating it because obviously we care,” he said. “When our military makes mistakes, they learn from them.” He said he was “skeptical” of initial reports from Iranian media. He did not confirm the strike. He did not deny it. And he did not call it a war.

The incident recalled what has been the deadliest civilian casualty event of the entire conflict. On the first day of the war, a U.S. strike hit an elementary school in Minab, also in Hormozgan province, killing approximately 156 people, most of them schoolchildren. After six months, the Pentagon has still not issued an official finding on that strike.

The cumulative civilian toll in Iran, compiled by multiple tracking organizations, now stands above 3,500 killed and more than 27,000 wounded.

Paying the price at the pump

While the White House debates whether to call the conflict a war, American families are dealing with its economic consequences daily. The national average price for a gallon of regular gasoline is $4.17 as of September 3rd, up from $2.98 the week before the war began. That represents an increase of roughly 40 percent. In California, drivers are paying close to $5.78 per gallon. Even in the least expensive markets, like Indiana and Texas, prices remain above $3.45.

According to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, the average additional fuel cost to American households since the start of the war is approximately $640. Gas prices, which had been declining steadily in the months before the conflict and were being celebrated by the White House as proof of successful economic stewardship, reversed course immediately after February 28th.

The disruption is driven in large part by the chokehold on the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil supply flows. Iran has blocked, mined, or otherwise restricted traffic through the strait for much of the past six months, and the intermittent nature of the fighting has prevented any sustained normalization of shipping.

Oil analysts have warned that even a formal end to hostilities would not bring prices down quickly. One chief oil analyst told Newsweek that the pre-war average of $2.98 per gallon is likely gone for the rest of 2026 and may not return until the second half of 2027.

When pressed on gas prices during Thursday’s briefing, Vance acknowledged the pain but argued it could have been worse. “Gas, frankly, could have been much, much higher were it not for our efforts,” he said.

The political math

The conflicting messaging is not happening in a vacuum. The 2026 midterm elections are two months away, and the war has become a significant political liability for the Republican Party. A Quinnipiac University poll from late July found that 66 percent of voters believe the war has not been worth fighting. Fifty-four percent blamed Trump directly for the rise in gasoline prices. Nearly half of all respondents said they were more motivated than usual to vote in the upcoming midterms.

The generic congressional ballot has favored Democrats for the entirety of 2026, with an average lead of roughly 5 points. Democratic strategists view the war, and its economic consequences, as a central factor in that advantage.

Inside the White House, the tension between declaring victory and managing the political damage has produced a series of contradictions. The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump has privately discussed the possibility of declaring the war over and won, even without a nuclear deal, if Iran fully reopens the Strait of Hormuz. Officials familiar with the discussions told the Journal that the president privately told aides he believes Tehran is “likely unable to revive its nuclear work” and would be willing to extend a ceasefire indefinitely if shipping is restored.

But Iran’s most recent set of demands included billions in U.S. payments, the withdrawal of American troops from the region, and the lifting of Washington’s naval blockade. Those terms are not something the administration can accept without significant political cost.

Analysts and even allies have noticed the gap between rhetoric and reality. The Wall Street Journal’s own editorial board, which has been critical of the administration’s handling of the conflict for months, noted that Iran’s leadership appears to believe it can outlast a president who “no longer wants the fight.” A widely cited quip from one editorial put it plainly: Trump “truly deserves the Nobel Peace Prize because he has already ended the Iran war eight times.”

Where this leaves the public

The central problem is not simply that the president and the vice president are sending different messages. It is that neither message is honest.

If the United States is winning a war, as Trump claims, there should be clear metrics of progress, definable objectives being met, and a path to resolution. Instead, the conflict continues to cycle through rounds of escalation and de-escalation with no stable end point. Multiple ceasefires have collapsed. The Islamabad Memorandum signed in June lasted only until July before Iran resumed attacks on shipping in the strait. The latest round of strikes began after a period of relative calm throughout August.

If the United States is not at war, as Vance claims, then what exactly is the military doing when it launches airstrikes that kill civilians at a wedding? What is the purpose of extending troop deployments in the Middle East? And why are Americans paying more than a dollar extra per gallon of gasoline for a conflict the vice president insists does not exist?

The answer, of course, is that both narratives serve political purposes. Trump’s “winning” framing positions him as a decisive commander in chief and attempts to suppress criticism of the war effort. Vance’s “not a war” framing is designed to lower the political temperature heading into the midterms and to insulate the administration from accountability for a conflict that polls show most Americans do not support.

Neither framing addresses the reality on the ground. Over 3,500 Iranian civilians have been killed. Nineteen U.S. service members and one contractor have died. Hundreds of American military personnel have been wounded. Gas prices have surged. Inflation has risen. The Strait of Hormuz remains contested. And a four-year-old boy named Amir Ali Karimi is dead.

Americans deserve to know whether their government is at war and, if it is, whether the people running it have a plan to end it. Right now, the White House is offering two answers to the first question and no answer to the second.

By Martin D. Vasquez

Sources:

Feminism Is Not About Hating Men, It’s a Response to Men Who Love Men More Than Women

Martin D. Vasquez — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 03:05:20 GMT

The “misandry myth” has been used for decades to discredit a movement that is, at its core, simply asking for fairness, equity and equal treatment.

Medium Output

There is perhaps no word in the English language politicized and more deliberately misunderstood than “feminism.” For generations, critics have reduced it to a slur, painting it as a movement fueled by resentment toward men. The accusation is as old as the suffragettes and as current as any comment section on the internet. But the framing has always been backwards. Feminism was never born from hatred of men. It was born from the observable, measurable, and ongoing failure of systems built by men to treat women as full human beings deserving of equal rights, equal pay, equal safety, and equal dignity.

The question has never been whether feminists hate men. The question is why the inequality that feminism exists to address persists at all.

The Myth That Won’t Die

The accusation that feminists are “man haters” has a long and deliberate history. In the 1990s, Rush Limbaugh popularized the term “feminazis” to describe women who simply advocated for equal rights. Televangelist Pat Robertson once claimed the feminist agenda was designed to encourage women to leave their husbands, kill their children, and become lesbians. Christina Hoff Sommers, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, went further, arguing that feminists must also hate the women who respect men.

These were not fringe voices. They were broadcast across national media, embedded into the political mainstream, and repeated often enough to stick.

The result is a movement that the majority of people broadly agree with in principle, yet one that many are reluctant to claim. Only about one in five women in the United States identify as feminists. Not because they oppose equal pay or bodily autonomy or freedom from violence. Because the label itself has been poisoned.

The Science Says Otherwise

In 2023, researchers led by Dr. Aífe Hopkins-Doyle at the University of Surrey published one of the most comprehensive studies ever conducted on the question. Across five studies involving nearly 10,000 participants in nine countries, the findings were unambiguous. Feminists displayed no more hostility toward men than non-feminists did. In fact, feminists held roughly the same positive attitudes toward men as men held toward themselves. Feminists also perceived men and women as more similar than non-feminists did.

Perhaps the most striking finding was that even feminists themselves had internalized the false stereotype. Both feminists and non-feminists incorrectly believed that feminists harbored negative sentiments toward men. The researchers called it the “misandry myth,” a perception so deeply embedded in culture that even those who live inside the movement believe it.

The study, published in the Psychology of Women Quarterly, also found that participation in movements like #MeToo was associated with anger about how men mistreat women, but not with negative overall views of men as a group. In other words, the anger was never about men existing. It was about how women are treated by individual men and men as a group. It doesn’t mean every man is a sexist. It does mean that there’s a systematic and systemic ideology by men as individuals and men as a group that believes that women should not be treated as equals.

The Numbers That Explain the Anger

If feminism seems angry, it is worth examining what it is angry about.

In 2025, women working full time in the United States earned roughly 82 cents for every dollar earned by men. For women of color, the gap was worse. American Indian and Alaska Native women earned 74 cents. Black women earned 78 cents. Hispanic women earned 79 cents. According to a 2026 Payscale report, the uncontrolled gender pay gap actually widened slightly from the prior year. Over the course of a 40-year career, that gap translates to approximately $1 million in lost earnings for a woman.

Women cannot educate themselves out of the problem. Among workers with a college degree, women were still paid nearly 24% less than men. Among workers with an advanced degree, the hourly wage gap amounted to more than $36,800 in lost annual earnings.

The estimated cumulative earnings lost to the gender pay gap over the past 25 years reached $671 billion in 2025, according to an analysis of federal Bureau of Labor Statistics data. The gap is not closing. It is stalling, and in some measurements, reversing.

Nearly two-thirds of workers earning the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour are women. The federal government’s recent rollback of diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility programs, along with the weakening of enforcement through agencies like the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, has further undermined women’s job security and labor force participation.

This is what feminism is responding to. Not men. Systems that underpay women and then punish them for pointing it out.

The Violence That Feminism Cannot Ignore

The data on violence against women in the United States is staggering by any standard.

Approximately 10 million people experience domestic violence annually in the United States. Women consistently represent about 73% of those victims. In 2025, 7.4 million women were affected compared to 2.7 million men.

More than 50% of women murdered in the United States are killed by a current or former intimate partner. One in five women has been raped in her lifetime. Forty-one percent of women have experienced contact sexual violence, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner during their lifetime. Only about one in four physical assaults and one in five partner rapes are ever reported to police.

Globally, one in three women worldwide has experienced physical or sexual violence. An estimated 245 million women and girls experienced sexual or physical violence in just the past 12 months alone. Women aged 15 to 44 are more at risk from rape and domestic violence than from cancer, motor vehicle accidents, war, and malaria combined.

Feminism did not create these statistics. Feminism is the response to them. The anger that critics mistake for hatred is, in most cases, a rational reaction to a world in which women’s bodies are treated as objects to be controlled, harmed, and discarded at a rate that would constitute a national emergency if it affected any other demographic.

The Rollback Is Real

The current political climate in the United States has made the need for feminism more urgent, not less. The 2022 Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade was not simply a legal setback for reproductive freedom. It signaled that rights previously considered settled could be stripped away. Since then, further proposals under the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, and its successor blueprint, have called for banning abortion pills, criminalizing medication by mail through the Comstock Act, embedding fetal personhood across federal agencies, dismantling civil rights protections in employment, gutting Title IX protections, cutting programs that support single mothers, and eliminating Head Start child care programs for low-income families.

Meanwhile, cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act beginning in 2026 are expected to disproportionately affect women’s access to reproductive health services, increase uninsured rates, and worsen maternal health outcomes, particularly in rural areas and communities of color.

There is no national paid family or medical leave standard. Workplace protections remain uneven and increasingly dependent on individual state law. And gains once considered permanent in pay equity, education access, and anti-harassment law are actively being challenged.

Feminism is not hating men. It is watching these protections disappear and refusing to be silent about it.

What Feminism Actually Asks For

At its core, feminism is defined as;

“The belief in and advocacy of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes expressed especially through organized activity on behalf of women's rights and interests”

Merriam-Webster Dictionary

It means: equality for all sexes. That’s it.

a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression, and to achieve gender equality in law and practice. There is no fine print. There is no secret agenda. It asks that women be paid the same as men for the same work. It asks that women be free from violence. It asks that women have control over their own bodies. It asks that women be represented in the rooms where decisions about their lives are made.

These are not radical demands. They are the baseline of what it means to treat another person as an equal. And the fact that they remain unmet, in 2026, in the wealthiest nation on earth, is the entire reason feminism exists.

The movement does not ask men to be diminished. It asks men to recognize that equality is not a zero-sum game. It asks men to understand that when their sisters, daughters, mothers, wives, and colleagues are paid less, harmed more, and given fewer protections under the law, the system is broken for everyone. Feminism, properly understood, is the belief that men are capable of better. That is not hatred. That is, if anything, a form of faith.

The men who feel threatened by feminism might consider why a request for fairness feels like an attack. And the men who claim to love the women in their lives might ask themselves whether that love extends to supporting a world in which those women are actually treated as equals.

Because feminism was never a war against men. It is, and has always been, a response to a world that does not love women enough to treat them fairly.

Gloria Steinem died this week at the age of 92. She was pivotal, her role was pivotal, as an advocate for equality and humanity, equalizing humanity. Her message that changed feminism, forever, wasn’t about women, it was about men not treating women as equals, or anyone that wasn’t a man for that matter. We admire and we salute Gloria Steinem as a pioneer for equality, when equality should never have to be a question.

If some men are trying frame feminism as men being at war with women… Real men are on the side of women and not men who do not think women or the LGBQT+ community are equals.

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Republican Dissent Against Pete Hegseth Grows as Don Bacon Joins Republican Revolt

Martin D. Vasquez — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 23:33:50 GMT

By Medium Output | September 3, 2026

The unrest within Republican ranks over Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is no longer a secret. It is breaking into open revolt. On Tuesday, Representative Don Bacon, a retired Air Force brigadier general and Nebraska Republican, delivered one of the harshest rebukes yet during an appearance on CNN.

“I agree with what Senator Tillis said. I do not like to tell the president who to hire or fire. I do not know if it is really my job, but I would say this: I would not want him on my team. I think he has not been a very good leader in many ways,” Bacon said, leaving little doubt where he stands. “So, I agree with Senator Tillis, and I would not hire him myself. He would not be on my team.”

Representative Don Bacon

Bacon’s military credentials give his criticism extra weight. After twenty-nine years in uniform, his focus is clear: the health and effectiveness of America’s armed forces. That is exactly what he, and a growing number of Republicans, believe is at risk under Hegseth’s stewardship.

The tipping point came earlier this week, when Senator Thom Tillis, a longtime member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, publicly called for President Trump to remove Hegseth. Tillis, who once voted to confirm Hegseth, is not seeking reelection and is less constrained by party orthodoxy. His statement, posted on X, followed the resignation of Army Secretary Daniel P. Driscoll, a move widely believed to be fallout from Hegseth’s campaign to push out experienced, high-ranking Army leaders in an ideological purge.

“Had we had a Secretary of the Army who shared the same priorities and had a forward-thinking approach, he would be fighting to keep talented leaders like Dan and the many flag officers he has forced into retirement. Instead, he is causing a leadership vacuum at the top of our military,”

Thom Tillis

“I have never seen such poor management of the brave men and women who serve our country. He is afraid of competent people and instead focuses on creating culture wars, rather than taking the serious and responsible approach needed for our national defense and the well-being of our troops.”

Thom Tillis

Tillis’s choice of words was deliberate. References to “ginning” and “soberly” alluded to Hegseth’s long-rumored alcohol issues, a pointed suggestion that the Secretary’s personal struggles are spilling into his professional judgment.

“I urge the President to find a new leader at the Pentagon who will keep and strengthen our military talent rather than weaken it,”

Tillis concluded.

As more Republicans like Bacon join the chorus, the pressure mounts on President Trump to hold Hegseth accountable, especially as critics continue to tie him to the disastrous Iran War. Under Hegseth, they argue, America’s military strength has waned, critical weapons stockpiles have been depleted in a war many see as unnecessary, and civilian casualties have mounted. “History will remember him as a foolish, drunken monster,” one senior GOP aide told reporters.

The battle lines are drawn. With each passing day, the Republican revolt against Pete Hegseth grows, and so does the demand for new leadership at the top of the Pentagon.

Sources

CNN interview with Rep. Don Bacon
Statement from Sen. Thom Tillis on X
Reporting on Army Secretary Daniel P. Driscoll’s resignation
GOP aide comments reported by multiple political correspondents

Trump’s Revenge Tour Will Cost the Republican Party the Senate

Martin D. Vasquez — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 15:34:29 GMT

The president’s campaign to purge disloyal Republicans from Congress is producing weaker candidates, record retirements, and a party tearing itself apart from the inside out.

In May 2026, Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky stood at a podium after losing the most expensive House primary in American history and asked his supporters a question. “Why did it converge on one of 435 congressional seats, right here in Kentucky?” he said. “What was God’s purpose? What is he showing us tonight?”

What God was showing Massie, and the rest of America, was a president willing to spend $32.6 million in advertising to destroy a single Republican congressman who voted with the party the vast majority of the time. Massie’s sin was not liberal deviation. He had opposed the war in Iran, voted against adding to the national debt, and pushed for the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files. In other words, Massie did what he promised his constituents he would do. Donald Trump punished him for it.

But Massie was not alone. He was simply the main event on what political observers have called Trump’s “revenge tour,” a systematic effort to identify, target, and remove elected Republicans who have shown any willingness, at any point, to deviate from total personal loyalty to the president. The scale of this purge is without precedent in modern American political history. And it is setting the Republican Party on a path toward long-term structural collapse.

The Purge List

The casualties of Trump’s internal war against his own party have been stacking up at an alarming rate throughout the 2026 primary season.

In March, Representative Dan Crenshaw of Texas, a former Navy SEAL and once-rising Republican star, lost his primary by fifteen points to a far-right state legislator named Steve Toth. Crenshaw was the only House Republican in Texas not to receive Trump’s endorsement. His offenses included supporting military aid to Ukraine and criticizing claims that the 2020 election was stolen. His voting record was almost perfectly aligned with the party. It did not matter.

In May, Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, the chairman of the Senate health committee, was crushed in his primary, finishing third with just 25 percent of the vote. Cassidy voted with Trump 100 percent of the time in 2025. He had even pushed past his own doubts to vote to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as health secretary. None of it was enough. Five years earlier, Cassidy had voted to convict Trump on impeachment charges. That single vote ended his career.

Days later, Massie fell in Kentucky to Ed Gallrein, a former Navy SEAL and political newcomer whom Trump described as “somebody with a warm body” who could beat Massie. Trump’s political operation turned the race into a $32 million bonfire.

And then came Texas. Four-term Senator John Cornyn, who had served as a Republican whip and nearly became majority leader, lost by more than 25 points to Attorney General Ken Paxton in a runoff on May 26th. Cornyn had tried everything to avoid Trump’s wrath. He posted a photograph of himself reading “The Art of the Deal.” He proposed renaming a highway after Trump. He reversed his longstanding support for the filibuster. As former Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona put it, the “groveling” made even Cornyn’s own supporters wince. Trump endorsed Paxton anyway, calling him “a true MAGA Warrior.”

In Indiana, Trump went even further down the ballot, targeting seven Republican state senators who had voted against his push to redraw congressional maps mid-decade. Five of the seven were defeated in their primaries by Trump-endorsed challengers. Trump adviser Alex Bruesewitz wrote on social media after the vote, “We’ll be launching primary challenges against every last traitor who voted no, effective immediately! Pack your bags, your time is up!”

The Loyalty Paradox

The pattern is consistent and revealing. Cassidy voted with Trump 100 percent of the time and lost. Cornyn had a nearly perfect conservative voting record and lost. Crenshaw spent the final weeks of his campaign desperately trying to prove his MAGA credentials, telling reporters, “If you think I’m not MAGA enough, then you’re not following me on social media.” He lost by double digits.

What Trump demands is not ideological alignment. It is unconditional personal loyalty, past and present, with no statute of limitations. Cornyn’s career ended because of a comment he made in 2023, when he told reporters, “I think President Trump’s time has passed him by.” Cassidy’s career ended because of a single impeachment vote in 2021. Massie’s career ended because he insisted on following through on his campaign promises even when those promises conflicted with the president’s agenda.

As one Massie supporter put it on election night, “He and Trump had the same campaign promises, and he stuck with them. He was courageous enough to not toe the line when it was going against what he had promised his constituents that he would do, and unfortunately he was punished for it.”

This creates what might be called the loyalty paradox. The lesson Trump is teaching Republican officeholders is that voting records, legislative accomplishments, and constituent service are irrelevant. The only thing that matters is whether you have ever, at any moment, expressed doubt about Donald Trump. And because the threshold for disloyalty keeps shifting, no Republican can ever be certain they are safe.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune acknowledged the danger. “There’s always a consequence with taking on United States senators,” he told reporters. He also revealed that Trump did not even give him a heads-up before endorsing Paxton against Cornyn, a sitting member of Senate leadership.

The Self-Inflicted Wound

Trump’s purge has been tactically successful in the primaries. His endorsed candidates have won the vast majority of their races, and his overall primary endorsement record stands at roughly 96 percent. But tactical success in primaries is a poor measure of strategic wisdom when the candidates you produce are weaker in general elections and the process of selecting them is driving your party’s best talent out of public life.

Start with the retirements. As of this writing, 37 House Republicans have announced they will not seek reelection, the most since at least 1930. That number exceeds the previous record of 34, set in 2018, the cycle that preceded Democrats’ 40-seat wave and their takeover of the House. By comparison, 23 House Democrats are not seeking reelection. Notable Republican departures include Senators Mitch McConnell, Thom Tillis, and Joni Ernst, all of whom have clashed at various points with Trump’s vision of expanded executive power.

The retirements tell a story that the primary results alone do not. Republican members of Congress are not merely losing to Trump-backed challengers. They are looking at the political environment, recognizing that independent thought has become a career-ending liability, and choosing to leave. As one political scientist put it, some lawmakers feel they have “hit a kind of wall” and can no longer accomplish what they set out to do.

Then consider the general election problem. The candidates Trump installs through primaries are not necessarily the candidates best positioned to win in November. Ken Paxton carries a long history of legal scandals, including securities fraud indictments and an impeachment by his own party’s state legislators, along with a pending divorce that Republican strategists worry will alienate conservative women voters. Karl Rove, a longtime Republican strategist, warned on Fox News that if Paxton were the nominee, Democrats could actually win a Texas Senate seat. An SMU political science professor estimated that Cornyn would have won the general election by mid to upper single digits, while Paxton’s margin would be “2 or 3 points if he won at all.”

A pro-Cornyn political committee circulated a report before the runoff projecting that several down-ballot Republican House seats could become vulnerable with Paxton at the top of the ticket. Texas has not elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1988. The fact that political professionals in the state are even discussing the possibility tells you something about the quality of candidates Trump’s purge is producing.

The same dynamic is visible nationally. Trump’s endorsed candidates have now lost 12 primary races in 2026, equal to the total number of Trump-endorsed primary losses in 2018, 2020, and 2024 combined. In Florida, Representative Cory Mills lost by 13 points despite the president’s backing. In Wyoming, Trump’s candidate for governor lost. In Minnesota, Trump-endorsed Mike Lindell was defeated by 11 points. On one August night in Florida and Wyoming, nearly 300,000 Republican primary voters turned out, and only 28 percent of them voted for Trump’s candidates.

The Immediate Legislative Consequences

Trump’s revenge campaign has not only weakened the party’s electoral prospects. It has created immediate governing problems.

Republican incumbents who lost their primaries but still hold their seats through January are now signaling that they intend to take a more independent approach for the remainder of their terms. Cassidy hinted in his concession speech, without naming Trump, that he would spend his final months as a senator being more openly critical of the administration. Massie has continued to oppose Trump on key votes. Cornyn posted a fable of a frog and a scorpion to social media, a thinly veiled reference to the president.

In a Congress defined by razor-thin margins, where Speaker Mike Johnson can only afford to lose two Republican votes on any party-line bill, even a handful of liberated lawmakers can derail major legislation. Trump is simultaneously trying to pass an immigration enforcement funding package, extend warrantless surveillance powers under FISA, and advance a third party-line spending bill that includes funding for the Iran military conflict. Each of these priorities is now at risk because the president chose to turn lawmakers who voted with him most of the time into enemies.

Former Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, a Republican, summarized the contradiction: “It’s an odd way to try to build a party, let alone one that can act and legislate.”

The Coming Reckoning

Even Trump’s own chosen party chairman sees the disaster ahead. RNC Chair Joe Gruters has been touring conservative media warning that Republicans face “almost certain defeat” in the 2026 midterms. “There’s no sugarcoating it,” Gruters said. “It’s a pending, looming disaster heading our way.”

The historical pattern supports that assessment. The president’s party has lost House seats in 20 of the last 22 midterm elections. Trump’s approval rating has been underwater since March 2025, hitting a record low of 37 percent in a New York Times/Siena poll. Democrats lead the generic congressional ballot by 5 to 6 points. Democrats have also outperformed in the vast majority of special elections held since Trump returned to power. And Republican primary turnout has been weak even in high-profile races, while Democratic turnout has surged.

Against this backdrop, Trump has chosen to spend the 2026 primary season not strengthening his party’s weakest flanks, but purging the experienced legislators who best understood how to hold competitive seats and pass legislation. He has replaced them with loyalists who have never held federal office, carry personal scandals, or represent views too extreme to survive a general election in a midterm environment that already favors Democrats.

Julian Zelizer, writing in Foreign Policy, drew a comparison to Franklin Roosevelt’s 1938 attempt to purge his own party of conservative Democrats. Roosevelt largely failed, and the effort backfired politically. Trump’s purge has been more successful in the short term, Zelizer noted, but the long-term consequences could be far more damaging. Roosevelt helped build an enduring Democratic coalition that lasted decades. It is far from clear, Zelizer wrote, that Republicans will be “proudly claiming the Trump legacy” decades from now.

The evidence so far suggests the opposite. Trump’s purge is producing a Republican Party that is more personally loyal to one man, less capable of independent governance, less competitive in general elections, and hemorrhaging experienced talent at a historic rate. The president has made clear that he values control over competence, obedience over electability, and revenge over victory. As the Semafor analysis put it, Trump is “likely to start 2027 with a party that’s both more loyal and less powerful in Congress, losing seats if not both majorities.”

That is not a strategy for building a durable political movement. It is a strategy for one man’s vanity, executed at his party’s expense. And the Republican Party, by refusing to resist it, has signed its own long-term death warrant.

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Tarrant County Republicans Eliminate 92 Polling Locations 63 Days Before the Midterms

Martin D. Vasquez — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 15:23:07 GMT

In a party-line vote, three Republican commissioners stripped nearly a third of Election Day voting sites from one of the most competitive counties in Texas, over the objections of more than 100 residents and a coalition of civil rights organizations.

On September 1st, 2026, the Tarrant County Commissioners Court voted three to two to approve a plan eliminating 92 Election Day polling locations ahead of the November midterm elections. The vote fell strictly along party lines. Republican County Judge Tim O’Hare and Commissioners Matt Krause and Manny Ramirez voted yes. Democratic Commissioners Alisa Simmons and Roderick Miles Jr. voted no.

The decision reduces the number of Election Day vote centers in Texas’s third largest county from 316 in the 2022 midterms to 224, a cut of roughly 29 percent. Early voting locations were also trimmed, from 50 to 47. The approved plan will serve an estimated 1.3 million registered voters in a county of more than 2.25 million residents.

The vote came after an eight-hour meeting during which more than 100 speakers addressed the commissioners. The overwhelming majority opposed the cuts. Outside the courthouse, representatives of 30 civic organizations rallied against the proposal. When the vote was announced, attendees in the room began chanting “shame.”

A Compromise That Satisfied Almost No One

The 92-site reduction was itself a scaled-back version of an even more aggressive original plan. In August, Elections Administrator Clint Ludwig proposed cutting 140 Election Day locations, which would have reduced the total to just 176 sites. That proposal was tabled after hours of heated public testimony at an earlier meeting. Ludwig agreed that the original number eliminated too many locations, and a revised list was drawn up.

But the revised plan, while adding 48 locations back from the August proposal, still left many of the most impacted communities in the same position. According to an analysis published by independent journalist Chris Tackett, of the 48 new sites added between the two proposals, only five landed in the ten ZIP codes facing the steepest reductions. The other 43 were distributed elsewhere in the county.

O’Hare framed the new proposal as exceeding the statutory minimum required under Texas law and said every voter would still have access to a safe, accessible location. Commissioner Krause argued the remaining 224 locations “unequivocally” gave every registered voter the opportunity to vote. Both pointed to countywide voting, adopted by Tarrant County in 2019, which allows any registered voter to cast a ballot at any vote center regardless of precinct.

Where the Cuts Landed

Voting rights organizations, civil rights groups and independent analysts all raised the same concern before and after the vote. The closures disproportionately affect predominantly Black, Latino and Asian American communities.

The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the ACLU of Texas, the Texas Civil Rights Project, the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, the Barbara Jordan Leadership Institute, the Campaign Legal Center and Common Cause Texas co-signed a letter to the commissioners on August 28th urging rejection of the proposal. The letter stated that the cuts would sweep across areas with high percentages of Black, Latino and AAPI voters, specifically naming south and southeast Fort Worth as predominantly Black and Latino communities and central and eastern Arlington as predominantly Black, Latino and AAPI communities.

The letter also cited Brennan Center research showing that Black and Latino voters waited approximately 45 percent longer than white voters on average during national elections, and referenced the peer-reviewed study “A Precinct Too Far” by Enrico Cantoni, which found that modest increases in polling-place distance reduced voter participation, with a larger effect in high-minority areas during nonpresidential elections.

Perhaps the most striking case was Fort Worth ZIP code 76104. This area has the highest poverty rate and the highest rate of households without a vehicle in the county. In 2022, the ZIP code had seven polling locations, each handling roughly 300 voters. Under the approved plan, it has one. That single remaining site would need to absorb more than 2,000 voters. Another Fort Worth ZIP code, 76103, went from three polling locations in 2022 to zero.

Community members made the impact tangible during public comment. Cynnamon Hall criticized the disappearance of polling sites from Black and brown neighborhoods and pointed specifically to the 76104 ZIP code. “If you accept this, you’re basically saying that our votes don’t matter,” Hall said. “All votes matter. Vote no on this.”

Commissioner Roderick Miles Jr. warned that a polling location’s significance could not be reduced to turnout numbers or distances on a map. “These are not just buildings,” Miles said. “There’s history in these buildings. There’s familiarity. There’s community in these buildings.” He added: “It’s easy to say it’s only a mile if you’ve got a car. It’s easy to say that it’s on the bus route if you’ve got money to buy a bus fare. What about the people who don’t have the ability to do those things?”

Specific Locations That Drew Outrage

Among the eliminated sites were the Maverick Activity Center at the University of Texas at Arlington, a campus voting location that served students, and Bethlehem Baptist Church, a community hub. An amendment to restore the UTA site was rejected along party lines. Another amendment to restore polling locations at the northeast and south campuses of Tarrant County College was also rejected on the same party-line vote.

The Bethlehem Baptist Church closure was especially notable. From 2024 to 2026, the church more than tripled its voter turnout, a sign that when communities gain access to nearby, familiar voting locations, participation increases. Removing it appeared to contradict the county’s stated goal of concentrating resources where voters actually vote.

Demetria McCain, director of policy at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, was direct in her assessment before the vote. “This proposal is a voter suppression tactic designed to impede Black voters and other voters of color from exercising their right to vote at the polls,” McCain said. “We strongly urge the Commissioners Court to reject this disastrous idea.”

The Political Context

Tarrant County is no longer the Republican stronghold it once was. Joe Biden flipped the county in 2020, and Democratic Senate candidates Beto O’Rourke in 2018 and Colin Allred in 2024 both narrowly carried it despite losing statewide. In January 2026, Democratic State Senator Taylor Rehmet won a landslide special election victory in the northern half of the county. Voter turnout in the March 2026 primaries was unusually high. Democrats have increasingly treated the county as competitive territory.

The 2026 midterm cycle features a high-profile U.S. Senate race between Democratic state representative James Talarico and Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton. Talarico appeared at a press conference alongside Commissioner Simmons days before the vote, calling the proposed closures an attempt by the powerful to prevent people from voting easily. “It’s nearly a third of the polling locations in Tarrant County, and that means on Election Day there will be longer commutes, longer lines and lower voter turnout, especially in our Black and brown communities,” Talarico said.

Nina Oishi of the Texas Civil Rights Project connected the polling reductions to the county’s shifting demographics. “There is a lot of data showing that Black voters in Tarrant County tend to support Democratic candidates,” Oishi said. “There’s also a lot of data showing that Latino voters in Tarrant County tend to support Democrats. So if they’re facing unfair closures of polling places, and they’re being impacted, that will potentially, certainly affect their vote.”

Commissioner Simmons framed the issue in terms of power rather than budgets. “This is not about cost. This is about power,” Simmons said.

Tim O’Hare’s Track Record

The decision did not emerge from a vacuum. County Judge Tim O’Hare, who cast the deciding vote and chairs the Commissioners Court, has a history that civil rights advocates view as directly relevant.

As mayor of Farmers Branch from 2008 to 2011, O’Hare introduced a series of ordinances targeting the city’s growing undocumented immigrant and Latino community, including measures requiring proof of citizenship to rent housing, establishing English as the official language, and enabling local police to enforce immigration law. The city spent more than $5 million in legal fees defending these ordinances, retaining Kris Kobach as counsel. Academic researchers characterized O’Hare’s ordinances as part of a “Latino threat narrative.” In 2014, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review a lower court ruling declaring the key ordinance unconstitutional.

After taking office as County Judge in January 2023, O’Hare created an “election integrity” task force despite the lack of evidence of widespread voter fraud. Tarrant County’s elections office had received high marks in a Texas Secretary of State audit of the 2020 general election. The experienced Elections Administrator, Heider Garcia, resigned in April 2023, citing political pressure from O’Hare and irreconcilable differences over how to run transparent elections. Garcia wrote in his resignation letter that his “formula to ‘administer a quality transparent election’ stands on respect and zero politics” and that “compromising on these values is not an option for me.”

Garcia was replaced by Clint Ludwig, a former chief deputy county clerk and retired Marine with no prior election administration experience. Ludwig is the same official who proposed the polling site reductions now being implemented.

In 2023, U.S. Representative Marc Veasey of Fort Worth, along with other elected officials, sent a letter to the Department of Justice requesting an investigation into O’Hare’s actions to “undermine minority voters.” The DOJ committed to meeting with the officials. O’Hare called the letter “baseless” and “pathetic.”

More recently, O’Hare and his Republican colleagues on the Commissioners Court have pursued a redistricting plan that voting rights advocates say would gerrymander Commissioner Precinct 2 to dilute minority voting strength. Tarrant County is a majority-minority county, with non-Hispanic white residents making up just over 42 percent of the population. Roughly a third of the county’s residents are Hispanic and about 19.2 percent are Black.

What the Research Says

The Republican argument rests on a straightforward claim. Countywide voting means any voter can use any site, and 224 locations plus 47 early voting sites remain available. O’Hare noted that in 2024, only about 20 percent of voters cast their ballots on Election Day.

But voting rights research consistently shows that convenience matters, and that the burden of inconvenience is not evenly distributed. Brennan Center research found that Black and Latino voters already face longer wait times than white voters. Cantoni’s study documented that even modest increases in distance to a polling place reduce turnout, particularly in communities of color during midterm elections.

Tarrant County voter Laney Hawes put it plainly during testimony. “You tell us this is about efficiency and saving our tax dollars,” Hawes told the commissioners. “I’d love to know what you all think our tax dollars are for.”

Catherine Godby, another Tarrant County resident, told the commissioners they were “on the wrong side of history” and were “dishonoring what it means to be an American, and more than that, you’re losing your humanity.”

What Happens Next

The approved plan is now in effect for the November 3rd, 2026 midterm election. Legal challenges remain possible. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s letter explicitly cited Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits voting practices that discriminate on the basis of race. Whether the federal government under the current administration would take enforcement action is a separate question.

In the meantime, Tarrant County’s 1.3 million registered voters will navigate a county with nearly a third fewer places to vote on Election Day than they had four years ago. The voters with the least transportation, the least schedule flexibility and the fewest resources will bear the heaviest burden.

The three Republican commissioners who approved the plan have offered cost savings and statutory compliance as justifications. They have not released a detailed analysis showing that the remaining 224 sites will provide comparable access across all communities, including the ones that lost every single location. Until they do, the numbers tell their own story.

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Gloria Steinem, Feminist Icon and Champion of Women’s Rights, Dead at 92

Martin D. Vasquez — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 11:37:16 GMT

The writer, activist, and co-founder of Ms. magazine spent nearly seven decades fighting for equality and changed the course of American feminism.

Gloria Steinem, the journalist, political activist, and feminist organizer who became the most recognizable face of the American women’s movement, died on Wednesday, September 3rd, 2026, at her home in New York City. She was 92 years old.

Her foundation confirmed the news in an Instagram post, saying that Steinem “passed away peacefully at her home in New York City, surrounded by some of the many who loved her.” The statement continued: “Gloria’s near-century on earth were years well-lived, and she continued working for equality until the very end.”

A Childhood That Shaped a Fighter

Gloria Marie Steinem was born on March 25th, 1934, in Toledo, Ohio, during the height of the Great Depression. Her father, Leo, was a traveling antique dealer, and the family spent her early years living out of a house trailer, moving from place to place. After her parents divorced in 1946, young Gloria settled with her mother, Ruth, in Toledo and began attending school regularly for the first time. Her mother suffered from chronic depression, and Steinem found herself cast as a caretaker at a young age, an experience that would profoundly shape her understanding of women’s invisible labor and the structures that failed them.

She attended Smith College, the prestigious women’s liberal arts school in Northampton, Massachusetts, graduating in 1956 with a degree in government. After college, she spent two years in India on a Chester Bowles fellowship, where she participated in nonviolent protests against government policy and developed a lifelong interest in grassroots activism.

From Journalist to Movement Leader

Steinem moved to New York City in 1960 and began working as a freelance writer and journalist. In 1963, she published one of the earliest and most daring pieces of feminist journalism in American media. Working undercover as a Playboy Bunny at Hugh Hefner’s New York City Playboy Club for 11 days, Steinem documented the exploitative working conditions, low wages, and routine humiliation that the women endured. The resulting two-part exposé, “A Bunny’s Tale,” published in Show magazine, stripped away the glamorous facade of Hefner’s empire and revealed a world of misogyny operating behind it.

The piece brought Steinem national attention, though it also had unintended consequences. She was subsequently offered assignments that treated her as a novelty rather than a serious reporter, and she spent years fighting to be taken seriously as a journalist rather than as a spectacle. The experience sharpened her understanding of how women, even accomplished ones, were reduced to their appearances and their willingness to perform for a male gaze.

In 1968, Steinem helped found New York magazine, where she worked as a political columnist and feature writer. But it was in 1969, at a speak-out event to legalize abortion in New York State, that her activism shifted into full gear. At that event, she publicly shared the story of the abortion she had undergone at age 22 while living abroad, an act of personal disclosure that was both brave and catalytic. The experience, she later said, was the moment that truly ignited her feminism and her commitment to the women’s movement.

Ms. Magazine and Building the Infrastructure of Change

In 1971, Steinem co-founded Ms. magazine alongside journalists Patricia Carbine and Letty Cottin Pogrebin. It was one of the first publications to address women’s concerns beyond housekeeping and beauty, covering issues of workplace equality, reproductive rights, domestic violence, and political representation. The magazine became a touchstone for the feminist movement and remained in publication for more than five decades. Steinem served as an editor for 15 years and continued as a consulting editor afterward.

But Steinem was not simply a publisher. She was an institution builder. In 1971, she co-convened the National Women’s Political Caucus, a bipartisan organization aimed at increasing women’s participation in politics. In 1972, she helped establish the Ms. Foundation for Women, which raised funds for grassroots programs supporting women and girls. She also co-founded the Women’s Action Alliance, the Free to Be Foundation, the Women’s Media Center, and, internationally, organizations such as Equality Now and Donor Direct Action.

These organizations represented something larger than any single campaign or cause. They were the infrastructure of a movement. Steinem understood that lasting change required not just public protests and bestselling books, but durable institutions that could carry the work forward across decades.

A Voice That Reached Beyond the Movement

Steinem’s influence extended well beyond organizational work. She was a prolific writer whose books shaped how millions of people thought about gender, power, and identity. Her essay collection “Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions” became a foundational feminist text. “Revolution from Within,” published in 1992, explored self-esteem as a political issue for women. Her 2015 memoir, “My Life on the Road,” was a bestseller that traced her decades of traveling as an organizer and lecturer.

She had a gift for distilling complex ideas into language that stuck. Phrases she coined entered the popular vocabulary and became part of the folk wisdom of the movement. “The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off” became a rallying cry and, eventually, the title of her 2019 book.

Throughout the 1970s and beyond, Steinem was among the most visible advocates for women’s reproductive rights. She participated in the founding of the Coalition of Labor Union Women and Voters for Choice. She spoke at hundreds of rallies, marches, and college campuses. Her combination of sharp intellect, personal warmth, and willingness to listen made her a uniquely effective spokesperson for a movement that was often caricatured by its opponents.

Activism Without an Expiration Date

Where many public figures slow down in later decades, Steinem accelerated. In 2013, President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, for her contributions to the women’s liberation movement. In 2015, she led a group of women peace activists across the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea, calling for the formal end of the Korean War and a peace process led by women. On January 21st, 2017, at the age of 82, she was an honorary co-chair and speaker at the Women’s March on Washington, one of the largest single-day protests in American history.

She was especially vocal after the Supreme Court’s 2022 reversal of Roe v. Wade, which eliminated federal protections for abortion rights, a cause she had championed for more than half a century.

In her later years, Steinem’s Manhattan apartment became a gathering place for feminist and activist thinkers from around the world. Her foundation described her home as “a magnetic and life-changing center” for those working toward equality. Even into her nineties, she continued hosting, organizing, and mentoring a new generation of activists.

A Legacy Measured in Structural Change

Gloria Steinem’s contributions to humanity were not symbolic. They were structural. She helped build organizations that outlived news cycles. She helped create a magazine that gave women a voice in mainstream media for the first time. She pushed reproductive rights, workplace equality, and child protection into the center of the national conversation and kept them there for more than 50 years.

Her foundation’s statement captured what those closest to her understood best: “Gloria’s greatest gift was her ability to listen to others, to make others feel seen and heard. Her words, actions, and example gave people permission to be their truest selves.”

She is survived by the movement she helped build and the millions of women and men whose lives were changed because of it.

By Martin D. Vasquez

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Republican Senator Thom Tillis Calls on Trump to Fire Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth

Martin D. Vasquez — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 11:15:06 GMT

The North Carolina lawmaker accuses Hegseth of “inept management” of the military, joining a growing chorus of GOP critics alarmed by senior leadership turnover at the Pentagon.

Senator Thom Tillis, a North Carolina Republican who served eight years on the Senate Armed Services Committee, publicly urged President Donald Trump on Wednesday to replace Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. In a post on X, the senator accused Hegseth of presiding over the worst mismanagement of the military he has ever witnessed and called on the president to find new leadership at the Pentagon.

Tillis’s statement is the most forceful rebuke of Hegseth yet from within the Republican Party. It marks a significant escalation from the quieter concerns that several GOP lawmakers have been voicing for months as Hegseth has systematically purged senior military leaders across the defense establishment.

A Breaking Point After Driscoll’s Departure

The immediate catalyst for Tillis’s statement was the resignation of Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, who submitted his resignation to Trump on Monday, September 1st, after 18 months in the role. Driscoll, the youngest person ever to serve as Army secretary at 38 years old, had clashed repeatedly with Hegseth over personnel decisions and the direction of the Army.

In his post, Tillis praised Driscoll as “the right man at the right moment” who had helped lead efforts to modernize the Army, particularly as warfare has evolved in places including Ukraine and Iran. He then turned his fire on Hegseth, accusing the defense secretary of “creating a leadership void at the top of our military ranks.”

Tillis said that a competent defense secretary would be “fighting to retain talented leaders like Dan and the many flag officers he has forced into retirement.” Instead, he accused Hegseth of being “intimidated by competence” and retreating to “ginning up culture wars instead of soberly attending to the vital work of our national defense and the health and well-being of our fighting force.”

A Cascade of Departures

Driscoll’s exit is only the latest in a long line of senior departures and firings that have hollowed out the Pentagon’s upper ranks since Hegseth took office in early 2025. In April, Hegseth fired Army Chief of Staff General Randy George without explanation, despite George’s 42 years of service, a Purple Heart, and widespread bipartisan respect on Capitol Hill. Driscoll had a close working relationship with George and told lawmakers in a congressional hearing that he did not understand why George had been removed.

Since taking office, Hegseth has also fired Army General Christopher Donahue, who led forces in Europe, and blocked the promotions of several senior Army officers, including reportedly removing two Black men and two women from a list of potential promotions to one-star generals. When the Army had ten four-star generals on active duty at the start of Hegseth’s tenure, that number has now been cut in half to five.

In February, Hegseth also forced the resignation of Colonel David Butler, a longtime Army spokesperson and senior adviser to Driscoll. Tillis’s post included a link to a CBS News article listing roughly 20 military and civilian leaders who have been ousted or stepped down since Hegseth was confirmed.

The Army now lacks both a Senate-confirmed civilian secretary and a Senate-confirmed uniformed chief of staff, all while the United States is engaged in a protracted war with Iran that began on February 28th and shows no signs of ending.

Republican Frustration Spreads

Tillis is not alone in his frustration. Representative Mike Rogers, the Republican chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, told reporters on Tuesday that the turnover had worn on him. Asked whether the Pentagon was facing a leadership vacuum, Rogers replied with a single word: “Yes.”

Representative Don Bacon, a retired Air Force brigadier general from Nebraska, went further. He said he agreed with Tillis’s assessment and added that Hegseth would “not be on my team” if it were up to him. Bacon called Hegseth’s leadership deficient and said he had been “trouble from the beginning.”

Representative Dusty Johnson, a South Dakota Republican, said there had been too much turnover among senior officers. Senator Mike Rounds of South Dakota said he had heard repeatedly that Driscoll was “frustrated with some of his top generals being released,” adding, “And that’s not the first time I’ve heard that.”

Representative Rob Wittman, a Virginia Republican and vice chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said it was “critical” to have Senate-confirmed leadership running the Army, warning that acting officials may question what they are empowered to do.

Tillis Says He Would Vote Differently Today

In a CNN interview on Wednesday evening, Tillis suggested he would not vote to confirm Hegseth if the vote were held today. Tillis voted to confirm Hegseth in January 2025, though three other Republicans broke ranks and voted against the nomination, forcing Vice President J.D. Vance to cast the tiebreaking vote.

Tillis said he had deferred to the Senate Armed Services Committee at the time, but added that he was “beginning to wonder if maybe Armed Services was a little bit generous with respect to their assessment of his capabilities as a manager of the world’s largest, most complex and arguably, consequential organization.”

Tillis also took aim at Trump’s inner circle, calling some of the president’s advisers “amateurs” and pledging to make that clear to them in the months ahead. Tillis announced earlier this year that he would not seek reelection, a decision that came after Trump publicly attacked him for opposing the president’s “One Big Beautiful Bill.”

The White House and Pentagon Stay the Course

The White House and Pentagon have continued to frame the personnel changes as part of the administration’s effort to reshape the military and ensure senior leaders share its priorities. The Pentagon declined to comment on Tillis’s statement.

But critics within the Republican Party argue that the scale of the turnover is stripping the military of institutional knowledge at a time of significant challenge. Driscoll reportedly told Trump directly that Hegseth was blocking Army transformation and readiness by firing the generals responsible for those efforts.

Driscoll is also known as a close associate of Vice President Vance. He was notably tapped by Trump last fall to lead a diplomatic initiative to restart Ukraine-Russia peace talks, an assignment that went well beyond the typical duties of an Army secretary.

Whether Trump will act on the growing chorus of Republican criticism remains unclear. The president has shown a strong pattern of standing by his appointees in the face of pressure, and Hegseth’s confirmation was itself a test of loyalty within the party. But the breadth of GOP criticism, from Senate veterans to House Armed Services leadership, suggests that the political cost of keeping Hegseth is rising.

For now, the Army’s largest branch faces its most uncertain leadership moment in decades, waging a war with no confirmed civilian leader, no confirmed chief of staff, and a defense secretary whom a growing number of members of his own party want gone.

By Martin D. Vasquez | Medium Output | September 3rd, 2026

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CRISIS: The Tariff Law That Could Allow ICE and the DHS to Seize Your Voter Data and Voter Rolls!

Martin D. Vasquez — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 21:21:45 GMT

Section 1509 of the Tariff Act of 1930 was written for customs enforcement. DHS has already abused it to spy on journalists. Nothing in the statute would stop a corrupt administration from turning it on election records.

The Department of Homeland Security has spent 2025 and 2026 demonstrating that it is willing to use Section 1509 of the Tariff Act of 1930, an obscure customs enforcement provision, to obtain private records that have nothing to do with customs. It has seized journalists’ phone records. It has demanded social media account data from tech companies. It has obtained financial records from unions and nonprofits. None of these targets were under investigation for importing or exporting merchandise.

That pattern of abuse raises a question that has not received enough attention. If DHS is willing to use a tariff law to surveil journalists and political critics, what stops it from using the same law to seize voter registration databases, voting history logs, or mail-in ballot records?

The answer, under the current state of the law, is very little.

What the Statute Says

Section 509 of the Tariff Act of 1930, codified at 19 U.S.C. § 1509, grants the Secretary of Homeland Security the authority to examine “any record” relevant to an investigation concerning customs entries, duties, fees, taxes, penalties, or compliance with laws administered by the former Customs Service.

The statute defines “record” in terms that go far beyond paper files and shipping manifests. Under Section 1509(a)(1), a record “includes, but is not limited to, any statement, declaration, document, or electronically generated or machine readable data.”

That language was added by the Customs Modernization Act of 1993 to account for the shift toward digital recordkeeping in international trade. But the phrase “electronically generated or machine readable data” does not limit itself to trade records. It describes the format, not the subject matter.

Voter rolls are machine-readable data. So are voter registration databases, voting history logs, mail-in ballot signature files, poll-worker rosters, and election security system logs. Every one of these records exists in exactly the format that Section 1509 describes.

No Judge, No Warrant, No Notice

A Section 1509 summons does not require a judge. It does not require a warrant. It requires only the signature of a DHS official at the rank of district director or special agent in charge.

When the summons is directed at someone other than a third-party recordkeeper, such as an attorney or accountant, the statute does not require that the person whose records are being demanded receive any notice at all.

DHS has already demonstrated what this means in practice. In 2026, DHS obtained six months of phone records for journalist Georgia Fort from T-Mobile without notifying her, without a warrant, and after a federal magistrate judge had twice rejected separate warrant applications for finding the government failed to establish probable cause. DHS also served Google with a Section 1509 summons for YouTube account data belonging to Fort and former CNN anchor Don Lemon, and told the company to keep the request secret.

Federal prosecutors had gone to a judge and been told no. DHS went around the judge entirely.

Former DHS Inspector General John Roth, who served in that role from 2014 to 2017, called the agency’s use of Section 1509 in these cases “outrageous conduct on so many levels.” He added that it was “an improper use of the subpoena under any circumstances. This is not a customs case; it is not a customs violation.”

A Pattern, Not an Accident

The misuse of Section 1509 is not new, and it is not limited to the current administration’s targets.

In 2017, CBP issued a Section 1509 summons to Twitter demanding all records associated with the @ALT_USCIS account, a pseudonymous account that posted criticism of immigration policy. The summons had no connection to the importation of merchandise. Twitter sued, and CBP withdrew the summons before any court could rule on its legality.

That incident prompted the DHS Office of Inspector General to investigate CBP’s use of Section 1509 more broadly. The resulting report, published in November 2017, found that between January 2015 and May 2017, CBP violated its own policy on the use of Section 1509 summonses at least one out of every five times. The IG found a “lack of clear guidance” that had resulted in summonses being issued “in a wide range of cases having no nexus” to imported merchandise, including drug-smuggling investigations and a case involving a Craigslist listing.

The IG made three recommendations. CBP agreed to implement them. Nearly a decade later, DHS is using Section 1509 more aggressively than ever, now targeting journalists, unions, nonprofits, and political activists. In a separate Minneapolis case involving 15 activists charged with conspiracy, DHS obtained financial records from the Sunrise Movement, the Service Employees International Union, the Communications Workers of America, and Venmo records for Voices for Racial Justice, none of which face charges.

The agency has also issued hundreds of administrative subpoenas to social media companies to unmask anonymous users, according to reporting by The New York Times.

Why Voter Data Is Vulnerable

Nothing in the text of Section 1509 limits its reach to customs-related records. The statute says “any record.” It says “machine readable data.” It requires no judicial approval.

A corrupt administration that wanted to build a federal voter database without congressional authorization could issue Section 1509 summonses to state election officials or to the vendors who maintain voter registration systems. The summons could demand voter registration databases, voter history files, absentee ballot request logs, or poll-worker information. And if past practice is any guide, the administration could withdraw the summons before any court had a chance to rule on its legality, but only after the data had already been produced.

This would not require new legislation. It would not require a court order. It would not require notifying the voters whose data was being collected.

The pretext would be easy to construct. An administration could claim it was investigating noncitizen voting, a customs-adjacent concern given that immigration enforcement falls under DHS. It could claim it was investigating foreign interference in elections, tying the request to the importation of foreign propaganda. The connection to customs would be thin, but as the record shows, DHS has never let that stop it.

What This Would Mean

Federal seizure of voter data under the cover of a tariff law would carry consequences that go well beyond the legal question of whether DHS has the authority to do it.

A federal voter database assembled without congressional authorization and without judicial oversight would enable the targeting of voters by party affiliation, voting frequency, or geographic location. It would give DHS, an agency with arrest and deportation powers, access to the names and addresses of every registered voter in a jurisdiction. It would create an infrastructure for voter intimidation that operates entirely outside the democratic process.

Poll workers, election judges, and local election officials would also be exposed. Their names, contact information, and work schedules could be obtained through Section 1509 summonses directed at county clerks or election boards.

And because DHS has a documented practice of withdrawing summonses before courts can rule on them, there would be no reliable mechanism for judicial review.

The Statute Needs to Be Fixed

Section 1509 was written in 1930 and updated in 1993 to reflect the digital age. But neither the original drafters nor the authors of the Customs Modernization Act contemplated a world in which DHS would use a tariff provision to seize journalists’ phone records or unmask anonymous critics of the government. They certainly did not contemplate a world in which the same provision could be aimed at voter rolls.

Congress could fix this by amending Section 1509 to require judicial approval for summonses that target records unrelated to the importation or exportation of merchandise. It could require notice to the individuals whose records are sought. It could prohibit the use of Section 1509 to obtain election-related records entirely.

Until that happens, the broadest surveillance tool in the federal government’s arsenal is a 96-year-old tariff law that most Americans have never heard of. And nothing in its text prevents it from being pointed at the one dataset that matters most in a democracy.

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How Vladimir Putin Tried to Weaponize Germany’s Energy Dependence to Divide NATO and Why the Strategy Failed

Martin D. Vasquez — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 20:34:35 GMT

Recent Russian attacks in Germany are testing the response of NATO. Russia has been bound by NATO and sees the organization as a threat to Russia’s world power status. This is a brief history of why Russia sees NATO as a threat thatexplains why Donald Trump’s alliance with Vladimir Putin against NATO is so dangerous.

We understand why Russia sees NATO as a threat, but why does Donald Trump?

Germany entered the 2020s with one of the most exposed energy positions of any major Western economy. The country had no significant domestic natural gas reserves and relied almost entirely on imports to heat its homes, power its industry, and sustain its economy. By 2021, Russia accounted for 55 percent of Germany’s total natural gas imports, with the Nord Stream 1 pipeline serving as the dominant artery of that supply. A second pipeline, Nord Stream 2, had been completed and was awaiting regulatory certification, and its activation would have pushed Russia’s share of Germany’s gas supply past two thirds.

Vladimir Putin saw this dependency not as a matter of commerce, but as a tool of coercion.

Germany’s Energy Crisis as Strategic Leverage

Nord Stream 1, with an annual capacity of 55 billion cubic meters, was the single largest source of Russian gas flowing into Europe. It supplied roughly two thirds of Germany’s total gas imports in 2021, and Gazprom, Russia’s state energy company, had also acquired a quarter of Germany’s underground gas storage facilities, including the largest such facility in Western Europe, at Rehden.

Putin’s strategy was to exploit this dependency by reducing or threatening to cut gas flows at politically critical moments, pressuring Berlin into accepting terms favorable to Moscow. Beginning in mid-2021, Gazprom started reducing gas flows through multiple pipelines supplying Europe. By mid-June 2022, citing a disputed technical issue involving a Siemens turbine, Russia had cut Nord Stream 1 deliveries by 80 percent. In September 2022, Moscow shut the pipeline down entirely.

The intended effect was clear. Putin wanted Germany to fear a winter energy catastrophe badly enough to break ranks with its Western allies. He believed Berlin could be pushed into supporting a Russia-led framework for ending the war in Ukraine on terms that would weaken NATO, legitimize Russian territorial gains, and elevate Moscow as Europe’s dominant power broker.

The Ambition for a New Alliance

Putin’s energy gambit was part of a larger vision. He sought to build an alternative security architecture in Europe, one in which Russia, not the United States, served as the continent’s primary power. A fractured NATO and a compliant Germany would have been the cornerstones of that project.

This ambition did not emerge from nowhere. Putin had been cultivating European energy dependency for years. Even after Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014, Germany’s gas import dependency on Russia rose from 45 percent to 55 percent, directly contradicting the EU’s own 2010 and 2014 gas security strategies, which called for greater diversification. Berlin continued to treat Russian gas as a purely commercial matter, dismissing warnings from Eastern European allies like Poland and the Baltic states, who recognized the security risks involved.

Putin’s confidence was inflated further by what he believed was his proven ability to shape Western political outcomes, most notably through Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. That perceived success contributed to an increasingly aggressive posture, culminating in the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Putin calculated that Western democracies were too divided and too dependent on Russian resources to mount a sustained response.

Why the Strategy Collapsed

The invasion of Ukraine shattered whatever remained of Putin’s credibility as a stabilizing force in Europe. Rather than fracturing the Western alliance, the war galvanized it. Germany, which had been widely criticized for its reluctance to confront Moscow, made a dramatic reversal. On February 22nd, 2022, just two days before the full-scale invasion, Chancellor Olaf Scholz ordered the suspension of Nord Stream 2’s certification process, effectively killing the pipeline.

Putin’s own background worked against him. A former KGB officer who had systematically dismantled Russia’s democratic institutions, imprisoned political opponents, and ordered military operations in Georgia, Syria, and Ukraine, he was never a plausible candidate for the role of European peacemaker. The invasion removed any remaining ambiguity. Western publics and governments alike recognized that accommodating Putin’s demands would only invite further aggression.

Germany’s reliance on Russian gas, which Putin had intended to use as leverage, instead became a liability for Moscow. When Russia itself began cutting gas supplies, it confirmed every warning that critics had issued for years and accelerated the very diversification efforts Putin had been trying to prevent.

The United States Intervenes

The Biden administration recognized that Germany’s energy vulnerability was a threat to the entire Western security architecture. If Berlin could be coerced through energy pressure, NATO’s cohesion would be in jeopardy.

On March 25th, 2022, President Biden and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced a joint initiative to reduce Europe’s dependence on Russian gas. The United States committed to supplying at least 15 billion additional cubic meters of liquefied natural gas to Europe by the end of the year, with a longer-term target of 50 billion cubic meters annually by 2030.

The results exceeded expectations. In 2022, the United States exported 56 billion cubic meters of LNG to the EU, up from 22 billion the previous year. Europe became the top destination for American LNG exports, and for the first time, the continent’s LNG imports surpassed its pipeline gas imports. Germany, which had never before signed long-term LNG supply contracts, entered into new agreements with the United States and Qatar, and rapidly constructed new LNG import terminals. By 2023, the EU had reduced its LNG imports from Russia to 15 percent of its total, down from 45 percent before the war.

Then, on September 26th, 2022, a series of underwater explosions severely damaged both Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 in the Baltic Sea. Swedish and Danish investigators confirmed that the blasts were the result of sabotage. The identity of the perpetrators remains the subject of ongoing investigation, but the physical destruction of the pipelines ended any possibility of their reactivation and permanently closed Russia’s primary tool of energy coercion against Europe.

The Broader Geopolitical Stakes

Germany’s vulnerability to Russian energy pressure was never just a bilateral issue between Berlin and Moscow. It threatened the entire Western alliance structure. A Germany forced into accommodation with Russia would have undermined the collective defense posture of NATO and weakened the transatlantic partnership that has anchored European security since the end of World War II.

The ripple effects would have extended beyond Europe. A fractured Western coalition would have weakened the diplomatic and security support available to Israel and other key allies who depend on a unified Western front. Putin’s strategy, had it succeeded, would have reshaped not just Europe’s security architecture but the broader global order.

By stabilizing Germany’s energy supply and accelerating European diversification away from Russian gas, the United States and its allies preserved the unity that Putin had sought to destroy. The energy intervention was as consequential as any military or diplomatic measure taken in response to the invasion.

Conclusion

Putin’s plan to use Germany’s energy dependence as a weapon against the West failed because the danger was recognized and addressed before it could become decisive. The suspension and ultimate destruction of Nord Stream 2, the rapid expansion of American LNG exports to Europe, and Germany’s own belated but significant pivot away from Russian gas collectively dismantled the Kremlin’s primary pressure tool.

Putin’s miscalculations were fundamental. He overestimated the West’s tolerance for coercion, underestimated its capacity for collective action, and placed excessive faith in a strategy built on a vulnerability that, once exposed, could be corrected. Germany’s shift away from Russian energy did not just close one chapter of Putin’s ambitions. It reinforced the Western alliance at the very moment it was most needed and demonstrated that economic dependencies, however deeply entrenched, need not become permanent strategic liabilities.

Russia, at least under Vladimir Putin's leadership, has long viewed NATO as the primary obstacle to restoring its status as a global power. In recent years, Moscow has tested the alliance through military provocations, cyberattacks, and energy coercion. But the dangers to NATO do not come from Russia alone. They also come from Donald Trump's persistent alignment with Putin when it comes to undermining the alliance diplomatically, questioning its purpose, and attacking its member nations. Putin's hostility toward NATO is at least comprehensible. He sees a unified Western military alliance as a direct threat to his agenda of territorial expansion and political dominance across Eastern and Western Europe.

The more unsettling question is why an American president would share that view.

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Trump’s $100 Billion Venezuela Oil Deal Lie

Martin D. Vasquez — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 19:39:31 GMT

Trump’s Venezuelan oil deal has nothing to do with current gas prices.Energy experts are saying the administration’s promise of cheap gas is a lie, and it would take $100 billion and 10 to 15 years to accomplish.

On August 29th, President Donald Trump announced what he called “the biggest oil deal in world history,” a sweeping agreement granting a U.S.-backed private company century-long concessions over 17 Venezuelan oilfields containing an estimated 65 billion barrels of proven crude reserves. The deal was framed as a masterstroke that would lower gas prices, secure American energy dominance, and reassert the Monroe Doctrine across the Western Hemisphere.

The reality is far less dramatic. Energy experts, former administration officials, and industry analysts have lined up to warn that the deal’s promises outstrip its mechanics by a wide margin. The infrastructure needed to extract this oil barely exists. The capital required to rebuild it will approach $100 billion or more. And the timeline to meaningfully affect prices at the pump stretches not two or three years, as the president has claimed, but into the next decade at the earliest.

A Deal Built on Paper

The agreement creates a partnership between the U.S. government and North American Blue Energy Partners, a Barbados-headquartered company led by Venezuelan businessman Alejandro Betancourt. Under the terms, the Department of War holds a 35 percent equity stake in NABEP’s corporate parent, while the State Department secures the right to purchase 20 percent of all extracted crude at production cost. NABEP retains operating control and has pledged to invest “up to $100 billion” in new oil infrastructure, all at “no cost to the American taxpayer.”

But the central unanswered question is where the money comes from. NABEP invested roughly $1 billion to grow production from 18,000 to about 200,000 barrels per day over two years. That is impressive. But scaling to the level this deal contemplates requires capital on a completely different order of magnitude, and no major U.S. oil company has committed funds. ExxonMobil’s CEO called Venezuela “currently uninvestable” earlier this year. Chevron, already operating in the country, has said it will increase investment only using cash flow from existing operations. When Trump asked top oil executives in January to collectively spend $100 billion on Venezuelan infrastructure, there were no official takers.

The Infrastructure Problem

Venezuela’s oil sector has been in collapse for more than a decade. Production peaked near 3.5 million barrels per day in the late 1990s. By 2020, it had cratered to as low as 337,000 barrels per day. As of mid-2026, output has recovered to roughly 1.1 million barrels per day, still less than a third of historic capacity.

The decline was driven by years of U.S. sanctions, the flight of skilled engineers, and the collapse of state oil company PDVSA’s maintenance budgets. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, Venezuela’s pipeline network has not been significantly upgraded in roughly 50 years and daily spills are common. In the Orinoco Belt, which holds the bulk of the country’s heavy crude, analysts estimate that fewer than 2,000 of the region’s more than 12,000 oil wells are currently operational.

Francisco Monaldi, director of the Latin America Energy Program at Rice University’s Baker Institute, has offered a blunt assessment. Returning Venezuela’s production to historic levels will require at least $100 billion and at least a decade of sustained rebuilding. Rystad Energy projects that $8 to $9 billion per year would be needed from 2026 through 2040 just to reach two million barrels per day. Even maintaining current output without any growth would require approximately $53 billion in upstream and infrastructure investment over the next 15 years.

Nobody Believes the Two-Year Promise

Trump has said the deal will lower gas prices within two to three years. Industry analysts have been nearly unanimous in dismissing that timeline. Gerald Kepes, president of Competitive Energy Strategies, called the idea “absurd.” Patrick De Haan of GasBuddy said any impact would likely be measured “in pennies per gallon rather than dimes.” Vijay Vaitheeswaran of the Council on Foreign Relations said the oil will “absolutely not” reach the market in time to reduce prices ahead of the midterm elections.

Erik Katovich, an economist at the University of Connecticut, put the structural problem in plain terms. Venezuela currently produces around one percent of global oil output. Its crude is extra-heavy, requiring specialized and costly refining. The infrastructure to extract, transport, and process it at scale does not exist today.

Colonialism Charges From Trump’s Own Camp

Even Trump’s former special representative to Venezuela, Elliott Abrams, has publicly condemned the deal. Writing in the Washington Post, Abrams called it “a terrible deal” and described its terms as “a kind of fever dream of what colonialism looks like.” He accused acting Venezuelan President Delcy Rodríguez of surrendering a fifth of the national patrimony to comply with White House demands. Abrams also warned that Betancourt, who has faced money laundering investigations in three countries and built his fortune under Hugo Chávez, is “the most shadowy and repellent Venezuelan businessman” the administration could have chosen as a partner.

The deal may eventually produce results. But its core promise, that it will lower gas prices for American consumers in the near term, is contradicted by every credible energy analyst who has examined it. A hundred billion dollars and a decade of work stand between this agreement and its first meaningful barrel of oil.

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Nearly 630,000 People in North Carolina Are Going Hungry and 47.9 Million Across The U.S.A. in September’s Hunger Action Month

Martin D. Vasquez — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 17:32:55 GMT

As September begins, a national awareness campaign meets a generational food crisis driven by rising costs and historic federal cuts to food assistance

September is nationally recognized as Hunger Action Month, the annual campaign led by Feeding America to raise awareness about food insecurity and mobilize communities to act. This year, the campaign arrives at a moment when the problem it was created to fight is worse than it has been in more than a decade.

Across the United States, 47.9 million people are living in food-insecure households. That is roughly one in every seven American households. More than 14 million of those affected are children. The Southern states continue to bear the heaviest burden, with food insecurity rates at 15 percent, the highest of any region in the country. The numbers have now remained elevated for three consecutive years, reversing a decade of progress that had been driven largely by pandemic-era nutrition assistance programs that have since expired.

In North Carolina, the crisis is especially severe.

A Generational Crisis in North Carolina

New data from Feeding America’s annual Map the Meal Gap analysis, which draws on figures from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Census Bureau, reveals that close to 630,000 people in the Food Bank of Central and Eastern North Carolina’s 34-county service area are experiencing food insecurity. That represents an increase of nearly 180,000 people compared to the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021, a jump of more than 70 percent.

Statewide, the picture is even broader. Approximately 1.7 million North Carolinians, or one in every six residents, are food insecure. Among children, the rate is even higher. More than one in five kids and teens in the state are uncertain about where their next meal will come from. The data also shows that nearly 100,000 seniors in the region are living at or below the poverty line, and roughly 191,000 children are among those affected.

Amy Beros, president and CEO of the Food Bank of Central and Eastern North Carolina, has described the scope of the crisis as staggering and has said the 630,000 figure is likely a low estimate.

The causes are not difficult to identify. Rising costs for food, housing, health care, gas, and childcare have outpaced wage growth for years. Families that once maintained stability are now turning to food banks and pantries for the first time.

Federal Cuts Hit at the Worst Possible Moment

At the same time that demand has surged, the federal safety net is shrinking.

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed into law on July 4th, 2025, included what multiple policy analysts and advocacy organizations have described as the largest cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program in the program’s history. SNAP, formerly known as food stamps, serves approximately 42 million Americans, including 16 million children. The legislation is projected to cut $187 billion from the program over the next decade.

The effects have been swift. Between July 2025 and February 2026, more than 3.5 million people nationwide lost access to SNAP benefits. By mid-2026, that figure had grown to more than 4 million. More than one million of those who lost benefits are children. The law also introduced new work requirements affecting adults between the ages of 55 and 64 and parents of children 14 and older, along with stricter eligibility verification processes that states are now scrambling to implement.

In North Carolina, 1.35 million residents rely on SNAP. The state’s enrollment has already declined by more than 110,000 people between September 2025 and August 2026. Beginning October 1st, 2026, the federal government will cut its share of SNAP administrative costs in half, from 50 percent to 25 percent, shifting the remaining burden to states and counties.

North Carolina faces additional financial pressure because of the law’s new error rate penalty structure. The state reported a SNAP payment error rate of 10.21 percent for the 2024 fiscal year. Under the new rules, any state with an error rate above 6 percent will be required to cover a portion of SNAP benefit costs that the federal government has historically covered entirely. For North Carolina, that could mean an additional $420 million per year in state costs, plus roughly $69 million annually for county governments to cover increased administrative expenses. If the state cannot meet those financial obligations, SNAP could be significantly reduced or, in a worst-case scenario, effectively shut down in the state.

The Food Bank of Central and Eastern North Carolina distributed more than 100 million pounds of food last year. Beros has noted that for every one meal a food bank provides, SNAP provides nine, underscoring the fact that charitable distribution alone cannot replace the scale of federal nutrition assistance.

Hunger Action Month and What It Asks

Hunger Action Month was launched by Feeding America in 2007. It is designed to be a month of education, advocacy, fundraising, and direct action. This year, Hunger Action Day falls on September 29th, a national day of focused community effort. Orange is the campaign’s signature color, and organizations across the country participate by wearing orange, lighting landmarks, hosting food drives, and organizing volunteer events.

The campaign exists to make the invisible visible. For many Americans, the daily experience of hunger is not about having nothing to eat. It is about impossible choices. It is a parent skipping meals so their children can eat. It is a senior choosing between medication and groceries. It is a working family whose wages cover rent but not the cost of filling a refrigerator.

In North Carolina and across the country, those choices are being made by more people today than at any point in more than 15 years. And the policies meant to ease the burden are, for millions, moving in the opposite direction.

Food banks, local nonprofits, churches, and community organizations continue to fill gaps wherever they can. The North Carolina General Assembly recently directed $9.1 million in one-time funds to six food banks across the state for the 2026 to 2027 fiscal year, along with smaller grants to 13 food programs. But food bank leaders and policy advocates have been clear that charitable efforts, however heroic, cannot replace the structural support that federal programs like SNAP provide.

As Beros put it plainly at a recent press conference, this is not a problem charity alone can solve.

By Martin D. Vasquez

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WARNING: Trump’s Trade War and a 1930 Customs Law is Enabling Unmonitored Surveillance on U.S. Citizens!

Martin D. Vasquez — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 17:02:43 GMT

Donald Trump isn’t just reviving tariffs. He’s resurrecting one of the most catastrophic economic laws in American history, and hidden inside that same law is a surveillance tool federal agents are already using against journalists, unions, and nonprofits.

On June 17th, 1930, President Herbert Hoover signed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act into law. The failed law was disasterous and raised tariffs on more than 20,000 imported goods by roughly 20 percent, pushing the average duty on taxable imports to nearly 60 percent and was pivotal in pushing the economy into the Great Depression.

So why is Donald Trump reviving the most disastrous, destructive law to the U.S. economy in U.S. history? Because a provision in the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act will allow the DHS to monitor and seize data from U.S. citizens without due process, a warrant from a judge, or even notifying them.

The problem is the section of the Tariff Act that allows the government to audit and inspect imports and exports and obtain information that is relevant only to customs is being used illegally for something it was never designed for, only because the law now belongs to the Department of Homeland Security. which is Donald Trump’s personal task force.

A Failed Tariff Law Returns in Two Different Forms

Trump’s tariff agenda has cycled through multiple legal authorities since January 2025, from IEEPA tariffs struck down by the Supreme Court in February 2026, to temporary Section 122 duties, to expanded Section 232 and Section 301 investigations, and finally to Section 338 of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act itself, a provision no president had ever invoked until Trump imposed a 50 percent duty on $20 billion worth of Canadian imports in July 2026.

Trump’s tariff regime is producing the same unsuccessful and disastrous results as did the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act did for Hoover and Hoover that plunged the U.S. economy into a deeper, almost unrecoverable depression.

But the tariff story, as serious as it is, obscures something far more dangerous happening under the same statute.

Trump is not merely reviving Smoot-Hawley’s trade provisions. His administration is simultaneously exploiting the law’s customs enforcement section, a provision designed to inspect shipping records and calculate import duties, as a warrantless surveillance tool aimed at American citizens.

The Hidden Half of the Law

The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act did not consist solely of tariff schedules. Title IV created enforcement powers for the U.S. Customs Service. Among those powers was Section 509, now codified at 19 U.S.C. §1509.

Section 1509 was designed for a narrow administrative purpose. It authorized customs officials to examine records, summon witnesses, and demand testimony under oath in the course of investigating customs entries, determining liability for duties and fees, assessing fines and penalties, and ensuring compliance with customs law. The targets were importers, exporters, and bonded warehouses. The context was paperwork, cargo manifests, and duty calculations. It was never intended for journalists. It was never intended for political investigations.

But the statute’s language is broad. It allows a DHS official to examine any record “which may be relevant” to customs enforcement, to summon “any person he may deem proper,” and to demand testimony under oath. It requires no warrant. It requires no judicial approval. It requires no notice to the person whose records are being seized. The only authorization needed is a signature from a DHS official.

For most of the 20th century, this did not matter. The U.S. Customs Service was a relatively modest agency within the Treasury Department, and its summons power was exercised in the narrow world of import duties and cargo inspections.

Then came September 11th, 2001.

How a Customs Provision Became a Surveillance Tool

The Homeland Security Act of 2002 dissolved the U.S. Customs Service effective March 1st, 2003. Its functions were transferred to two new entities within the newly created Department of Homeland Security: U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which took over border enforcement, and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, whose investigative arm became Homeland Security Investigations, or HSI.

When the Customs Service was absorbed into DHS, its statutory authorities went with it. That included Section 1509. A provision originally designed to inspect shipping manifests and calculate import duties was now in the hands of an agency with a far broader domestic security mandate.

The misuse was not theoretical. In 2017, CBP issued a Section 1509 summons to Twitter, demanding the identity behind the anonymous @ALT_USCIS account, which had been critical of immigration enforcement. Twitter sued in federal court, arguing the summons exceeded the government’s statutory authority and violated First Amendment protections. CBP withdrew the summons the next day. The DHS Office of Inspector General subsequently investigated and concluded that CBP’s use of Section 1509 summonses was, in multiple instances, inconsistent with or exceeded its statutory authority. The OIG made policy recommendations. CBP promised reforms.

Those reforms did not hold.

The Pipeline in Practice

In late August 2026, reporting revealed that the Department of Homeland Security has deployed Section 1509 summonses on a sweeping scale against journalists, unions, and nonprofit organizations, none of which are involved in customs activity.

In the most detailed case documented so far, HSI obtained six months of telephone records from T-Mobile for Georgia Fort, an independent journalist in Minneapolis, covering more than 10,000 calls and text messages. Fort was not notified. She had no opportunity to challenge the request. The records were obtained through an administrative summons under Section 1509, requiring only a DHS official’s approval.

Separately, federal prosecutors had twice sought court-authorized search warrants for the YouTube accounts of Fort and fellow journalist Don Lemon. A federal judge rejected both applications, finding that the government had not established probable cause and that the journalists should be notified so they could challenge the requests under the Privacy Protection Act. Rather than comply with those rulings, the government withdrew its warrant applications entirely. Less than a month later, DHS served Google with an administrative summons under Section 1509 for the same YouTube account information, bypassing the judge altogether. The summons instructed Google to keep the request secret.

The targets extended well beyond Fort and Lemon. The summons to Google sought subscriber information, IP addresses, and login data for ten YouTube accounts, including those belonging to the news organization Democracy Now, podcaster Megyn Kelly, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, and independent journalist Brendan Gutenschwager.

In a separate Minneapolis case involving 15 activists facing criminal conspiracy charges, DHS used Section 1509 summonses to obtain financial records from the Sunrise Movement, the Service Employees International Union, the Communications Workers of America, and Venmo transaction records for a nonprofit organization called Voices for Racial Justice. None of those organizations has been charged with a crime. DHS offered no public explanation for why it needed their financial records.

John Roth, who served as DHS Inspector General from 2014 to 2017, called the conduct “outrageous on so many levels.” He added: “This is an improper use of the subpoena under any circumstances. This is not a customs case; it is not a customs violation. They are not investigating a customs violation.”

Chris Duncan, a former DHS lawyer, was equally blunt. “These laws have absolutely nothing to do with a domestic situation at a church, a social media post, even an immigration matter,” he said.

The Don Lemon Case

The case of Don Lemon illustrates how Section 1509 functions not as a standalone surveillance tool but as one step in a pipeline that runs from warrantless data collection to criminal prosecution. After a federal judge twice rejected warrant applications for the YouTube accounts of Lemon and fellow journalist Georgia Fort, finding insufficient probable cause, HSI bypassed the court entirely by issuing Section 1509 customs summonses to obtain the same information the judge had denied. HSI also used the summonses to acquire phone records and identify individuals who had traveled with Lemon. The data seized through this customs provision, in an investigation that had nothing to do with customs, imports, or international trade, fed directly into the case that led to Lemon’s arrest by federal agents on January 29th, 2026. He and Fort were charged with conspiracy against rights of religious freedom after livestreaming an anti-ICE protest at Cities Church in St. Paul, Minnesota. Both maintain they were covering the news. A federal judge in Minnesota has since placed Lemon’s indictment under review, ordering the Justice Department to provide grand jury materials to determine whether there are sufficient grounds to dismiss the case.

A Dual System

The Trump administration’s tariff policy and DHS’s use of Section 1509 are not the same initiative. They operate in different agencies, under different officials, for different stated purposes. But they are powered by the same statute, and they produce a combined effect that is difficult to dismiss as coincidence.

On the economic front, the administration has revived Smoot-Hawley’s protectionist model, invoking its never-before-used Section 338 to impose tariffs on a major trading partner while assembling a patchwork of trade barriers through other provisions. On the enforcement front, DHS is using the same statute’s customs summons power to seize the communications records of journalists, obtain financial data from labor unions, and extract transaction histories from nonprofit organizations, all without warrants, judicial oversight, or notice to the targets.

Section 1509 bypasses every standard constitutional safeguard:

There is no requirement for probable cause.
There is no requirement for a warrant.
There is no requirement that the target be notified.
There is no reporting requirement to Congress.
There is no automatic judicial review.

The only check on its use is whether the receiving company decides to push back, a process that can cost tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees and that, in the case of T-Mobile, clearly did not happen.

Lauren Regan, executive director of the Civil Liberties Defense Center, put the situation plainly:

“They don’t want a judge to take away this scary tool. They are getting stuff out of it.”

Nathan Freed Wessler of the ACLU noted that DHS has a documented history of using Section 1509 summonses for records outside its customs authority and against speech protected by the First Amendment.

And while Section 1509 gives DHS broad power to demand records, multiple legal experts emphasize that this power exists only in the limited circumstance of investigating a customs issue. The unresolved legal question is whether the statute authorizes DHS to use the summons in circumstances entirely unrelated to customs enforcement. That question has never been litigated to a final resolution because DHS has repeatedly withdrawn its summonses when challenged in court, avoiding a binding judicial precedent.

The Danger of Reviving Old Laws Without Modern Safeguards

The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act’s economic damage is well documented. It raised consumer prices, destroyed export markets, provoked global retaliation, and deepened the worst economic crisis of the 20th century. Historians, economists, and trade scholars across the political spectrum treat it as a cautionary tale. Most Americans know it, if they know it at all, from a famous movie scene in which a bored economics teacher drones about it to an empty classroom.

What almost no one knows is that the same statute contains an enforcement provision that, in the hands of a post-9/11 security apparatus, has become a tool for warrantless domestic surveillance. The law that Senator George Norris once called “protection run perfectly mad” now enables federal agents to seize a journalist’s phone records, demand subscriber data from social media companies, and obtain the financial records of labor unions and nonprofits, all without presenting evidence to a judge.

Congress in 1930 was building tariff walls. It was not building a domestic surveillance architecture. It was not contemplating a Department of Homeland Security. It was not imagining that a provision designed to inspect cargo manifests would one day be used to investigate a protest at a church or to circumvent a federal judge who had already rejected the government’s request for a warrant.

Trump’s revival of Smoot-Hawley’s tariff provisions draws headlines and economic analysis. DHS’s use of Section 1509 has, until very recently, drawn almost no public attention at all. Together, they represent something that should concern every American regardless of political orientation: a 96-year-old law designed for tariffs and customs paperwork that failed miserably and crashed the economy, has been repurposed for a 2026 system of economic protectionism, warrantless surveillance, and prosecutorial overreach. The first half of the law gets the attention. The second half does the damage.

As Senator Ron Wyden wrote to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem in November 2025, the agency’s use of Section 1509 summonses against social media platforms was “a manifestly improper use of this customs investigatory authority.” He warned that:

“DHS appears to be abusing this authority to repress First Amendment protected speech.”

That warning has not been heeded. The summonses have continued. The records have been seized. And the danger is not just to journalists. The danger is to every United States citizen who assumes that their constitutional rights are still in place.

Sources:

Trump's Immigration Policies Literally Drove a 20 Year Old Immigrant Honor Student to Suicide

Martin D. Vasquez — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 09:20:46 GMT

Pierre Damas

After telling his father on the phone that he was not feeling okay mentally because of the bullying from having his immigration status revoked. 20-year-old Pierre Damas drove his 2006 Toyota Avalon to I-70 westbound, parked it on the right shoulder near mile marker 66, got out, and walked into the westbound lanes on foot, where he was struck by a tractor-trailer. Troopers were called to the scene at approximately 8:45 a.m.

On the morning of August 31st, 2026, Pierre Damas Bel video-called his father from the shoulder of Interstate 70 in Clark County, Ohio. He was 20 years old. He told his father he was not feeling okay mentally because of the bullying. His father told him to come home so they could talk. A few hours later, police arrived at the family’s door to report that Pierre had walked into the westbound lanes of the interstate and been struck by a tractor-trailer. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

Pierre Damas Bel was an honors student. He graduated from Springfield High School with a 3.8 GPA. He was a member of the National Honor Society. He played varsity soccer for the Springfield Wildcats. He served as a lieutenant in the Marine Corps Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps. He worked at Texas Roadhouse. He volunteered in his community and helped other students learn English. He earned scholarships, including a $2,500 Award of Excellence scholarship from the Springfield City School District that he accepted in May while wearing a blue suit and a black bow tie. He was recruited to play soccer at Wittenberg University. He had just started his freshman year at Wright State University on August 24th, one week before his death, where he was studying physiology and neuroscience. He wanted to be a doctor.

Thirty-three days before he died, Immigration and Customs Enforcement strapped a GPS ankle monitor to his leg.

The Machine That Killed Him

Pierre arrived in the United States in 2024 through the CBP One application to reunite with his parents, who had fled Haiti three years earlier because of gang violence. He was granted Temporary Protected Status, the federal designation that allows nationals of countries experiencing armed conflict, environmental disasters, or other extraordinary conditions to live and work legally in the United States. For 16 years, Haiti had held that designation. The country’s conditions had only worsened over that time.

In November 2025, the Trump administration announced it would terminate TPS for Haitians. Federal courts blocked the move, finding that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem had not followed proper procedures and may have unlawfully discriminated against Haitian immigrants on the basis of race. The administration appealed. In June 2026, the Supreme Court ruled in a decision written by Justice Samuel Alito that the administration could proceed with ending protections for an estimated 350,000 Haitians and more than 6,000 Syrians.

When asked after the ruling whether TPS holders should expect to be deported, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller said the quiet part out loud. “Well, of course. If you no longer have status in this country, then you’re supposed to be deported.” He then singled out the Haitian population by name.

On July 29th, ICE placed Pierre on its alternatives-to-detention program and fitted him with the ankle monitor. He had a pending asylum claim. He had committed no crime. He had done everything the system asked of him and more. None of it mattered.

What the Monitor Took From Him

The ankle monitor destroyed Pierre Damas Bel’s life in 33 days.

He could no longer play soccer, the sport he had been recruited for. His father said Pierre twice traveled to ICE offices to ask them to remove the device so he could play. They refused. On the Friday before his death, his JROTC program distributed uniforms. According to his father, Pierre was the only student who did not receive one. Pierre believed it was because of the ankle monitor. He told his father he was humiliated.

On July 30th, one day after the monitor was placed, Pierre posted on Instagram. He wrote that he came to this country to pursue his education. He wrote that he did not come here to commit a crime or hurt anyone. He wrote that he was now walking through the streets of the United States with a GPS monitor on his leg, carrying a feeling of shame and humiliation that he never imagined he would experience.

It was his first week of classes at Wright State. His family said he could not concentrate on his studies because he was traumatized. He was bullied at school. The monitor marked him, visibly, as someone the government had decided did not belong.

Springfield Was Already a Target

Pierre Damas Bel did not live in just any town. He lived in Springfield, Ohio, a city the Trump administration had already singled out for political purposes.

During the 2024 presidential campaign, Donald Trump and his running mate JD Vance, who grew up an hour from Springfield, spread debunked claims that Haitian immigrants in the city were stealing and eating their neighbors’ pets. Trump repeated the lie on a presidential debate stage watched by tens of millions of Americans. Vance later admitted the claims were fabricated, telling CNN that if he had to create stories to get the American media to pay attention, then that was what he was going to do.

The consequences for Springfield were immediate and severe. Neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups, including the Blood Tribe, marched in the city’s streets and issued threats against local officials. Bomb threats shut down area schools. The city eventually sued one of the extremist groups. Springfield’s roughly 15,000 Haitian residents became targets in their own neighborhoods because the President of the United States pointed a finger at them.

The White House had also threatened to flood Springfield with ICE agents earlier in 2026 when it first announced it was ending TPS. The message was not subtle. These people were not wanted.

This was the environment Pierre Damas Bel lived in. This was the community the federal government had chosen to terrorize for political gain. And when the Supreme Court cleared the way for the administration to strip legal protections from hundreds of thousands of Haitians, this was where the consequences landed.

The Reactions Tell You Everything

Republican Governor Mike DeWine, who has repeatedly opposed the mass deportation of Ohio’s Haitian population, called Pierre’s death “a horrible, horrible tragedy” at a press conference at the Ohio Statehouse on September 1st. He said Pierre was well-liked and had great dreams about what he could do in the country and what he could contribute. He asked reporters whether it was really wise to look at someone like Pierre and say, “we’re going to kick you out of the country.” He questioned whether mass deportation was really what Americans wanted done in their name.

The Haitian Bridge Alliance, a nonprofit that provides legal and humanitarian aid to migrants, said Pierre’s death was caused by the Trump administration. Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, said Pierre killed himself because of the Trump administration’s obsession with hurting Haitians and the humiliating shame of an ICE ankle monitor.

Wright State University President Sue Edwards said the university was heartbroken by the devastating loss and that Pierre was an active honors student who was passionate about soccer and already actively engaged in his classes and the campus community. Springfield City Schools released a statement mourning Pierre as a member of the Class of 2026 who had been involved in the National Honor Society, the MJROTC program, and the varsity boys soccer team.

The Department of Homeland Security responded by noting that Pierre had entered the country via CBP One under the Biden administration and suggesting that immigrants who do not want to wear ankle monitors have a “lawful, voluntary option” to self-deport using the CBP Home app, which provides a government-arranged flight and a $2,600 exit bonus. The government’s response to a dead 20-year-old was to advertise its deportation incentive program.

The Cruelty Is the Policy

There is no separating Pierre Damas Bel’s death from the policies that produced it. He did not die because he made a bad decision. He did not die because of some failure of personal resilience. He died because the government of the United States took away his legal status, strapped a tracking device to his body, and left him to endure the social consequences in a community that had already been marked for political targeting by the President.

Pierre was not a criminal. He was not a threat. He was a 20-year-old who wanted to be a doctor. He helped other students learn English. He played soccer and wore a JROTC uniform and earned a scholarship. He did exactly what the country says immigrants are supposed to do. And in return, the country slapped a monitor on his ankle, took away his ability to play the sport he loved, humiliated him in front of his classmates, and told him he would be sent back to one of the most dangerous countries on earth.

The Trump administration did not put Pierre Damas Bel in front of that truck. But it built the road that led him there. It created the conditions of despair. It ended his legal protections. It strapped the device to his leg. It turned his community into a national punching bag. And it did all of this deliberately, as a matter of policy, because dehumanizing Haitian immigrants was useful politics.

Pierre Damas Bel’s father said the government treated his son like an animal. That is not an exaggeration. It is a description of policy outcomes.

The federal government owes Pierre’s family more than a press release about the CBP Home app. It owes the country a reckoning with the fact that its immigration enforcement apparatus drove a 20-year-old honors student to walk into oncoming traffic. There is no framing of border security or national sovereignty that makes that outcome acceptable. There is no version of this story in which Pierre Damas Bel needed to die.

He was 20 years old. He wanted to be a doctor. He is dead.

If you or someone you know is in crisis, you can call or text the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988.

Sources:

Who’s the Biggest Piece of Shit, Laura Loomer, Candace Owens, Michael Cohen, Charlie Kirk, or Erica Kirk?

Martin D. Vasquez — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 05:18:13 GMT

Who’s the biggest piece of shit? This is an easy one. That’s an easy question to answer. None of them. They’re all equally pieces of shit.

Michael Cohen - The Triple Flip Turncoat

Michael Cohen is the modern master of political betrayal. He began as Donald Trump’s loyal fixer, defending him through every scandal. Then he flipped. He wrote Revenge, testified under oath that the Trump Organization was a criminal enterprise, and became a hero to liberals who saw him as the insider finally exposing Trump’s corruption. Cohen spent years attacking Republicans, calling Trump a con man, and positioning himself as a redeemed truth teller. But once he built a new audience and regained relevance, he flipped again. In 2026 he suddenly claimed prosecutors had coerced him into testifying, walked back his own accusations, and began publicly addressing Trump as Boss and Sir. Cohen did not just betray Trump. He betrayed liberals, his own testimony, and anyone who ever believed him. He is the ultimate turncoat, switching sides whenever it benefits him.

Candace Owens - The Professional Turncoat

Candace Owens, the turncoat token for white supremacy propaganda has made a career out of switching allegiances. She aligned herself with Trump, MAGA media, and Turning Point USA, a group widely criticized for racist rhetoric, and became one of the movement’s loudest defenders. But when she fell out with TPUSA and accused them of covering up Charlie Kirk’s assassination, she abruptly turned on the Republican Party and Trump himself. Owens did not leave because of principle. She left because her internal feuds made staying inconvenient. Her pattern mirrors Michael Cohen’s. Align with power, profit from loyalty, flip when the relationship becomes toxic, and rebrand herself as a truth teller. And just like Cohen, nothing suggests her current stance is permanent. If the political winds shift or Trump offers her a platform, she has shown she can reconcile with the same movement she once denounced. In your framing, she is Cohen’s sister from another mother, a two faced turncoat waiting for her next opportunity.

Laura Loomer - The Open, Repeated, Unapologetic Racist

Laura Loomer’s public record is defined by openly racist attacks. Two episodes stand out as emblematic of her behavior. She called Candace Owens a nappy haired bitch, then escalated by calling her a ghetto Black bitch. She repeated the same slur toward State Senator Nixon, again calling her a ghetto Black bitch. These are not isolated incidents. They are part of a long pattern of racist and anti Muslim rhetoric that has earned her condemnation from civil rights groups, lawmakers, and even some conservatives. Loomer positions herself as a martyr of censorship while using her platform to demean Black women and other marginalized groups. In your framing, she is not just problematic. She is a deliberate, consistent, and unapologetic racist, and one of the clearest examples of someone who weaponizes hate as a political brand.

Charlie Kirk - The Misinformation Architect

Charlie Kirk built Turning Point USA into a powerful youth conservative machine, but his legacy is dominated by misinformation, extremist adjacent rhetoric, and racially charged messaging. He promoted false claims about elections and COVID 19, echoed great replacement conspiracy themes, and pushed aggressive campus intimidation tactics like the Professor Watchlist. Kirk’s debates often relied on fallacies, red herrings, and narrative control to normalize discriminatory ideas under the guise of intellectual discussion. His involvement with Project 2025 and close ties to the Heritage Foundation further cemented his role in shaping far right policy. In your framing, he is a racist propagandist who used debate as a weapon to launder extremist ideology.

Erika Kirk - The Reactionary Gatekeeper

After Charlie Kirk’s assassination, Erika Kirk stepped into leadership at Turning Point USA and quickly became embroiled in controversy. She promoted traditionalist gender roles, pushed exclusionary narratives, and publicly claimed that diversity, equity, and inclusion diminish the success of young white men, effectively confessing to a worldview rooted in racial resentment. Her rhetoric framed white males as a marginalized group, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Critics argue she reinforced the same culture war politics that defined TPUSA under her husband, while amplifying grievances that align with far right ideology. In your framing, she is a reactionary defender of racial hierarchy who blames equality initiatives for the supposed decline of white male success.

So as you can see, this isn’t at all a difficult question to answer. They are not all just pieces of shit. They are all equally pieces of shit. Horrible people that cannot be trusted. Michael Cohen should never be trusted by anyone ever again except Donald Trump. Candace Owens is the slick expert flipper who could trick either side into believing that she is part of their movement. Laura Loomer is distinctively a racist at heart. What little black heart that she has, if it’s a heart at all. Charlie Kirk, who should not be celebrated or have any monuments built to him, was a racist and was building a foundation for racism and normalizing racism. Erica Kirk is not only continuing his legacy, but adding the cherry on top of normalizing racism. They are all pieces of shit, but not just pieces of shit, the worst pieces of shit that America has had to offer in the last 15 years.

Sources:

PRIMETIMER – Hasan Piker responds to Laura Loomer’s racist attacks
Yahoo News – Angie Nixon calls out Trump’s harmful rhetoric after Loomer’s racist comments
PRIMETIMER – Isaiah Martin condemns Loomer’s racist attacks on Angie Nixon
Soap Central – Angie Nixon mocks Loomer’s dog‑food controversy after racist tirade
uPolitics – Lawmakers slam Laura Loomer’s racist attacks on Angie Nixon
Reuters – Trump ally Laura Loomer faces fresh criticism over racist comments
The Straits Times – Loomer condemned for racist attacks on Black women politicians
Media Matters – Guide to Laura Loomer’s pro‑white nationalism and bigotry
Factually / BBC / Britannica – Loomer’s history of bans, stunts, conspiracies, and racist statements
Britannica – Laura Loomer biography and controversies
PRIMETIMER – Mehdi Hasan condemns Charlie Kirk’s hateful comments about Muslims and Palestinians
Times of India – Candace Owens’ nostalgic Charlie Kirk post sparks controversy
PRIMETIMER – Andrew Wilson claims Charlie Kirk feared being killed by the left
International Business Times UK – Erika Kirk’s deleted Signal message controversy
The Guardian – Charlie Kirk’s racist remarks and “great replacement” rhetoric
Popular Timelines / Britannica / Reuters – Charlie Kirk’s misinformation and controversies
BBC / Guardian – Timeline of Charlie Kirk’s major controversies
Snopes / NYTimes – Charlie Kirk’s most controversial statements
Britannica / The Hill – TPUSA controversies and fallout around Charlie Kirk
Popular Timelines / EBSCO – Candace Owens controversies on rape, domestic violence, reproductive rights
AP News / POLITICO – What happened to Candace Owens and her political reversals
Times of India / Britannica – Candace Owens’ on‑air claims and legal consequences (Macron lawsuit, conspiracies)
PolitiFact / Independent – Owens’ controversies about sexual violence and MeToo skepticism
POLITICO / Britannica – Investigations and sanctions related to Candace Owens’ claims
Substack / The Hill / Newsweek – Michael Cohen’s reconciliation with Trump and shifting testimony
U.S. District Court / NYTimes – Cohen’s guilty plea and evidence provided in federal cases
U.S. DOJ / NYTimes – Crimes Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to (campaign finance, tax evasion, fraud)
FEC / Washington Post / Fox News – Cohen’s claims of prosecutorial coercion and testimony reversals
Britannica – Michael Cohen biography and legal history

Former MAGA Members Who Describe MAGA as Trump's Religious Cult, Are Leaving in Droves

Martin D. Vasquez — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 02:55:05 GMT

A growing number of former Trump loyalists are going public with their accounts of leaving the MAGA movement, describing it in terms normally associated with high-control religious groups.

Former members of Donald Trump’s MAGA movement are now going public with their accounts of how and why they left, with many describing it as a religious cult in a new report from the Guardian. Their stories follow a pattern that cult researchers and psychologists say is disturbingly familiar, and they are arriving at a moment when Trump’s approval ratings have cratered and fractures within his base are widening ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.

The accounts are not simply tales of political disillusionment. They describe all-consuming group identities, enforced obedience, suppressed critical thinking, and social consequences so severe that walking away felt less like changing one’s mind and more like fleeing a captor.

‘Make America Godly Again’

One woman from Michigan described her own experience in the MAGA movement as a “religious psychosis,” telling the Guardian that her loyalty was never really to the president himself. It was to a far-right conservative evangelical culture that encouraged her not to work, not to vote, and never to question her husband’s decisions. For her, MAGA meant “Make America Godly Again.” She said she was ultimately turned off by the rank hypocrisy of those around her.

Her account tracks closely with the testimony of Stephania Messina, a former member of the evangelical Quiverfull movement and a one-time Christian nationalist from Michigan, who has become one of the most visible voices within the Leaving MAGA organization. Messina was a trained pediatric respiratory therapist who said she abandoned her own medical expertise to embrace the anti-science messaging that pervaded her church and MAGA circles during the COVID-19 pandemic. She said she became deeply indoctrinated into tradwife culture, a lifestyle that promoted total submission to a husband, including the surrender of her right to vote through a practice known as “household voting.”

Messina told the Guardian that it was not her job to vote or to know who to vote for. She was simply expected to submit to her husband and do what he thought was necessary. She described the process as indoctrination into Christian nationalism.

Her church taught that Trump had been chosen by God, that he was a flawed vessel like the biblical King David, and that his sins should be forgiven because he was a “baby Christian.” Dissent was not tolerated. Critical thinking was treated as a worldly temptation. Messina said that when the father of her oldest son died, her church told the boy he was better off without his dad because his father had not been a Christian. That moment, along with the church’s handling of the pandemic, began her slow break from the movement.

From Islamophobia to the Red Hat

A Virginia man who spoke to the Guardian described a different but equally consuming path into MAGA. He grew up without a strong sense of belonging and was drawn into Islamophobia in the aftermath of the September 11th, 2001 attacks. That fear and anger eventually led him into evangelical Christianity, and from there, into full participation in the MAGA movement, complete with the signature red hat. He said it took years of consistent trauma therapy before he was able to step back and ask real questions about the trajectory that had consumed his adult life.

His story echoes what cult experts have documented about how the MAGA movement drew in people who were already vulnerable to high-control group dynamics. Steven Hassan, a former member of the Unification Church and the author of “The Cult of Trump,” has argued that MAGA specifically attracted people who had previously left insular religious groups but had never learned to recognize the patterns of manipulation that pulled them in. Hassan developed what he calls the BITE model, a framework for analyzing authoritarian control across four domains: behavior, information, thought, and emotion. He has applied it to the MAGA movement and concluded that it functions as a cult of personality.

Daniella Mestyanek Young, a Harvard-trained organizational psychologist and the author of “The Culting of America,” has gone further. Young, who grew up inside the Children of God, a notorious religious sect accused of widespread abuse, escaped at 15 and later served as a military intelligence officer before becoming one of the country’s leading scholars of high-control groups. She has said plainly that calling MAGA a cult is not hyperbole. She has argued that Trump pulled together a coalition of conservative, populist, and conspiracy-driven factions that extends well beyond any single religious tradition. He went, as she put it, way bigger than just the evangelical church.

Leaving MAGA

At the center of the growing infrastructure for former MAGA members is Rich Logis, a former Trump campaign volunteer, donor, and aspiring MAGA pundit who spent seven years deep inside the movement. He had bylines at outlets including Fox News and The Federalist. He spoke at Trump-aligned events. He described himself as unapologetically MAGA.

Then came a series of fractures. The movement’s response to COVID raised early doubts. January 6th, which Logis had initially dismissed, eventually revealed itself to him as an attempt to overturn a free election. And when Trump appeared at an NRA conference just three days after the Uvalde school shooting in 2022 to reject calls for gun reform, Logis reached his breaking point. He said it drove home for him that Trump and the Republican Party deemed avoidable deaths and suffering acceptable.

Logis published a public apology in the summer of 2022, expecting silence. Instead, he was flooded with messages from people trying to reconnect with friends and family members lost to MAGA. He founded Leaving MAGA as a nonprofit in 2024, and the organization now hosts free weekly support groups, maintains a deradicalization website, and has published Logis’s memoir, “One Betrayal Too Many,” which carries a foreword by former Republican Congressman Adam Kinzinger.

The organization’s billboard campaign has become one of its most visible efforts. Simple signs reading “Having Doubts? You Are Not Alone” now appear in 27 states, strategically placed in red and purple communities, including two just down the road from Mar-a-Lago. Logis has said the key is not to try to argue anyone out of their beliefs. It is to give people a place to land once they have started expressing doubts on their own.

‘Leaving Costs Nearly Everything’

For those who do walk away, the cost can be immense. Tia Levings, the New York Times bestselling author of “A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape From Christian Patriarchy,” has described MAGA Christianity as a near-perfect overlap between authoritarian church cultures and Christian nationalism. She told HuffPost that leaving costs nearly everything. Relationships, social networks, and practical support systems often evaporate overnight.

Georgia-based writer Deirdre Sugiuchi, whose forthcoming memoir “Unreformed” recounts her experience in a white evangelical reform school, was blunt in her own assessment. She told HuffPost that MAGA Christianity is a cult, and that she knows because she was in it. As a teenager, Sugiuchi was sent to Escuela Caribe, a strict evangelical institution in the Dominican Republic, for the offense of failing to be a sufficiently obedient young woman. She has said that leaving meant having to escape to survive, and that many believers are so thoroughly conditioned that they may not even recognize the forces shaping their thinking.

Anna Rollins, who grew up Southern Baptist and later wrote “Famished: On Food, Sex, and Growing Up as a Good Girl,” remembers the merger of religion and Republicanism starting in her childhood. She recalled singing patriotic songs alongside hymns in church services and said nationalism was tightly woven in with Christianity from her earliest years.

A Movement Under Strain

These personal accounts arrive against a backdrop of measurable political erosion. NBC News polling has shown that self-identified MAGA affiliation among Republicans dropped by seven percentage points since April 2025. Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon has publicly warned of a “massive lack of enthusiasm” among the base heading into the 2026 midterms. Trump’s overall approval rating has fallen to around 36 percent, with only 15 percent of Americans saying they “strongly approve” of the president.

The question now is whether the growing visibility of former MAGA members, and the infrastructure being built to support them, can accelerate what appears to be an organic process of disillusionment. Logis and the Leaving MAGA team are betting that it can. Their approach borrows from the methods used by cult intervention specialists, but centers on empathy rather than confrontation. As Logis has said, shame is not a strategy. People who are having doubts need to know they are not alone, and they need somewhere to go.

Each of the stories now emerging from former MAGA members reveals the depth of commitment that the movement demands from its followers, as well as the immense courage it takes to walk away from a tight-knit community bound together by fierce loyalty to one man. Given the trajectory of Trump’s approval ratings and the growing fractures within his coalition, Leaving MAGA may prove to be one of the more valuable resources available to those in the president’s disaffected base who are looking for a way out.

Martin D. Vasquez is the founder and editor of Medium Output.

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Natalie Harp’s Brother Went on CNN and Revealed the True Motive of the “Human Stalker”

Martin D. Vasquez — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 01:38:52 GMT

September 1, 2026 | Medium Output

Preston Harp had not spoken publicly about his famous sister before. But on the evening of August 18th, 2026, the estranged brother of White House executive assistant Natalie Harp sat down with CNN anchor Erin Burnett and offered a window into the woman who has become one of the most talked about figures in American politics.

His message to her was simple and direct. “I love you. I hope that you change and that you wake up.”

The Obsession That Started at 16

The interview came at a moment of intense scrutiny for Natalie Harp. Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff had thrust her into the spotlight days earlier when he told a campaign rally that President Trump would rather “build his ballroom and travel with Natalie” than do his job. The remark set off a firestorm. The White House went on the offensive. Trump called Ossoff a “Pee-wee Herman look-alike.” MAGA allies accused the senator of pushing misogynistic innuendo. And through it all, the question lingered: who, exactly, is Natalie Harp, and why is she always at the president’s side?

Preston Harp provided an answer few expected. According to him, his sister’s fixation on the presidency is not new. It did not begin with Donald Trump. It began in childhood.

“I’d say since she was like 16, she’s had an obsession with, gosh, how do I explain this?” Preston told Burnett. “She’s written letters to other presidents, let me put it that way. And so like, her dream came true finally.”

When Burnett asked which presidents his sister had written to, Preston said he was aware of at least one letter to George W. Bush during the Iraq War. None of the presidents she wrote to ever responded.

A Family Divided by American Exceptionalism

Preston traced the roots of his sister’s behavior to their upbringing. Their mother, he said, raised them with a rigid belief in American exceptionalism, the idea that the United States was “the boss of the world.” He said his mother taught them that historical atrocities like slavery were acceptable for their time, and that people who participated in them “weren’t bad.”

“I think that my sister, unfortunately, didn’t break out of that delusion my mom raised us with,” Preston said. “And Trump is like everything that my mom taught us to respect.”

In other words, Preston argued, Natalie did not attach herself to Trump by accident. She was raised in a worldview that glorified unchecked American power, and Trump became the living embodiment of everything that worldview venerates. The fixation was not political strategy or career ambition. According to her own brother, it was something closer to ideological devotion.

The Trunk of the Motorcade

The most striking moment of the interview came when Burnett brought up a CNN report that Natalie had jumped into the trunk of a vehicle in Trump’s motorcade during an October 2023 court appearance in lower Manhattan. According to the report, there were not enough seats in the cars heading to the courthouse. Rather than be left behind, Natalie allegedly climbed into the trunk after a shouting match in the lobby of Trump Tower. CNN reporters said they obtained a photo of the incident.

Preston laughed. “That’s really funny,” he said. “I didn’t even know about that.”

Then his tone shifted. “It’s actually sad. That’s like an unhealthy obsession.”

“I Don’t Think It’s a Physical Attraction”

Burnett pressed Preston on the nature of his sister’s relationship with the president. The question had hung over the story since Ossoff’s rally, with critics and supporters alike reading different implications into the senator’s words.

Preston dismissed the idea of anything romantic. “I don’t think it’s a physical attraction,” he said. Instead, he framed it as something more like fandom taken to its most extreme conclusion. “I think that Trump’s best friends are people who are his fan club. And so she’s his biggest fan. And so that’s probably why he likes her.”

The dynamic Preston described is supported by reporting in the book “Regime Change” by New York Times journalists Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan. In that book, Trump is quoted as telling staffers about Harp: “All of you will go off and make money. She’ll never leave me.” Trump reportedly used a mock French pronunciation to call her “Nah-ta-lee” and told staff she “was the only one who loved him as much as his wife and his kids.”

The Letters That Alarmed the Secret Service

Natalie Harp’s personal letters to Trump had already drawn attention before Preston’s interview, but reporting that emerged in the same week added new layers of concern.

The Daily Beast published the full text of several letters Harp sent to Trump, one of which read: “I never want to bring you anything but joy. I’m sorry I lost my focus. You are all that matters to me. I don’t want to ever let you down. Thank you for being my Guardian and Protector in this Life.” Another letter was signed, “With all my heart, Natalie.”

During his first day at his New York criminal trial, Harp reportedly slipped Trump a letter quoting Bible verses and pledging to remain by his side. Author Michael Wolff reported that during the trial, Harp even offered to go to prison on Trump’s behalf to circumvent a judicial gag order. Wolff wrote that “a bewildered legal team stared at her as though she had three eyes in her forehead.”

Haberman and Swan both confirmed on separate CNN appearances that the Secret Service had been “alarmed” by Harp’s letters during the 2024 campaign. Haberman said on CNN’s “The Source” that Harp “had left these letters for him in his personal spaces during the interregnum for years. The Secret Service had gotten alarmed by some of them.” Swan said the agency expressed concern about someone “that close” to Trump writing letters of “absolute devotion.”

According to Wolff’s reporting, the Secret Service characterized Harp as “a potential danger to herself as well as to the president.” Trump reportedly brushed off the concern. “She just loves her president,” he said.

A Year Without Security Clearance

In the same week, MS NOW reported that Harp had worked in the White House for over a year without completing the routine security clearance process required of all West Wing staff. According to two unnamed sources, Harp repeatedly declined to fill out the SF-86, the standard federal background investigation form. The reasons for her refusal were unknown.

The report raised immediate red flags given Harp’s role. She sits just outside the Oval Office. She regularly sits in on meetings. She drafts many of the president’s Truth Social posts. She controls much of his media diet. And she was one of the small group of people placed on a secret decoy plane with Trump when he departed Turkey in July after an Iranian assassination threat was detected.

One national security official told MS NOW that Harp was in close proximity to Trump while he was handling highly sensitive information, without the clearance that would normally be required for such access. Staff reportedly made “subtle moves” to limit her access, but they were unsuccessful. The president eventually intervened to push the process forward, and Harp has since obtained clearance.

The Backlash to the Interview

Preston Harp’s CNN appearance was immediately polarizing. Eric Trump posted on X the following morning calling the interview “absolute trash.” He called Natalie “an incredible young woman, a cancer survivor, a genuinely good person and arguably one of the hardest-working people in the White House.” He added, “From the looks of it, she got all the family genetics.”

Right-wing commentator Laura Loomer accused the media of being “beyond desperate” and said that “being loyal to your boss” had been reframed as an “unhealthy obsession.” Critics of CNN pointed out that Preston is estranged from his sister and has no firsthand knowledge of her current relationship with Trump.

Others noted the awkwardness of the interview itself. Preston laughed at odd moments, lost his train of thought at others, and at one point called his sister “good looking,” a detail that drew mockery from conservative commentators online.

The Hill’s media columnist called the decision to interview Preston “bad form” and argued that CNN was indulging in gossip rather than journalism. Fox News contributors accused the network of trying to manufacture a scandal.

What the Interview Actually Revealed

Underneath the political noise, the substance of what Preston Harp said on CNN is worth sitting with. He described a woman whose fixation on the presidency began in adolescence, who wrote unreturned letters to presidents before she ever met Donald Trump, and whose worldview was shaped by a mother who taught her children that America’s power justified its history. He described someone who found, in Trump, the fulfillment of that childhood programming. Not a romantic partner, not a political strategist, but a true believer in the most literal sense.

Whether that portrait is sympathetic or alarming depends largely on what one thinks about the nature of devotion at the highest levels of government. For those who see Harp as a dedicated public servant, her loyalty is a virtue. For those who see her as someone whose behavior alarmed the Secret Service, who went a year without a security clearance while handling sensitive presidential communications, and who offered to go to prison for the president, the picture is more troubling.

Preston Harp did not seem interested in scoring political points. He seemed like a brother who is worried about his sister. His parting words were not an attack. They were a plea.

“I love you. I hope that you change and that you wake up.”

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Republicans Use Laura Loomer as a Decoy to Distract From the Party's Own Racist Strategy

Martin D. Vasquez — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 00:24:14 GMT

Laura Loomer spent years normalizing racist rhetoric for the Republican Party. Now that the backlash has arrived, the party is using her as a shield to protect a much larger project: positioning itself as the political home of white identity.

The controversy surrounding Laura Loomer is not about Laura Loomer. It never was. The far-right influencer and Trump confidante spent the final weekend of August 2026 on a racist tirade against prominent Black women in American politics, and the Republican Party responded exactly the way it was designed to respond. It condemned the messenger, protected the message, and hoped the public would confuse one for the other.

The message is simple, and the party has been broadcasting it for years. The Republican Party is building its electoral future around white racial solidarity. Laura Loomer’s role has been to say that out loud, in escalating terms, so the party itself never has to. And now that her latest provocation has drawn national attention, her role has shifted. She is no longer the messenger. She is the decoy, absorbing the outrage so the party’s broader racial strategy remains unexamined. Let’s not help to dilute the facts… Laura Loomer is a fucking disgusting racist pig!

What Loomer Said

On her podcast “Loomer Unleashed,” Loomer called Florida Democratic Senate nominee Angie Nixon, Representatives Ilhan Omar and Ayanna Pressley, former Representative Cori Bush, and Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson “ghetto, entitled, race-obsessed, destructive black BITCHES who are completely unfit for the power they hold.” She told Black Americans to “start policing their own behavior,” then listed the names of prominent Black women one by one.

“Are you starting to see a pattern here?” she asked. “It’s called pattern recognition. Some people call it racism. I call it pattern recognition. And guess what? Pattern recognition and profiling keeps you safe.”

She anticipated the backlash and told her audience to preemptively defend her. “Just be sure tomorrow when they attack me and they call me a racist, go out there with your shirts and make sure you all let everybody know Laura Loomer didn’t do nothing wrong.”

On X, she escalated. She called Nixon a “ghetto, black, bitch.” When Nixon responded by reminding Loomer of the time she ate dog food on camera during a promotional video and quoting Queen Latifah, Loomer replied by mocking Nixon for:

“speaking Ebonics” and adding, “maybe I need to bark at you and tug your leash and then you’ll finally understand.”

The language was not accidental. It was not a lapse in judgment. It was the latest in a years-long pattern of deliberate escalation designed to push the boundaries of what is considered acceptable within Republican political discourse.

The Real Strategy Behind the Decoy

The Republican outrage over Loomer is performative, and it serves a purpose beyond managing a single news cycle. By focusing public attention on Loomer as an individual, the party creates a firewall around the much larger and more consequential project she has been helping to advance: the consolidation of the Republican Party as the party of white racial identity.

This is not an accusation that requires inference. It is the observable product of decades of strategic decisions. From the Southern Strategy of the 1960s and 1970s, when the party made a calculated decision to court white voters who opposed the civil rights movement, to the welfare queen narratives of the Reagan era, to the Willie Horton ad in 1988, to the birther conspiracy against Barack Obama, to the Muslim ban, to the “shithole countries” remark, to the “very fine people on both sides” response to Charlottesville, to the labeling of Black Lives Matter as domestic terrorism, to the attacks on critical race theory, to the weaponization of the term “DEI,” the Republican Party has systematically constructed an identity around white grievance. Each of these was a signal sent to white voters that the Republican Party understood their anxieties, shared their resentments, and would protect their position in the social hierarchy.

Loomer’s rhetoric operates within this framework, not outside of it. When she calls prominent Black women “ghetto” and “entitled,” she is not departing from the party’s message. She is delivering it in its rawest form. When she describes racism as “pattern recognition” and argues that racial profiling “keeps you safe,” she is articulating the logic that underlies Republican opposition to police reform, voting rights expansion, affirmative action, and diversity initiatives. She is saying plainly what the party communicates through policy.

The difference between Loomer and the party is not substance. It is packaging.

The Normalization Pipeline

Loomer did not arrive at this level of influence by accident. She was elevated through a system that rewards racial provocation with access and visibility. She won a Republican congressional primary in 2020 in the district that includes Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, with his endorsement. She flew with Trump to a presidential debate in 2024. She attended the September 11th memorial at his side. She has claimed credit for firings at the National Security Council. She describes her role as keeping the president “on track.” She has nearly two million followers on X.

At no point during her rise did any of her previous racist or Islamophobic provocations disqualify her from Republican circles. She called herself a “proud Islamophobe.” She advocated for removing every Muslim from America. She said the White House would “smell like curry” if Kamala Harris won the presidency. She described Representative Jasmine Crockett’s reported staff treatment as “typical DEI Shaniqua behavior.” She endorsed white nationalism by name, telling a far-right podcast in 2017, “Someone asked me, ‘Are you pro-white nationalism?’ Yes. I’m pro-white nationalism.”

None of this cost her access to the president. The party did not reject her. It absorbed her, used her, and allowed her to function as the voice that says what the party’s elected officials cannot say while still benefiting from the fact that someone is saying it.

This is the normalization pipeline. A provocateur introduces language that sits outside the boundary of mainstream political speech. The party does not endorse the language but does not reject the person. The boundary shifts. The provocation becomes background noise. A new, more extreme provocation follows. Over time, the range of what can be said within the Republican sphere expands, and the party’s implicit message to white voters becomes more explicit without ever having to be stated on the record by anyone with an official title.

Loomer has been the most visible operator in this pipeline. She is not the only one. But she is the one who got too loud.

The Scapegoat Pivot

When Loomer’s rhetoric crossed a visibility threshold that made silence untenable, the party executed a pivot it has rehearsed many times before. Condemn the individual. Protect the institution. Redirect the conversation.

Former Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene wrote that “the Republican Party and President Trump own Laura Loomer and her nonstop vitriol” and said she “1000% denounce Laura Loomer and her nasty, hateful, racists comments. This is Trump’s new MAGA and Republican Party and I want nothing to do with it.”

Noah Rothman of the National Review called Loomer’s comments “vile” and said she “deserves to be cast out.”

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries called Loomer a “stone-cold racist, pathological liar and nutjob” and demanded every Republican denounce her.

These responses, from both sides, accomplish the same thing. They center the controversy on Loomer. They treat her as the source of the problem rather than a symptom of a party that has spent decades cultivating exactly this kind of rhetoric to attract and retain white voters. The conversation becomes about whether Laura Loomer is racist, which she obviously is, rather than about whether the Republican Party has built its modern identity around an implicit promise to white voters that it will protect their racial position in American society.

This is the decoy at work. As long as the press and the public are debating Laura Loomer, they are not debating the party’s voter suppression efforts, its dismantling of DEI programs across the federal government, its attacks on diversity in the military, its opposition to police reform, its gutting of the Voting Rights Act through judicial appointments, or its use of immigration policy as a vehicle for racial messaging. They are not asking why the party that claims to have moved beyond race continues to produce, elevate, and protect figures whose entire public identity is built on racist provocation.

Greene’s condemnation is particularly revealing. She frames Loomer as the corruption of the party rather than its product. But Greene herself was stripped of committee assignments in 2021 for endorsing conspiracy theories and inflammatory rhetoric. Her denunciation of Loomer reflects a rivalry for influence within Trump’s inner circle, not a principled objection to the party’s racial strategy. Greene is not opposed to the message. She is opposed to losing her position as the one who delivers it.

The Silence That Speaks

The White House, when asked by Reuters for comment on Loomer’s racist remarks, did not respond. Donald Trump, who flew with Loomer, attended memorials with her, and allowed her to function as an informal loyalty enforcer within his administration, offered no public statement.

That silence is not negligence. It is strategy. The president’s refusal to condemn Loomer communicates something far more powerful than any press release could. It tells the party’s white base that the rhetoric Loomer used is not actually disqualifying. It tells them that the condemnations from Greene and others are theater, not policy. It tells them that the party hears them, agrees with them, and will not sacrifice one of its most effective communicators just because the opposition objects.

The double standard was made explicit during a CNN NewsNight panel on September 1st, when host Abby Phillip contrasted the Republican response to Loomer with the party’s weeks-long campaign to force Democrats to distance themselves from left-wing streamer Hasan Piker. Republicans demanded total disavowal of Piker. They offered carefully worded personal disapproval of Loomer while leaving every structural relationship intact.

Democratic activist Isaiah Martin captured the contradiction: “I do not want to hear a single thing about Hasan Piker until your president goes forward and condemns her.”

Zeteo founder Mehdi Hasan raised the same question, asking why mainstream news networks had devoted exhaustive coverage to Piker while ignoring far worse conduct from someone who serves as an actual presidential adviser.

The answer is that the press, like the public, has been successfully redirected. The decoy is working.

What Nixon Understood

Angie Nixon’s response to Loomer was notable for its refusal to play the role the Republican strategy required of her. She did not beg for condemnation. She did not center her victimhood. She reminded Loomer of the dog food incident, quoted Queen Latifah, corrected Loomer on the proper form of address for a state representative, and told the public to donate to her Senate campaign. She then redirected the conversation to policy, pointing out that her Republican opponent, Senator Ashley Moody, was implicated in a grand jury report finding the DeSantis administration had misappropriated $10 million in taxpayer dollars from a children’s nonprofit.

“When referring to me, it’s Representative Angie Nixon,” she wrote. “However, after November 3rd, YOU CAN CALL ME SENATOR.”

Nixon understood what the Republican decoy strategy depends on the public missing. The controversy is not Laura Loomer. The controversy is a political party that has spent more than half a century building its coalition around white identity, that elevated a self-described white nationalist to the president’s inner circle, that benefited from every escalation she produced, and that now pretends to be shocked by the predictable result of its own strategy.

Laura Loomer is not the disease. She is the symptom the party is willing to sacrifice so the disease can continue to operate undiagnosed. The condemnations are not accountability. They are camouflage. And the longer the public spends debating whether Loomer went too far, the less time it spends asking the only question that matters: too far from what? From a party that has been heading in exactly this direction, by design, for decades.

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The Poor Republicans: Not All Republicans Are Wealthy, the Ones Who Are Not Are Struggling to Put Food on the Table

Martin D. Vasquez — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 17:36:37 GMT

The party’s low-income base is feeling the squeeze, and rallying cries aren’t putting food on the table

By Martin D. Vasquez

Not every Republican drives a luxury SUV or summers in the Hamptons. A substantial portion of the party’s most loyal voters are working class, lower middle class, or outright poor. They work warehouse shifts, drive trucks, stock shelves, and stretch paychecks across too many bills. Many of them voted for Donald Trump with deep conviction, believing he would fight for their economic interests. But in 2026, with grocery prices roughly 35 percent higher than they were a decade ago and gas costs climbing sharply in the wake of the Iran conflict, a growing number of these voters are no longer responding to the president’s rhetoric. Their loyalty hasn’t disappeared. It is simply being overtaken by the reality of an empty refrigerator.

The Numbers Tell a Difficult Story

The economic data confronting lower-income Republicans is hard to ignore. A Pew Research Center survey conducted in July 2026 found that 60 percent of Americans now say Trump’s economic policies have made conditions worse, and the share of Republicans who agree has risen from 18 percent to 28 percent. Among adults in households earning under $50,000 a year, Trump’s approval stood at just 38 percent in a CNN/SSRS poll earlier this year, with 60 percent disapproving. A CBS News/YouGov poll in May found that 54 percent of white, non-college voters disapproved of Trump’s job performance, up from 32 percent in February 2025. These are not fringe voters. They are the cornerstone of the Republican coalition.

A Washington Post/Ipsos poll of more than 2,600 adults conducted in July found that 65 percent of Americans considered groceries unaffordable. Among those earning less than $50,000, that number climbed to 82 percent. Bureau of Labor Statistics data show that groceries were 2.7 percent more expensive in June 2026 than a year earlier, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture projects that trend will continue through the rest of the year. For households in the bottom half of the income distribution, groceries consume roughly 13 percent of their income, a figure that leaves almost no room for error.

The Megabill and the Safety Net

The Republican megabill, enacted on July 4th, 2025, made the largest cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program in the program’s history. The Congressional Budget Office estimated the legislation would reduce SNAP funding by $187 billion over a decade, roughly a 20 percent cut. The bill expanded work requirements, tightened eligibility rules, and restructured how the government calculates food benefit levels.

The consequences arrived quickly. By February 2026, an estimated 3.5 million people had lost their SNAP benefits. Among those still receiving assistance, benefit levels fell. For example, a mother with one child whose benefits were cut under the new work requirements saw her household’s monthly food assistance drop from $536 to $292, a loss of $244 per month. The program serves more than 40 million people each month, including roughly 16 million children, 8 million seniors, and 4 million non-elderly adults with disabilities. Many of them live in solidly red districts.

The cuts to SNAP helped finance approximately $4.5 trillion in tax reductions, the benefits of which were heavily concentrated among the wealthiest households. Independent analyses projected that the law would increase income inequality. For the lower-income Republicans who supported the party that passed it, the trade was difficult to square. Their grocery bills went up. Their food assistance went down. And the tax cuts they received, if they received any at all, did little to close the gap.

When Rallying Cries Meet Rising Prices

For years, Trump’s political strength among working class voters rested on a combination of cultural affinity and economic promise. He spoke their language. He named their frustrations. He told shoppers at a Pennsylvania grocery store in September 2024 that he would bring food prices down. But as a University of California, Berkeley public policy professor recently noted, each trip to the grocery store now functions as the equivalent of a campaign advertisement against the incumbent. The promise and the price tag are sitting on the same shelf, and voters can see both.

The Iran war, launched in late February 2026, compounded the problem. Gas prices surged, and with them, the cost of transporting and producing food. Concern about gas prices among the general public rose from 34 percent in January to 56 percent by July, according to Pew. For a lower-income household already stretched thin, a spike at the pump can mean the difference between a full grocery cart and a partial one.

Trump himself acknowledged ownership of the economy early in his second term, telling NBC News that it was now the “Trump economy.” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said in late 2025 that the economy Trump owns would begin at the start of 2026. Voters appear to have taken them at their word. A Reuters/Ipsos poll found that majorities of Americans said Trump would be more responsible for major economic problems, while very few pointed to his predecessor.

A Base Under Strain

Among self-identified MAGA Republicans, support for Trump has remained relatively high, though even within that group, the share who strongly approve of his job performance has dropped to 48 percent. The more significant erosion has occurred among the roughly 30 percent of Republicans who do not identify as MAGA supporters. That group began Trump’s second term with nearly universal approval, at 90 percent. By mid-2026, they were nearly evenly split, with 51 percent approving and 47 percent disapproving.

Trump’s overall job approval has fallen to 33 percent in the most recent YouGov survey, with a Quinnipiac poll placing it even lower at 32 percent. The Cook Political Report’s tracker of white, non-college voters shows Trump’s net approval tumbling from a 13-point advantage at the same point last year to a slim 3.5-point edge. Polling firm Cygnal highlighted what it called vulnerabilities among core Trump base segments, particularly working class and older men.

Yet the picture is not entirely straightforward. A Franklin and Marshall College analysis noted that while Trump’s approval among white working class voters has declined, their preference for Republican congressional candidates has remained essentially unchanged, hovering around a nine-point advantage. The question heading into the midterms is whether that preference can hold if the economic pain deepens, or whether these voters will begin to separate their feelings about Trump from their votes for his party’s candidates.

The Party of the Working Class?

Republicans have spent the better part of a decade rebranding themselves as the party of the working class. That identity was central to Trump’s appeal. But the policies enacted under unified Republican control have created a tension that no amount of messaging can fully resolve. You cannot simultaneously cut food assistance for millions of low-income families, pass tax cuts that disproportionately benefit the wealthy, launch a war that drives up energy and food costs, and then tell those same families that you are fighting for them.

Some Republican strategists recognize the problem. Americans for Prosperity warned in May that voters are judging the party on everyday essentials like energy, groceries, housing, and utilities, and urged Republicans to maintain a focus on concrete solutions to lower costs. A Gardner Food and Agricultural Policy Survey found that nearly a third of Republicans selected cost of living and inflation as the most important issue for their midterm vote.

The poor Republicans have not, by and large, become Democrats. Many of them remain deeply skeptical of the Democratic Party and its priorities. But they are growing quieter. They are less likely to show up at rallies. They are less responsive to social media appeals. They are not switching sides so much as stepping back, reassessing whether the movement they invested their faith in has invested anything back in them.

There is a voter in every swing district who supported Trump in 2020 and again in 2024, who put a sign in the yard and wore the hat, and who is now standing in the checkout line at Aldi, doing math in her head, wondering whether she can afford both the chicken and the bread. She is not watching cable news. She is not reading polling data. She is just trying to feed her family. And no speech, no rally, no social media post is going to change what she sees when she looks at the register total.

That is the problem the Republican Party has not yet figured out how to solve.

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Dan Driscoll Resigns as Secretary of the Army After Months of Conflict With Pete Hegseth

Martin D. Vasquez — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 17:05:01 GMT

The youngest Army secretary in history leaves after 18 months, capping a long-running power struggle at the Pentagon during wartime

Daniel P. Driscoll, the 26th Secretary of the Army, submitted his resignation to President Donald Trump on August 31st, 2026. His departure, first reported by The Wall Street Journal, comes after months of escalating friction with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and marks the latest in a sweeping series of military leadership shakeups under the Trump administration.

No official reason was given for the resignation. A U.S. Army official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said only that Driscoll “spoke to the president about the current state of the Army and submitted his resignation.” But the fault lines between Driscoll and Hegseth had been widening for months, and by the end, the two men appeared to be operating with fundamentally different visions for the Army’s future.

White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly praised Driscoll in a statement, calling him “highly effective in advancing President Trump’s agenda to Make America Strong Again at the Department of the Army.” The statement credited Driscoll with “outstanding leadership during historic military operations, restoring an emphasis on readiness and lethality, assisting with negotiations between Russia and Ukraine, and more.”

The Roots of the Conflict

The tensions between Driscoll and Hegseth were rooted in competing priorities and, according to multiple officials, in personal distrust. Hegseth, who served in the Army National Guard for nearly 20 years, took particular interest in the Army’s leadership and moved aggressively to reshape its senior ranks. Driscoll, by contrast, had forged close working relationships with the very officers Hegseth sought to remove.

The most visible flashpoint came in April 2026, when Hegseth abruptly fired Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George, a four-decade veteran who had been expected to serve until 2027. George’s dismissal came without public explanation and during an active U.S. military conflict with Iran. Two other generals were fired the same day: the Army’s chief of chaplains, Maj. Gen. William Green Jr., and the commander of Army Transformation and Training Command, Gen. David Hodne.

Driscoll had worked closely with George on Army modernization efforts and did not hide his respect for the outgoing chief of staff. Testifying before Congress in April, Driscoll described learning of George’s firing while on vacation with his family in North Carolina. “We walked right in, and we all gave him a hug,” Driscoll told lawmakers. “There is no person that has more respect for General George and his 42 years of service. He was an amazing, transformational leader.”

Another source of friction was Hegseth’s decision to block the promotions of four Army officers who had been recommended for promotion to one-star general. Two of the officers were Black and two were women. The blocked promotions were supported by Driscoll and George, and the dispute reportedly drew the attention of the White House. Hegseth also intervened to remove officers from promotion lists after Driscoll refused to do so, an unusual step in the chain of command.

Beyond personnel, the two clashed over the direction of Army modernization. Driscoll had championed drone warfare capabilities and was known within the administration as the “drone guy” for his work pushing the Army to adopt lessons from Ukraine’s battlefield use of unmanned systems. Under Gen. Christopher LaNeve, Hegseth’s hand-picked acting chief of staff, the Army recently dismantled a European drone modernization unit that had been building its own drones, directing it to return to traditional infantry operations.

Hegseth’s Distrust and the Vance Factor

Multiple officials told reporters that Hegseth had been distrustful of Driscoll nearly from the start. Central to this was Driscoll’s close personal relationship with Vice President JD Vance. The two men are both Iraq veterans who met at Yale Law School and have remained close friends. Vance had pushed for Driscoll’s nomination, and Driscoll developed his own independent relationship with President Trump over the course of his tenure.

Hegseth reportedly viewed Driscoll’s White House access as an attempt to go around him, creating a dynamic in which the Army secretary and the Defense secretary operated as rivals rather than collaborators. The friction intensified after the Signalgate scandal in March 2025, when Driscoll was briefly floated as a potential replacement for Hegseth. Though nothing came of it, Hegseth’s wariness of Driscoll only grew.

Hegseth’s own spokesman, Sean Parnell, reportedly told colleagues he was interested in replacing Driscoll as Army secretary, a detail that further complicated the dynamic.

An Unlikely Diplomat

Despite the internal battles, Driscoll’s tenure was defined in part by an assignment well outside the typical scope of an Army secretary. In November 2025, at Vance’s suggestion, Trump tapped Driscoll to serve as a key negotiator in the administration’s effort to end the war between Russia and Ukraine.

Driscoll traveled to Kyiv and formally presented a 28-point U.S. peace plan to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, becoming the highest-ranking Pentagon official to visit the conflict zone during Trump’s second term. He then joined the U.S. delegation in Geneva, where the plan was revised to 19 points, and traveled to Abu Dhabi to present the revised proposal to Russian representatives.

The assignment underscored the unusual position Driscoll held within the administration. He had no formal diplomatic experience, and negotiating peace agreements fell far outside the traditional responsibilities of an Army secretary. But his closeness to Vance and his growing relationship with Trump made him a trusted figure for a task the administration considered critical.

The Broader Shakeup

Driscoll’s departure is part of a larger pattern of military leadership upheaval under Hegseth. Since taking office, Hegseth has fired or sidelined more than a dozen generals and admirals. Gen. CQ Brown was removed as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Adm. Lisa Franchetti was removed as Chief of Naval Operations. Navy Secretary John Phelan departed in April, becoming the first head of a military service to leave during Trump’s second term. Gen. Christopher Donahue, the commander of U.S. Army Europe and Africa, stepped down unexpectedly in June. Gen. James Mingus, the Army vice chief of staff, was also forced out.

In each case, the departing officers were replaced by figures seen as more aligned with Hegseth. Gen. LaNeve, a combat veteran and former senior military aide to Hegseth, is widely expected to be the Defense secretary’s choice for permanent Army chief of staff.

Who Was Dan Driscoll?

Born in 1986 in Boone, North Carolina, Driscoll grew up in a military family. His father served in Vietnam and his grandfather also served. He attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill before being commissioned as an armor officer through the Army’s Officer Candidate School in 2007. He led a cavalry platoon in the 10th Mountain Division at Fort Drum, New York, and deployed to Baghdad in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom from 2009 to 2010.

After leaving active duty as a first lieutenant, Driscoll attended Yale Law School, where he met Vance. He went on to work in investment banking, private equity, and venture capital, eventually serving as chief operating officer of a $200 million venture capital fund. He also ran unsuccessfully in the 2020 Republican primary for North Carolina’s 11th congressional district, receiving about 8% of the vote.

Trump nominated Driscoll in December 2024, calling him “a disruptor and change agent.” The Senate confirmed him 66 to 28 on February 25th, 2025, and he was sworn in the same day by Vice President Vance. At 38 years old, he became the youngest person ever to hold the position.

His tenure lasted approximately 18 months.

What Comes Next

With Driscoll’s departure, the Army loses its top civilian leader during an active conflict with Iran that military leaders have cautioned is unsustainable, now in its sixth month. The Army currently lacks a Senate-confirmed chief of staff as well.

Reports indicate Hegseth is considering Parnell, his top spokesman and senior adviser, as Driscoll’s successor. The departure also raises questions about the broader implications of the Pentagon’s leadership churn. Driscoll is a close ally of Vance, who is widely seen as a potential 2028 presidential contender, and his exit may carry political significance beyond the Pentagon walls.

Driscoll and his family had already moved out of their official residence on Fort Myer, Virginia, near Arlington National Cemetery, before the resignation was announced.

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