American Doom

Ten years ago, in the summer of 2015, a police officer in Cincinnati stopped a man named Samuel DuBose. It was night on a narrow road among winding back streets of a hilly neighborhood. Words were exchanged, and DuBose tried to drive away.Officer Ray Tensing claimed his arms were caught in the window and he was in danger of being dragged, so he shot DuBose point-blank in the head, killing him. I arrived the next day to see if protests would turn to flames. They did not. Tensing, who is white, was indicted for killing DuBose, who was Black. Eventually, Tensing was acquitted for DuBose’s killing. At trial, the prosecution was not allowed to present evidence showing that Tensing was wearing a shirt with the confederate battle flag underneath his uniform.The issue of police claiming that their lives were under threat by someone in a vehicle is not new. What’s new about the killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis yesterday is that her death came at the hands of a federal immigration agent who should have never even been in the city. The primary reason the agent — who has not been named — was even in Minneapolis is that a right-wing political influencer made highly questionable claims about fraud committed by Somali immigrants there, prompting Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to surge her teams to the city.Good was more or less an innocent bystander. Now she’s dead because Noem wanted to continue her campaign of looking tough on immigrants, egged on by a 23-year-old kid pretending to be a journalist by filming Somali immigrants who ran childcare centers, piggybacking off actual reporting by local press who had exposed some fraud tied to the businesses.Good is dead for this reason. She is also dead because American fascism continues to grow and spread in very troubling ways. Take a scan of social media and you’ll see plenty of your fellow Americans justifying Good’s killing. I’ll get to why that’s intellectually dishonest on its face in a moment but for now, consider the ironic phenomenon of conservative Americans lining up in support of masked federal troops occupying American cities and killing U.S. citizens with impunity under the direction of the president himself.This is nearly the exact scenario under which our nation was founded, with all those self-identified patriotic Americans you’ll see in the coming days and weeks praising the agent who killed Good identifying with the colonists and revolutionaries who battled tyrannical overreach and a foreign military on their own streets 250 years ago. Now, the people like Good are the revolutionaries, but the patriots aren’t on their side anymore.***Watch the video of Good’s killing and you’ll see a disorganized and unprofessional law enforcement operation. First, Good waves through an ICE vehicle that passes her by without incident.After this, other agents approach Good’s SUV, appearing to offer contradictory commands, motioning for her to drive away before demanding she exit the vehicle and grabbing the door handle. The agent who killed Good appears to position himself in front of the vehicle — which any cop worth his or her salt will tell you is a bad idea. Good puts the SUV in reverse as an agent wrenches on her door handle. She then shifts into drive and the SUV lurches forward.A video from another angle shows the agent who killed Good sliding from the hood to the front quarter panel of the car. As CNN’s chief law enforcement analyst, John Miller, noted on Wednesday night, it’s only after the agent is out of harm’s way from the front of the SUV that he begins firing. Prior to shooting Good, the agent had his phone out and appeared to be recording her.All of this — the lackadaisical yet contradictory commands and actions of multiple agents on scene, the firing agent’s stupid and pointless maneuvering in front of Good’s vehicle and his filming of her — do not add up to what Noem and president Donald Trump are now trying to sell: that the agent was so in fear for his life had no choice but to fire on Good.If all that weren’t obvious enough, Trump of course had to double down. Hours after the shooting, he claimed that the agent was “viciously” run over by Good. Video shows he was not. In fact, the agent was never even knocked to the ground. After shooting Good and after her car rammed harmlessly into a parked vehicle nearby as she lay dead or dying behind the wheel, the agent can be seen walking just fine under his own power.***Fatal police shootings are always fertile ground for culture war battles between the left and right. Over the last 11 years as I’ve covered them, both sides have gone to extremes. Many on the left think there’s never any reason for an officer to use fatal force. Many more on the right believe that law enforcement should be able to kill just about anyone, for just about any reason.The reality of police uses of force and the events that precede them are much more complex than these two opposing viewpoints allow. But what used to not be up for as much of a debate was whether an officer had a legitimate fear for his life when killing someone. How anyone can watch the videos of Good’s killing and conclude that the agent was legitimately in fear for his life by a slow-rolling SUV that he was just filming with his phone defies common sense.But we are far past that. The American right — taking their cues from Trump or vice versa; it’s hard to tell anymore — will suspend reason in order to be on what it perceives to be the correct side of this police killing-turned culture war flashpoint. They’ll either lie and say they actually believe the agent faced his own mortality and had to make an impossible choice, or they’ll convince themselves that’s the case. There’s a cost to the soul for that. Maybe it’s not one they’ll pay here but they’ll pay it eventually.If Minneapolis burns tonight, or tomorrow, or in the coming weeks or months as Trump’s masked immigration agents focus their harassment campaign on it, there’ll be at least some level of justification. Trump and his people will feel equally justified in responding with their own violence. They’ll invoke the Insurrection Act or send in National Guard troops from Republican-led states. Hell, they’ve been wanting to do that since protests erupted in Minneapolis and across the country following the killing of George Floyd.DuBose’s killing happened in the middle of a two-year stretch of high-profile police killings across the country. A mass protest movement spawned from that, leading to a backlash from white voters who clung to then-candidate Trump’s message of “law and order.”That protest movement then mostly faded from view as the first Trump administration inflicted its daily chaos and corruption on the nation. It came roaring back with Floyd’s killing, further enraging the American right who watched from their small towns as big cities burned. That’s part of the reason why the attempted insurrection on January 6 was so easily dismissed by Trump and his supporters.If Floyd protesters could burn American cities over his killing, why shouldn’t self-described patriots be able to try to overturn an election they (wrongly) believed was illegitimate?Then, as now, we have a president who is unable or unwilling to calm tensions, instead choosing to inflame them as he sees every violent, unnecessary and tragic incident as an opportunity to score points in a nihilistic game that is hastening our national decline. In 2020, the cooler heads in the first Trump administration stopped our would-be dictator from outright shooting Floyd protesters outside the White House. This time, protesters might not be so lucky. In fact, Trump’s troops are already killing Americans like Good.At the time of DuBose’s killing, a question hung over the nation that was difficult to answer, and mostly persists today: Why does this keep happening? With cops all over the country interacting with Americans in innumerable tense and strange circumstances, fatal police shootings are probably always going to happen.But when it comes to Good, the answer is obvious: This happened because of Donald Trump. He caused it. He supports it. He enjoys it. Trump and Republicans don’t see Americans who disagree with them as their fellow countrymen. They see them as the enemy. Or, as Noem described Good today, people who are engaged in “domestic terrorism.”You tell me who you think is causing the terror: people like Good, or the people who killed her.Please follow AD on our social media for a little more doom to your scroll. That’s what we all need, right?* Bluesky - @americandoom.bsky.social* TikTok - @americandoom_* YouTube - @americandoom_* Instagram - @americandoom_* X - @americandoom_* Facebook This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.american-doom.com/subscribe

I’m out today at Public Notice with a look at the obvious lie about the bandages on Trump’s hands — a coverup of some unidentified health problem — and how it’s part of a pattern of Trump’s endless lies starting to catch up to him in the face of reality, economic and otherwise. Today’s post will be brief but I have something longer coming later this week that deals with the downward flow of corruption and viciousness, and how it’s affecting the efficacy of our democracy. That will be my last piece for the year. To thank all of my subscribers for their support throughout this very newsy year, I’m offering a discount of 20 percent off subscriptions to American Doom through the second week of January. Now, onto the news on Trump’s health below, as well as some links to stories you might have missed in a tumultuous 2025…Whatever happens during President Donald Trump’s address to the nation tonight, know that it will be partly an attempt to distort reality or distract from it — and that reality is that it has been a disastrous end to the first year of Trump’s second presidency.Epstein, the economy, extrajudicial killings — how’s that for just some of the scandals that are roiling the Trump administration as it limps out of 2025 and into 2026. Hanging over all of it is the president’s health.A few weeks back I began asking the White House why Trump wears bandages on the back of his right hand. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt responded last week — with an obvious lie.“President Trump is a man of the people and he meets more Americans and shakes their hands on a daily basis than any other President in history,” Leavitt said in a statement. “His commitment is unwavering and he proves that every single day.”Why is this so obviously a lie? Well, there’s common sense, for one: have you ever known a single person to injure their hand from handshaking? I haven’t. There’s a few other reasons why this lie is so obvious and ridiculous, not the least of which is the fact that Trump has had fewer public events this year than any other year as president. Now, he plans to get back out on the road next year to whip up support for Republicans in the mid-term elections, which they’re of course trying to rig in their favor.To prepare for the exhausting prospect of campaign-style Trump rallies, I’ll be taking as much time off as possible over the holidays. This year really has flown by. Like 2024, 2025 was incredibly newsy and we’ve grown quite a lot here at American Doom. Really, these two years have sort of melded together in my mind. There hasn’t been much of a break, so I’m looking forward to taking one.The only reason I’m able to do that is thanks to the support of my paid subscribers. To join those ranks, please consider a paid subscription to American Doom. Believe it or not, next year is going to be even crazier, and American Doom is one of the only publications keeping a close eye on state and local threats to elections. That’s where the rubber meets the road for our democracy, and you’ll want to pay attention to stay in-the-know about how Republicans are working hard to rig the mid-term elections in their favor.Before my last dispatch of the year later this week, take a look at some of the greatest hits from 2025. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.american-doom.com/subscribe

On Friday night, “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth took to X to address one of the growing scandals surrounding him — what increasingly looks like murder, war crimes, or both.“The Department of War will never back down,” Hegseth wrote. “America First. Peace Through Strength. Common Sense. For the warriors, always.”In addition to the gaping holes in Hegseth’s story about the killing of two survivors of a Sept. 2 airstrike on alleged drug smugglers — inconsistencies that will catch up to him at his inevitable congressional testimony — the entire months-long mission to take out supposed drug boats in international waters has required incredible suspensions of reason to square with reality.Of course, Hegseth and many others are clearly lying about much involving the strikes, which have killed 87 people since September. The Trump administration hasn’t presented a single piece of evidence that the targets of the attacks are drug smugglers, that the drugs are even headed to the United States, or that the strikes are any more necessary than the non-lethal drug interdiction operations that have been in effect for decades.Instead, we’ve gotten grainy videos shared bombastically on social media and questionable legal justification for a “war” on “narco-terrorists.”At Public Notice today, I’ve got a breakdown of how these airstrikes are evidence of an erratic and largely leaderless administration running purely on the instinct of morally depraved strivers like Hegseth trying desperately to impress Trump by looking tough. But I wanted to take a moment here to address Hegseth’s (apparent) claim that the strikes necessitate a “never back down” stance by the U.S. military.Let’s start with… America FirstThe administration has claimed the strikes are necessary to take out drug dealers whose drugs are killing Americans. One problem: the boats are coming from South America and carrying mostly cocaine.More than 70 percent of American drug deaths are from fentanyl, not cocaine. If the Trump administration wanted to save American lives, it would be better off doing something about the fentanyl flooding American streets, much of which comes from China.Peace through strengthNothing says strength like the most powerful military in history obliterating speed boats piloted by, in some cases, Venezuelan fishermen.If the disproportionate use of force weren’t enough, we’re also now in the business of killing helpless non-combatants.After a first strike killed nine men on Sept. 2 and separated their boat in half, two men clung to the craft’s wreckage.Democrats who viewed video of the strike said that the two survivors may have been waving their arms in surrender or begging for mercy. Showing strength, our military fired on these helpless souls.Common senseIs it “common sense” to spend untold millions (or billions) of dollars on military strikes to take out low-level drug smugglers? Does that same common sense apply to Trump’s pardon of former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, who was convicted by U.S. courts for smuggling 500 tons of cocaine into the country?For the warriors, alwaysMaybe there are some members of the military who are proud of their work raining hellfire upon speedboats in the Caribbean, I don’t know. What I do know is that this isn’t likely what they signed up for.It therefore must take a significant amount of energy to convince oneself that these strikes are necessary to protect Americans. Are these strikes “for the warriors” then?When Hegseth says, “for the warriors,” he means these strikes are for people like himself — men with little to no combat experience who have romanticized conflict well past its brutal realities. It’s a desperate attempt at self-actualization from a man with a mediocre-at-best resume — an unintentional admission of his own insecurities.***Please follow AD on our social media for a little more doom to scroll. That’s what we all need, right?* Bluesky - @americandoom.bsky.social* TikTok - @americandoom_* YouTube - @americandoom_* Instagram - @americandoom_* X - @americandoom_* Facebook This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.american-doom.com/subscribe

We begin today with news of sweeping pardons issued on Monday to 77 people who tried to overturn the 2020 election. Less important than the actual individuals who were pardoned — bizarrely, for many of them were not under threat of federal indictment, the only classification of crime that falls under the jurisdiction of a presidential pardon — is the message that these pardons send going forward: try to interfere with elections on behalf of Trump and Republicans, and Trump and Republicans will have your back.Among those pardoned were two small-time Trump operatives who share the ignoble distinction of being the only Americans to have infiltrated voting machines in their futile attempt to find non-existent evidence of voter fraud. The American right absolutely loves to warn about the insecurity of voting machines but almost always fails to mention that it was their people in Georgia who were the only ones in recent years to actually illegally access election equipment.Cathy Latham and Misty Hampton worked with Sidney Powell and members of the 2020 Trump campaign to infiltrate voting machines in Coffee County. They then shared sensitive information from the equipment online, where it was accessed by an unknown number of people within the election denial movement. Both were indicted in Georgia for their crimes — state cases that are in danger of being dropped after Republicans targeted Atlanta prosecutor Fani Willis for having the audacity to prosecute obvious election crimes. Latham and Hampton are among a handful of election deniers and Republican officials who tried to overturn the 2020 election, and who were pardoned on Monday.They include Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, who is running to become Georgia’s next governor. Jones was one of the 16 Republicans who signed fraudulent documents purporting to allocate Georgia’s electoral college votes to Trump in November 2020. Jones and his “fake elector” co-conspirators were all pardoned by Trump on Monday.The pardons come as the Justice Department increasingly operates as the governmental arm of the election denial movement. Across the country, the DOJ is demanding access to the personal information of hundreds of millions of Americans as the Trump administration constructs a national database of voters. This database is currently being used to hunt for undocumented immigrants registered to vote — an occurrence so extraordinarily rare that it almost ceases to exist — and in the process likely purge many Americans from voter rolls.The DOJ is also at work in Georgia, demanding access to ballots and other material from the 2020 election in Fulton County as part of yet another futile investigation into widespread voter fraud there. These two undertakings — voter purges based on overblown claims of voting by non-citizens and bogus fraud investigations — are lining up to be the central themes of election denial efforts going into next year.Combined with executive orders targeting voting machines, mail-in and absentee voting and an insistence on one-day elections, the Trump administration, Justice Department, and officials at the state and local levels are all working in coordination to at minimum sow widespread doubt in any results of next year’s elections that don’t result in a win for Republicans.In the event Democrats rack up large wins in next year’s elections, there’s a final stopgap available to Republicans in Washington. Those tools are part of a doomsday scenario that represents the next step in anti-democratic efforts to dismiss the will of the people and solidify Republican power for years to come. I’ll have more on that front in the coming weeks and months.For now, know that much of this is happening right out in the open. Not only are Justice Department officials like pardon attorney Ed Martin bragging about pardoning those who illegally tried to interfere in the 2020 election, but allies across the country are in place in state and local governments working to implement the policies of the election denial movement. Those policies are rooted in a single, troubling goal: ensure no Republican can ever lose an election again.***Please follow AD on our social media for a little more doom to scroll. That’s what we all need, right?* Bluesky - @americandoom.bsky.social* TikTok - @americandoom_* YouTube - @americandoom_* Instagram - @americandoom_* X - @americandoom_* Facebook This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.american-doom.com/subscribe

I’m getting through a bottleneck of reporting and have many findings to share regarding Republican efforts to interfere in elections. You can support my work by throwing a few dollars my way with a paid subscription to American Doom. As always, thanks for your support. - jgWhen was the last time you remember voting in an election for your public utilities board? Who were the candidates and how much did they win by?If your answer to those questions is anything but, “I have no idea,” please seek help. Kidding, of course. Most Americans don’t pay attention to these types of elections, let alone things as local as school boards or city councils. But things are a bit different nowadays. Have you noticed?Taken by themselves, the wins of Alicia Johnson and Peter Hubbard to become the first Democrats to serve on Georgia’s Public Services Commission — which oversees utility rates — since 2007, don’t amount to much for their implications on the balance of power in Washington. But, as you may have heard by now, Johnson’s and Hubbard’s wins were not the only good news for Democrats last night.Zohran Mamdani beat up Anthony Cuomo in New York. Democrats took the governor’s offices in New Jersey and Virginia. (They also took the lieutenant governor’s office in Virginia and took even more control of one of their legislative chambers.) Voters in California overwhelmingly turned out in favor of a Gavin Newsom-backed proposal to draw new district lines to help Democrats take control of the House of Representatives.Across the country, Democrats didn’t just win; they cleaned up.That includes Georgia’s Public Service Commission, where Johnson and Hubbard beat their Republican opponents by 25 points. It was the first time since 2006 that Democrats in Georgia won a statewide race for a non-federal election, as the AJC’s Greg Bluestein pointed out.While there are certainly voters who took to the polls yesterday in Georgia who were solely focused on the issue of public utilities — the costs for which have been rising substantially since 2022 — the margin of victory for Johnson and Hubbard points to something else: Americans are fed up with Trump and Republicans, and they will vote for just about any Democrat they can get their hands on. That’s an encouraging sign heading into next year’s mid-terms, when Republicans will pull out all the stops to both rig the election in their favor and call into question any results that don’t favor the GOP.More on that soon. But for now, do yourselves a favor and tune into Fox News for a few minutes today to see their hosts being apoplectic over a self-described democratic socialist becoming the mayor of New York in a decisive victory. We’re still a long way from preventing further democratic backsliding, but yesterday was a hopeful reminder that there are many more reasonable, freedom-loving Americans than there are those who support Trump’s authoritarian power grabs.***Please follow AD on our social media for a little more doom to scroll. That’s what we all need, right?* Bluesky - @americandoom.bsky.social* TikTok - @americandoom_* YouTube - @americandoom_* Instagram - @americandoom_* X - @americandoom_* Facebook This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.american-doom.com/subscribe

Lots of info in today’s special Saturday edition of American Doom about how election deniers in Georgia continue to screw with elections here. It’s going to be a mess next year thanks to their success in convincing state lawmakers that they’re serious people (they are not). Anyway, lots of messes these days. You won’t find this information elsewhere — in Georgia or anywhere for that matter. So if you appreciate my work, please consider a paid subscription to support it. A free press ain’t for free! - jgI spent the better part of Thursday watching a meeting of a committee of Georgia state legislators discussing elections. The committee has hosted meetings around the state on various aspects of election administration, and Thursday’s was focused on Georgia’s membership in ERIC, the Electronic Registration Information Center.There has been a lot of right-wing noise about ERIC since 2020 and I’m not going to rehash all that — it’s mostly reactionary nonsense that came as a result of Donald Trump losing that year and many Republican states being very sour about it.Suffice to say that Thursday’s hearing was another example of what has become an unsettling reality in this country: conspiracists, cranks, and plain incompetents re granted the same deference and space as competent professionals who have spent years and decades gaining the respect of peers in their areas of expertise.This phenomenon has been almost entirely facilitated by Republicans, from Trump on down to people like Georgia Rep. Martin Momtahan, who you’ll meet in a moment. The GOP has been taken over by a class of politicians with great disdain for the level of professionalization on display at places like ERIC, or Harvard University, or the FBI — unless the person is someone like Trump who is very good at making money.Of the many shameless grifters working to climb their way up the very crowded and cutthroat ladder of modern Republican politics, election deniers are the largest group and often the most shameless — and bizarre. Their lack of shame is rooted in the fact that they never have to actually do anything. Like everyone in the highest echelons of the Trump administrations, all they have to do is go around breaking what other people have built.Election deniers say our election systems are rife with fraud. Not only can they never actually prove it — instead, they have a lot of conjecture they say should lead to investigations by, you know, actual authorities — but they have no real way of replacing this broken system. Well, that’s not entirely true. They do have a way, but it’s absurd. I’ll get to that in a second as well.Republicans like Momtahan want to point to things like the fact that ERIC has an address listed in Washington DC but no office there. (This, to Momtahan and others, is apparently evidence of some unexplained wickedness on the part of ERIC. For security reasons, ERIC’s director, Shane Hamlin, said on Thursday that he would not divulge the exact location of the organization’s data center, but said it was located somewhere in the Midwest.) Momtahan and Republicans want to point to “their constituents” who have questioned ERIC — nevermind that their constituents have no background in election administration and are getting their information from some of the election denial grifters who were invited to speak at today’s hearing.Republicans in Georgia and elsewhere want to point to the men and women of the election denial movement as if they were reasonable, competent, serious people. They simply are not. But that’s the situation across our society, where unserious flamethrowers now have great power because many of our fellow Americans think that people like Trump and Momtahan are kind of cool. They tell it like it is. They’re just like them, you see — not some fancy bought-and-paid for college professor with a haughty title. Momtahan spent today’s hearing doing his folksy, I’m a small businessman bit, something that is awfully tiring when you’ve been around long enough to realize this isn’t about small-town common sense, but about the deep insecurities of people like Momtahan who want to be liked and respected for their intelligence, but just never quite figured out how to achieve that.I’ve watched countless hours of these types of meetings over the last four years and am always struck by the obvious and profound un-seriousness of both government officials and members of the election denial movement. But there really is something about watching these folks discuss things that are so clearly out of their depth that words just can’t do justice for, so I’ve included a few clips of some of the exchanges that caught my attention.***Momtahan went on to grill Harris over ERIC’s security protocols, consistently conflating access to voter data via the Internet with susceptibility to hacking — despite Harris repeatedly explaining that ERIC staff only access voter data after going through several digital security checkpoints. Just really tough stuff to watch.I’m sorry that you had to watch all of that but it’s important so that you can understand what we’re working with here as lawmakers in Georgia and elsewhere operate under the belief that anything tied to the Internet means that system can be hacked by Antifa, or whatever. This entire exchange could be summed up by simply saying that Momtahan does not understand what a VPN is. I will also note that when Momtahan mentions digital security for his own small business, he is talking about the driver’s education company he runs — not a multi-state data-gathering operation like ERIC dealing with tens of millions of voters and untold billions of data points. Bit of a difference there.There was plenty of other ignorance-based questioning of people like Blake Evans, Georgia’s elections director, but I want to skip ahead to the deniers who spoke at Thursday’s hearing. First up was Mark Davis, an obscure political consultant who appears to run a company that deals with campaign marketing. Last year, Davis was floated by the State Election Board’s Dr. Janice Johnston — herself an election denier — to be on a “monitoring team” for Fulton County, ground zero for Georgia election conspiracies.Here, Davis has an exchange with Georgia Rep. Saira Draper, a Democrat. Draper points out that Davis’ research has led him to advocate for investigating virtually every single person in the state of Georgia who changes their address in an election year. Like many of the tortured theories of the election denial movement, Davis’ work does not show any purposeful acts of voter fraud — like double-voting or false registrations in order to illegally vote for one candidate or party over another — but routine technical errors, like voters forgetting to update their addresses.Davis’ research is based on National Change of Address data, which you’ll hear a lot about if you spend as much time in election denial circles as I do.Just to clarify: poor people move a lot. People in the military move a lot. Young people move a lot. People with aging parents might move a lot. What Davis is saying is that all of these changes of addresses are probable cause to investigate hundreds of thousands of Georgians for voter fraud under the belief — because election denialism is akin to religious belief systems — that something very bad is going on with all of this.Next up was Garland Favorito, who if you are not familiar with, you should consider yourself fairly lucky. Favorito is perhaps the state’s most prominent election denier — and certainly one of its most colorful. Like Davis, Favorito has many theories about widespread election fraud in Georgia, but can never seem to boil them down into a succinct explanation. He’s one of those guys who insists that you listen to him for as long as he is able to speak in order for you to understand that he is correct.But even if you give Favorito all the time in the world, most reasonable people will come away more confused about who is carrying out voter fraud in Georgia and how, let alone why. Favorito’s theories are an amalgamation of disparate bits and pieces of information, lore, and conjecture that, together, add up to his conclusion that the only way to ensure completely secure elections is to have him and all of his people looking over the shoulder of every single poll worker in the state as they hand count paper ballots. (Voting only on paper ballots and having them hand-counted by poll workers is the replacement election system proposed by Favorito and others. Trump has glommed on to this, recently issuing executive orders demanding hand-counted paper ballots.)Draper pointed out that, for all Favorito’s advocacy for what he calls “election integrity,” he has no apparent interest in the actual breach of election equipment in Coffee County in 2020. That breach was carried out by pro-Trump election officials who gave access to their election equipment to associates of Mike Flynn, Sidney Powell, and Mike Lindell. Those associates — including the Atlanta law firm who I busted for their role in the illegal breach — then turned around and published the sensitive information they’d obtained on the Internet.Some in Georgia maintain that that information would allow anyone who accesses it to get inside every voting machine in the state. To reiterate: the most serious breach of election equipment in recent Georgia history — the very thing that Favorito, Davis, and many others are so intent on stopping — was carried out by Trump-supporting Republicans.Favorito and his fellow election deniers have a lot of theories about election fraud in Georgia. They have successfully lobbied the State Election Board — run by a majority of Trump supporters — to pass scores of rules that will affect millions of Georgia voters. They have also called for the board and other entities to investigate supposed fraud in Fulton County.Their claims center around about 3,600 ballots that were double-counted in the county in 2020, which one of the many recounts and audits from that year found was the result of technical errors and had no effect on the outcome of the election. Now, they’re calling for 148,000 ballot envelopes from Fulton County in order to prove their fraud claims.***I watched the Cubs vs. Padres Thursday night and saw a trio of challenges to rulings on the field. Two were overturned and one was sustained, if memory serves me. Both teams clearly thought they were right when they challenged the rulings, but they accepted the results — even when they didn’t go their way — and played on. What Favorito and others are saying is that they simply won’t accept the results unless their team wins. Not only do they truly believe that there is no way that a Republican can lose an election, but they want to be inside the replay booth when the call on the field is reviewed.They simply do not trust the professionals counting the votes to make the right call, and they never will. No amount of ballots handed over from Fulton County, or access as poll watchers to stand over the shoulders of poll workers, or even hand-counted paper ballots or any of the many other demands they routinely make will ever be enough. That’s why none of this is going away any time soon, and will probably get worse before it gets better.With Trump in the White House and enablers leading every federal agency, the situation has become even worse. The Justice Department has joined people like Favorito in investigating bogus fraud claims, setting up even more distrust in elections as we head into next year’s mid-terms. Trump and Republicans will claim fraud and maybe even try to contest the results, leading to a standoff in the House of Representatives that will mirror what happened on January 6. And as long as no reasonable Republicans stand up to this madness, nothing will stop it from consuming much in its path.***Please follow AD on our social media for a little more doom to scroll. That’s what we all need, right?* Bluesky - @americandoom.bsky.social* TikTok - @americandoom_* YouTube - @americandoom_* Instagram - @americandoom_* X - @americandoom_* Facebook This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.american-doom.com/subscribe

As I said the other day, the Jimmy Kimmel debacle is more evidence that harsh crackdowns on freedom of speech and the free press are coming very quickly. It would mean a lot to me to see some of American Doom’s 13,000 subscribers throw a few bucks our way for a paid subscription. Or, you can contribute to our Doom Coffee Fund to support our work. Evidence of the Trump administration’s complete disregard for the rule of law and the checks and balances put in place by the founders to prevent a tyrannical government continues to pile up.The latest instance of the Trump regime telling other branches of government to kick rocks came courtesy of FBI Director Kash Patel in a pair of congressional hearings this week, which I outline today at Public Notice.Patel almost surely lied to members of the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, telling them that he has never pressed FBI agents on their personal political beliefs. That’s not true, according to a lawsuit filed by three former FBI agents who say they were fired for exactly that. The agents, who have a combined 60 years of experience in the FBI, say Patel and deputy director Dan Bongino helped the White House to carry out a political purge within the agency of agents who worked on investigations into Trump’s many crimes, or were simply suspected of being Democrats. These allegations — made by agency veterans under the penalty of perjury if they happen to be lying in their lawsuit — did not stop Patel from completely denying the claims during his Senate testimony.Patel’s apparent act of perjury this week shows his and the Trump administration’s DGAF attitude toward any level of accountability or checks on their power. And this emboldenment is rapidly getting worse. Patel, Trump himself, congressional Republicans, and the entirety of the right-wing media ecosystem have been clamoring since Charlie Kirk’s death for crackdowns on liberal activist groups, NGOs, and media outlets that they say are partly to blame for the stunning and troubling killing of Kirk. Patel made clear this week that the FBI will lead those efforts.***We are witnessing a mass-scale effort to shape a narrative of a vast left-wing conspiracy that involves George Soros, funding for left-wing think tanks, non-profits, advocacy organizations, media outlets, journalists, and academia — all leading to street-level violence and political murders like Kirk’s. (This, despite the fact that the political ideology of Kirk’s killer appears to not fit easily into a standard right-left paradigm.) Trump has even designated the amorphous Antifa as a “major terrorist organization,” which is not a lawful designation of any kind. Like Trump’s use of “emergencies” to justify things like expanded ICE operations and domestic deployment of the military, the Trump regime is using Kirk’s death to justify widespread crackdowns on free speech.The Antifa “terrorist” designation will surely be used to justify investigations into left-wing groups, in addition to that political capital to weaponize the FBI against progressive Americans in the wake of Kirk’s killing.“We’ve seen an explosion of political violence, not just one-off lone wolf attacks, but organized, systemic political violence at a mass scale — it is not organic,” Eric Shmitt (R-Mo.) said at Tuesday’s Senate hearing. “It is the offspring of a dark and clandestine system funded in part with our own tax dollars with a large network of foundations, NGOs, activist organizations and front groups.”Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) repeated Shmitt’s claim that “left-wing violence” is “not organic.”“The violence we are seeing is not purely organic,” Cruz said. “There is, I believe, significant money that is spreading dissension, that is spreading violence.”Schmitt’s reference to “the George Soros empire” financing left-wing extremism, partly with American tax dollars, was also not a one-off. On Monday, as he hosted an episode of Kirk’s podcast from the White House, Vice President JD Vance noted that Soros provides funding to The Nation, which published an article about Kirk’s extremist statements that Vance became incensed about.“Did you know that the George Soros Open Society Foundation and the Ford Foundation, the groups who funded that disgusting article justifying Charlie's death, do you know they benefit from generous tax treatment?” Vance said, referencing The Nation article that declared Kirk’s “legacy deserves no mourning. “They are literally subsidized by you and me, the American taxpayer. And how do they reward us? By setting fire to the house built by the American family for over 250 years”***The growing focus on investigating left-wing organizations, non-profits, media outlets and even social media platforms coincides with the expansion of the federal government into all aspects of American life.The Trump administration has successfully wielded the power of government agencies to pressure companies, non-profits, universities, media outlets, Democratic politicians and others into complying with its authoritarian demands.Companies and universities have cancelled programs aimed at diversity, equity and inclusion under Trump’s “anti-woke” edicts. Non-profit organizations like the Smithsonian and national parks have been forced to comply with the administration’s revisionist history in removing references to slavery, while the military and Republican states have assisted in reviving the legacy of the confederacy by renaming Army bases after confederate generals, and putting monuments back in place across the South.Media outlets have continually cowed to the Trump administration by settling specious lawsuits and firing employees who have been outspoken about authoritarian policies coming from the White House.On Wednesday, in apparent capitulation to FCC Chairman Brendan Carr’s demands to crack down on Trump critics, ABC suspended comedian Jimmy Kimmell indefinitely after he pointed out that the politics of Kirk’s killer were more complicated than is being portrayed by the American right.Kimmell’s suspension also comes as ABC affiliates seek the FCC’s approval for a historic merger that would require changes to federal regulations that limit what share of the American television audience a single company can broadcast to.Meanwhile, some Democratic politicians like Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and California Gov. Gavin Newsom have stood up to the Trump administration’s expansion of federal law enforcement to carry out Trump’s mass deportation policy and his domestic deployment of the military, but others like Washington DC Mayor Muriel Bowser haven’t put up much of a fight.We’re putting up a fight here at American Doom in ways the legacy media is failing to do. But we can’t do it without your support. You can become a paid supporter of American Doom for as little as $6 a month.Since Kirk’s killing, right-wing pundits and politicians have applauded the Trump administration’s efforts to punish anyone who has not sufficiently mourned Kirk — or who have simply pointed out some of his extreme statements.Now, with the help of Patel’s politically-aligned FBI, they’re pushing for investigations and prosecutions of left-wing groups in both the private and public sectors to continue their campaign of vengeance — not just over Kirk’s killing, but of their fundamental belief that anyone who is against Trump is anti-American.The situation could hardly be more ironic: Republicans, long the party of small government and states’ rights, are now backing the most aggressive expansion of the federal government into public and private life in recent history. Congress has completely abdicated its role as a check on executive power, leaving the courts to act as the lone constitutional bulwark against an all-powerful federal government.This brewing battle between the executive and judicial branches is lining up to be a possible endgame to all this madness. For now, the courts are holding. But there are signs on the horizon that they won’t be able to hold Trump back for much longer. ***Please follow AD on our social media for a little more doom to scroll. That’s what we all need, right?* Bluesky - @americandoom.bsky.social* TikTok - @americandoom_* YouTube - @americandoom_* Instagram - @americandoom_* X - @americandoom_* Facebook This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.american-doom.com/subscribe

Forget all the usual, anecdotal ways into an explanation of what is happening at this moment, because we appear to be in that stage of the fall where it all starts happening at once. Following the firing — let’s call it what it is — of Jimmy Kimmel, Donald Trump went even further in comments on Air Force One on Thursday afternoon, saying that any broadcast company that allows criticism of the president to air on television should lose their FCC license. Legacy media is adjusting its coverage and hiring right-wing propagandists under threat of lawsuits from Trump and his government — when those outlets aren’t settling those lawsuits and paying Trump off. The nation’s largest media outlets are also firing reporters for speaking out against the Trump administration, and for putting Charlie Kirk’s legacy in its proper context: he did not deserve to be murdered; he was also a hateful person who viewed a future America in which minorities and the vulnerable were punished or cast aside for their mere existence. Both of these things — the reality of Kirk’s hateful words and policy positions and the evil of his murder — can exist simultaneously. The mainstream press has been unable to consider these two truths at once, capitulating to an American right that is demanding all Americans sufficiently mourn Kirk on the terms his supporters dictate. That ain’t freedom. If we are going to keep our freedoms, we have to focus our energies in areas we actually have influence and some control over. I’m lucky enough to have a small amount of influence thanks to the readers of this newsletter, but I need your help. American Doom’s work is made possible thanks to paid subscriptions. Those funds keep everything you read here free for your fellow citizens. But only a small number of our 13,000 subscribers are paid. I’d like to see a lot more than that — not so I can make more money. For, if financial riches were my goal, I would not have become a journalist in the first place. No, I would like to see more of you choose to spend some of your hard-earned dollars here because I think it sends an important message — however small — that Americans support independent, adversarial journalism at a time when free speech faces the greatest threat of my lifetime. That’s no small thing, even though it takes just a few dollars a month to do.Thank you for your support. - jg This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.american-doom.com/subscribe

At a Tuesday hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee, FBI Director Kash Patel said his agency will investigate organizations that “utilize clickbait to make money for their ideology.”Allow me to translate: the FBI will now go after media outlets, think tanks, NGOs and activist organizations who lean left or are antagonistic toward the Trump administration, Republicans and conservatives. This is the exact type of weaponization of the Justice Department that Republicans in Congress and their allies in right-wing media have wailed about for years — and now that power will be wielded against any media outlet or organization critical of the American right.Specifically, Patel said he’ll seek warrants under 18 U.S. Code § 2703 (d) that will allow the FBI and other federal law enforcement agencies like the Treasury Department to obtain communications from media outlets and other organizations. All of this is in response to media outlets, individual journalists, and everyday Americans who Patel, the Trump administration, and Republicans have deemed insufficiently mournful of Kirk’s killing.In some cases, those who the American right has deemed guilty of inappropriate remarks about Kirk have simply pointed out his own words and extremist policies.***Maybe you remember the climate of fear that permeated the nation after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Democrats and Republicans united to avenge the deaths of more than 3,000 Americans. They also united to expand the powers of the executive branch and the surveillance state.The Patriot Act fundamentally changed the government’s ability to spy on its own citizens.We’re seeing something similar now, albeit far less bipartisan. All the right-wing noise from the last decade about cancel culture, about censorship of speech on social media, about being able to converse on platforms like Parler even if some of those conversations involve coordinating acts of domestic terrorism like the January 6 attack on the Capitol — all of that is now out the window.In the aftermath of the murder of Charlie Kirk, the American right has united under the banner of cracking down on the left, even if that means doing all of the things that the right has claimed were an infringement of their own liberties.Since Kirk’s killing, elected officials and right-wing media have swiftly lurched into action, demanding all of the types of crackdowns they have bemoaned in the last 10 years. In less than a week, the American right has:* Carried out a cancellation campaign directed at anyone the right deems to be not sufficiently mourning Kirk’s death. In Texas, where Gov. Greg Abbott has, in recent years, made a lot of noise about supporting free speech on college campuses so that conservative students can express viewpoints in line with those of people like Kirk, a Texas Tech student was arrested during an altercation with Kirk supporters. She has been charged with assault, although it’s unclear exactly how she physically engaged anyone.* Tried to get an Office Depot employee fired for refusing to print a flyer for a Kirk vigil. (Reminder: this is the same party that fought all the way up to the Supreme Court for the right of a baker to refuse to bake a cake for a gay couple’s wedding.)* Has called for investigations into left-wing advocacy groups and NGOs. (Reminder: this is the same party that criticized the Obama-era IRS for investigating tax fraud by conservative groups.)* Has called for crackdowns on social media. (Reminder: this is the same party that made a mountain out of the Biden administration asking Twitter to moderate content regarding election lies and other subjects.)* Has said, actually, not all speech is protected. (This comes from the nation’s most powerful libertarian politician, Rand Paul.)* Has encouraged the FBI to investigate people who have celebrated Kirk’s killing or, in the case of an Atlanta man, investigate people for buying t-shirts.At Tuesday’s hearing, Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) demanded an end to the “bullshit” narrative of political violence by “both sides.” He listed a series of attacks and violence by left-wing actors in recent years, including mentioning a conspiracy theory about “riot bricks” that stems from unfounded claims of bricks being left on the streets of American cities during protests over the killing of George Floyd in the summer of 2020.Schmitt claimed that these acts of left-wing violence were the product of a “dark and clandestine system” of activists groups and NGOs, specifically singling out liberal megadonor George Soros.“There can be no unity between good and evil,” Schmitt said.Schmitt and other Republican lawmakers have been beating the drum since Kirk’s death that this alleged “network” of left-wing groups needs to be dismantled. Vice President JD Vance said on Monday, while hosting an episode of Kirk’s podcast from the White House, that liberal groups are funded, in part, by U.S. tax dollars. (Schmitt said the same on Tuesday.)“And how do they reward us?” Vance asked. “By setting fire to the house built by the American family [for] over 250 years.”(Reminder: it was Trump supporters who stormed the people’s house on January 6, 2021 and tried to overturn an election for the first time in the nation’s history.)White House advisor Stephen Miller then chimed in as Vance’s guest.“The last message that Charlie sent me was [...] I think it was just the day before we lost him, which is that we need to have an organized strategy to go after the leftwing organizations that are promoting violence in this country,” Miller said. “And I will write those words onto my heart.”Schmitt alluded to going after more than just Soros-funded groups and NGOs. The Soros-funded “anarchists on our streets” are being “propped up by an army of researchers and journalists and propagandists who downplay the political violence.”Stop me if you’ve heard the one about right-wing politicians going after researchers/academia and the press for calling out right-wing violence.At Tuesday’s hearing, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) even mentioned dissent itself as a pretext for investigating left-wing groups.“The violence we are seeing is not purely organic,” Cruz said. “There is, I believe, significant money that is spreading dissension, that is spreading violence.”***Please follow AD on our social media for a little more doom to scroll. That’s what we all need, right?* Bluesky - @americandoom.bsky.social* TikTok - @americandoom_* YouTube - @americandoom_* Instagram - @americandoom_* X - @americandoom_* Facebook This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.american-doom.com/subscribe

Good morning. Long week. I’m out today with a look at the turmoil within the FBI over at Public Notice. A few items on that below and then some stuff on the killing of Charlie Kirk. The last two weeks have felt a little more troubling than normal, which is obviously very bad because our acceptance of the normal level of troubling-ness is already bad. Anyway, if you want to support my work, please subscribe to American Doom.FBI Director Kash Patel took a lot of credit both for himself and his agency at a press conference this morning in Utah. But first, he thanked President Donald J. Trump for his role in law enforcement bringing Charlie Kirk’s killer to justice in “historic” time.“I want to express my deep gratitude to President Trump, the vice president and the entire White House who have been so incredibly supportive with both resources and just personally to the FBI as a team,” Patel said. “They had our backs the entire way.”“In 33 hours,” Patel said, “we have made historic progress for Charlie.”Patel then laid out the timeline. The first FBI agents were on scene within 16 minutes of Kirk being shot. The agency then “launched fixed-wing assets” to “transport personnel.” (This means they flew FBI agents on planes out to Utah, including Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino on Thursday night.)“At my direction,” Patel went on, “the FBI released the first set of FBI photos of the suspect at 10 a.m., local time on 9/11.”For all the Americans across the nation hanging on Patel’s every word — and especially the one at the White House — Patel then got to the most important part: “Myself and Deputy Director Bongino arrived on the scene at approximately 5:30 p.m. on 9/11.”Neither Patel or Bongino are investigators. Their presence at an active crime scene is both unprecedented and unnecessary. It was all for show, for the benefit of one man.By 10 p.m. Thursday night, Kirk’s killer was in custody. But it would be another 10 hours before the nation learned that the manhunt was over — because Trump himself wanted to make the announcement on Fox & Friends on Friday morning.What followed has become the routine American practice of trying to determine what political team the killer is on. I’ll get to more about that in a moment. But first let me tell you about Patel’s FBI, which is, not surprisingly, considering his strange and amateurish performance at the Friday morning press conference for the benefit of making Trump happy so he won’t fire Patel, in turmoil because of Patel’s basic unfitness for the job and the political purge he has carried out within the agency.Also, he and Bongino’s brains are consumed by their online presence, meaning that their primary focus is to gain the approval of their social media followings — not necessarily do the job of running the FBI.These facts have come to light thanks to a lawsuit filed on Wednesday by three FBI veterans with nearly 60 years experience in the agency combined. In any other presidential administration, Wednesday’s lawsuit would be a monumental scandal. In Trump’s second term, it’s simply a news item on a Wednesday.The lawsuit lays out how Patel, Bongino, Trump lawyer-turned federal judge Emil Bove, and a 29-year-old Trump loyalist with no law enforcement experience have purged the FBI of veteran agents simply because they’ve refused to submit to total fealty to the president. In other words: the Trump administration has completely weaponized the FBI so that it can be used to punish the president’s enemies — including perceived enemies within the agency itself, regardless of their level of experience and expertise.The lawsuit also shows the level of online brain rot that Patel and Bongino are working with. Both men, according to the lawsuit, are so consumed by seeking the approval of their online followings that they can’t be bothered to consult the incredible wealth of materials at their disposal.In one instance, Bongino asked Steven Jensen — one of the agents who was fired and is named as a plaintiff in the lawsuit — whether he worked on January 6 prosecutions. Bongino was concerned about this because “people were saying online” that the agent had prosecuted January 6 attackers, the lawsuit states. The agent told Bongino that, yes, he had worked on those prosecutions as part of his role as Section Chief of the Domestic Terrorism Operations Section, which Bongino would have known about if he had read the agent’s “publicly available FBI biography and official personnel file.”Patel’s obsession with online clout-chasing, meanwhile, was apparent on Wednesday night, when he told the world on X that Kirk’s killer had been arrested. Two hours later, he recanted. I reached out to Sen. Mark Warner’s office about all this. Warner has been raising the alarm about the political purge within the FBI and its implications on the agency’s ability to solve and prevent major crimes. This is what he said:“The allegations in this lawsuit only confirm what’s obvious to anyone paying attention: Kash Patel is more focused on curating his social media image than doing the hard work of keeping Americans safe,” Warner told me. “Most Americans expect the FBI Director to be focused on threats to our national security, not how many followers he has on X.”So, the FBI is in turmoil, losing experienced agents because they did their jobs and investigated Trump for his many obvious crimes, or because they might have voted for a Democrat. Plus, it’s being led by two social media addicts who are being directed by the online mobs that they need to appease in order to maintain their influence.Paid subscribers help fund my work, and there’s a lot of work to be done. Maybe you can help send me to Memphis for another domestic military deployment. The wars against ourselves are heating up.It makes perfect sense, then, that Patel and Bongino saw the need to fly out to Utah to… just be there while actual members of law enforcement chased Kirk’s killer. And when it came to actually catching Tyler Robinson, the break in the case came when his family turned him in.Patel kicked off his remarks on Friday morning by saying, “This is what happens when you let good cops be cops.” It turns out the best cop involved was Robinson’s own farther, a veteran of the local sheriff’s office, who turned in his own son.But Patel and Bongino are Internet-warped ideologues. They see everything through the lens of the good vs. evil, right vs. left, LAW AND ORDER vs. DEFUND THE POLICE that they both subscribe to and has greatly aided their rise to positions of power they never should have had. Meanwhile, good cops are getting the boot because they don’t support Trump enough.Now, on to Robinson.***The one potential upside of Patel and Bongino being so terminally online is that they might actually be able to help the FBI move into a modern age of extremism based on incoherent political ideology. In the case of Robinson, it appears that, like Trump’s would-be assassin in Butler, Pa. last year, he either had no traditional conservative or liberal ideology — or he was even more far to the right than Kirk was, which is why he took him out.Much has been made of the “Hey fascist! Catch! ⬆️➡️⬇️⬇️⬇️” engraving Robinson carved into one of the shell casings in his gun. Right-wing media and Republicans have glommed onto this as evidence that Robinson was a left-wing extremist. But as younger reporters and non-legacy media outlets are pointing out, the engravings on Robinson’s bullets are more complex than the smoothed-out, HE WAS ANTIFA storyline being pushed by the American right.At a minimum, the engravings are “a confusing mix of internet memes and pop culture,” reports the Verge. Taken further, it’s entirely possible that Robinson was a far-right supporter of Nick Fuentes — a Groyper — who disagreed with Kirk for not being further to the right.Regardless, Kirk is dead partly because of the ironic, nihilistic gamer culture of the Internet that pervades so many young American lives.“Many young extremists now believe in a much simpler binary: Order and chaos,” Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day writes. “And if you are spending any time at all trying to derive meaning from violent acts like this then you are, by definition, their enemy.”I spend a lot of time reading and reporting on right-wing extremism, constantly consuming content posted by election deniers and deciphering their conspiracies, and this is damn far out there even for me. I can’t imagine what the FBI, let alone local cops in Utah, are making of all this.But it seems like now would be a good time to have someone like Steven Jensen at the FBI, running investigations into domestic terrorism. Too bad he’s gone, and the Trump administration has scaled back investigations of domestic terrorism in favor of immigration enforcement.*** This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.american-doom.com/subscribe