American Doom

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

Less of a news thing today and more of something that you’ll want to sit down with a cup of coffee for. The University of Georgia Press has completed design on the cover for my forthcoming book, and I’m very excited to share it with you today. Below is an excerpt from the book. If you support my journalism and writing, please consider a paid subscription to American Doom or a contribution. Founding members will get a signed copy of the book, called If I Am Coming to Your Town, Something Terrible Has Happened - The Life and Times of a Domestic War Correspondent. As far as domestic conflict zones go, this one was pretty tame. The Georgia State Troopers who were blocking access to part of the Hyundai Metaplant last week let me drive right on by into an area that looked like it was meant for employees only.On the main road leading into the plant no one bothered the small group of us press who had gathered there. The helicopter flew overhead at a distance. Inside, what I imagine were dozens of armed immigration agents rounded up terrified workers, including a pregnant woman, eventually arresting more than 400 of them. A Republican political candidate took credit for the raid, providing more evidence that if armed authoritarian forces don’t get you, your neighbors just might.I left this troubling scene and drove to meet a contractor at our new home. There I discussed the gates to a white picket fence we’ll have constructed to keep the dogs in the yard, fixing minor termite damage, running some new electrical, and when the permits will be secured. In other words, normal, everyday life stuff.This juxtaposition between the worlds I inhabit as a journalist and a citizen, husband, and otherwise normal guy, are jarring at times. I flew to Los Angeles in June to witness an illegal domestic military deployment and the ensuing police riot. A few days later I was back at home, mowing the lawn.Over the years, I’ve learned to balance these two opposing versions of reality, but it’s taken a lot of work and some pain to get here. For a while, the everyday niceties of life — this semi-suburban reality I often find myself in now as I come into middle age — were difficult for me to cope with. How could I partake in, let alone enjoy these things, knowing that flames, violence and strife were ravaging some city just a quick plane flight away?I rebelled at the thought of doing anything other than concentrating on conflict and chaos; you go have your nice things, I would think of others with derision. I’ll stay here in the dirt.Now, I’m much better at maintaining a balanced perspective — one that reminds me, for every ugly and violent thing, there is a beautiful and peaceful one.This should come in handy over the next few months and years, because even as I’ve achieved this greater sense of balance and acceptance, things have gotten worse.As a nation, we are hurtling toward a version of government and society that is brutal and punishing. This violence and vindictiveness has always been just under the surface of American life — the subject of most of my reporting throughout my career — but is now emerging in the open, as the official policy and characteristic of not just elected officials and the governments they control, but of our friends, neighbors and families.Now, I’m faced with a new juxtaposition to come to terms with: that even as my personal life gets better, more loving, more peaceful, more stable, the collective American life continues to decline into conflict and instability.I am very lucky to be able to leave a situation like the Hyundai raid and return to my comfortable, stable personal life. Many others are not. I’m also very lucky to be able to make a living doing what I love, and to be able to express my opinions and have a voice while so many are increasingly constrained from doing so.Coming to terms with this injustice — that for a variety of reasons that include privilege, circumstance and luck, I am able to travel freely between the theaters of conflict and peace — has taken a long time. It’s one of the themes of my forthcoming book, which will be published next year by the University of Georgia Press — another thing in my life for which I consider myself very lucky.In February, on the first anniversary of this publication, I shared an excerpt from my book, which is called If I Am Coming to Your Town, Something Terrible Has Happened - The Life and Times of a Domestic War Correspondent. Below is another excerpt. I hope you’ll read it and think about all the things in your own life that you’re grateful for. Because in the face of brutality and oppression, we all need reminders of gratitude and hope.Hundreds of local election officials across the country are in place to screw with next year’s mid-terms. Support my work investigating those officials with a paid subscription.***PEORIA, Ill. — On a hot July morning with the sun beating down on the dirty dashboard of one of the newspaper’s cheap Dodges, I was driving on a street on top of the west bluff that separates a part of Black Peoria from white Peoria when I heard the call on the police scanner. “10-32,” and then the address. “10-32” means someone has been shot. The address I knew, more or less: an ice cream shop called Tall Bob’s in the South End of Peoria. I got there before the police had crime scene tape up. A man had been shot somewhere else before he ended up in the parking lot where he screamed as the paramedics tried to stop the blood from running down his leg. The blood ran down the side of the tan leather seat of the SUV and dripped onto the door jamb. I watched the man bleed and scream as the paramedics around him tried to stop him from doing both. Fifteen minutes before I stood there in the parking lot I had left the newsroom for my first full shift on the cops beat. This was my first morning on the job. By the time I stopped to look away from the bleeding man I realized I was on the other side of that tape. I remember a cop saying that I’d have to stay now that I was on that wrong side of the line. But he was just joking so I left and drove down the street to where the police were having a press conference where they explained what had happened. When the police and the paramedics had finished their jobs and left, there were bloody plastic surgical gloves strewn all over the parking lot where people waited in line for ice cream like nothing had happened. Tall Bob’s was open for business again.It was 2012 and I was a cub reporter. Technically, I was an intern but I worked 40 hours a week just like everyone else at the paper. The newspaper’s headquarters sat on the edge of the east bluff, which overlooked the river on a road called 1 News Plaza. The bluffs, as they had since Peoria was founded, were natural markers between the Black and white neighborhoods of the city, between poor and rich. The paper’s printing press took up an entire building with three stories of glass windows that lit up the giant printing press inside like a snow globe at night. Toward the river from the press room was the main entrance, where in neon red gothic font the words Peoria Journal Star shone across the parking lot. I never saw anyone in the lobby but I walked through it each day and nodded at a secretary who is no longer there because no one is there anymore. up a stairwell with seafoam green tiles on the wall was the hallway that led either to the executive suites or past advertising and photography. I always chose the path past advertising because it meant I didn’t have to walk by the editors’ offices. I was scared of them and thought it was only a matter of time before they figured out I didn’t belong there and fired me.Six and sometimes seven days a week I walked into the newsroom through the back entrance by the photography room and passed a cork board that was supposed to be for upcoming events — fundraisers, happy hours, birthday parties — but never seemed to have anything current on it. Next to letters mailed to the newsroom from reporters who had left the paper behind was a photograph taken less than a decade before. It showed more than 100 people all standing under the gothic font of the newspaper’s entrance smiling on a blue sky day. More than half of their faces were covered with red Xs. Some quit, some took buyouts or were laid off as different owners of the paper looked to cut costs. The newsroom was filled with empty desks that once belonged to these departed reporters. The reporters who were left just kept working next to the empty desks, absorbing them into their own workspaces and filling them with whatever clutter couldn’t be contained on their own desks. Stacks of yellowing newspapers sat on the empty desks of the reporters who once put stories on those pages. I walked into the newsroom hungover and with dry mouth from the night before while sipping a cup of coffee and carrying a sub for lunch. I went to the desk where Anthony or Brad or Gary sat under a brown plastic sign hanging from the ceiling that said “Metro City Desk” and grabbed a chunky, black police scanner.When something bad happens the scanner plays the all clear tone, a high-pitched boooooooooooooop followed by a click. When the scanner hears a voice, it stops on that frequency and plays the sounds back to you. Then the information comes in from the dispatcher or an out-of-breath cop: a person shot, an armed robbery, police opening fire. After the all clear tone I waited to hear the address. “10–32, 600 block West Main.” Once I heard it I’d grab the scanner and a notepad and drive to the scene. There were a lot of them in the summer of 2011. That year, Peoria had the most homicides in a year since 1989. Twenty-three people were killed, including a five-year-old boy who took a bullet that went through his bedroom wall when he was at his uncle’s house for a sleepover. The cops thought whoever killed the kid was actually trying to kill the uncle but the uncle never cooperated with police and so they never solved the child’s murder.Boooooooooooooop the scanner would say and I’d perk up. Even today, I can hear that all clear tone when its musical key plays in some commercial or on someone’s phone over the din of any barroom or the whine of any highway. It comes back to me at times when I’m least expecting it and puts me right back in that newsroom or driving around the streets of Peoria.I heard the all clear tone one day and listened for the address, then drove toward Trewyn School in the South End. There was a car with the doors open and little yellow placards with numbers on the ground where the shell casings had fallen. There was a 19-year-old boy under a white sheet. Neighbors came out of their houses to see what was going on and people driving by stopped to get a look. A woman called out to anyone who would listen that if all these kids in the neighborhood were so good with guns that they should “go to Iraq” and fight in the war there. A police lieutenant hugged her by promising to find her son’s killer. She landed on her knees and cried and begged God to bring her son back but there was no answer.I drove back to the newsroom and wrote up the story which went under the headline 1 DIES IN SHOOTING. That story got the front page because it happened in the daytime when a photographer was able to get to the scene and take a photo. You need a photo if a story is going to go on the front page. Most of the stories I wrote about people who were killed in Peoria didn’t end up on the front page. Instead, I wrote them up in a few paragraphs called a brief. The brief would say when and where the person had been killed but not much else. The briefs went on the inside of the paper in the B section, where only those who knew where to look could find them.About a month later I walked into the newsroom to find a note on my desk. A 23-year-old man named Robreco King was found dead the night before in an empty lot in the South End, where a lot of the city’s crime and most of its murders took place. I called the coroner and asked for the man’s home address, which she wasn’t supposed to give out but did so under an unspoken agreement with the paper.I knocked on the screen door to a small screened-in porch and told a woman who I was. Then an old man came out and invited me to sit down with him in the porch. He was the victim’s grandfather, he said. His son, the dead man’s father, fiddled with a car parked in the driveway but didn’t want to talk. Besides, the father couldn’t hear very well because he had been shot himself years before and the injuries had taken some of his hearing. But the grandfather wanted to talk. He was frail but wiry and strong in the way that old men, insistent upon continuing to live, are. What a meaningless thing, to take a life, he said, more upset than sad. He knew. He had done it before and paid the price with a long prison sentence for a killing he did decades earlier in Chicago. After that he’d come to Peoria to get away from the violent madness of the big city, only to find a different variant here. His son had almost been killed in the shooting that partially deafened him, and now his grandson was dead. He just wanted the cycle to stop. “I wish someone would make these people put it on paper: What do you get out of killing another man? People don’t put value on life, but it’s worth a whole bunch.”I called my editor and told him this incredible story: a reformed murderer whose son was almost killed and now had a dead grandson, and who was calling for peace on the streets of Peoria. So we sent a photographer. The grandfather sat on the couch with his daughter-in-law and her children and posed for the photo. The photographer and I thought we had done something powerful: humanize a murder victim and his family as something more than just another “Black man killed in Peoria’s violent South End.” The next day, I opened my email to find that I had missed what the Journal Star’s readers had not: the grandfather’s fly was open. He had bared his soul for all of Peoria to see but all that the readers saw was that he had forgotten to zip up his pants.***After a few months at the paper, the editors asked me what cops shifts I wanted. I chose nights because that’s when the most action was. But no matter how big of a night I was expecting — maybe a revenge killing after a week of violence in a certain neighborhood — I always had to write a feature to fill the front page. Splitting your time between writing fluff stories about Oktoberfest or the opening of a new Bass Pro Shop and standing around at crime scenes is a fucked up exercise in understanding the ubiquity of violence in American life. It’s everywhere and nowhere at the same time. It is hard to enjoy a dinner party when you know that someone is being murdered just across town and you’ll have to write about it. On nights when I wasn’t working I was usually listening to the scanner anyway. If I wasn’t listening, I was usually distracted, keyed up, unable to concentrate on whatever was happening around me because I was thinking about what I was missing out on the streets. I call this straight life and real life. Straight life is what most of us do all day every day. We pretend everything is fine as we buy houses and clean our cars, plan dinners and happy hours with friends, go to see bands or play in a softball league. Real life is what happens when the sun goes down and someone pulls out a gun.I started to spend less time in the straight life. Instead of going home after work I went to the bars downtown and sat in back booths alone and watched people pass by, knowing nothing of what had happened in the city that day or what would happen that night. But I knew Peoria as if it were a person and I could read her face. When fall is coming and gray skies hang over the city for weeks, the city’s abandoned homes stick out a little more. When summer is peaking and everyone’s grass is green and you can hear lawnmowers and sprinklers and kids giggling as they play in the streets, Peoria seems as good as any place. But nighttime is different. Sometimes daytime is different, too. It just depends on the time of year, or how much someone has had to drink, or nothing at all. Sometimes people kill just because they feel like it.***There is one very quick and simple way to tell that the past sins of this country were never really addressed, and that’s by taking a trip to any given courthouse on any given day. In Peoria, the white lawyers and judges constantly doled out sentences and judgment to the city’s poor Black residents. The dockets there were filled with Jacksons, Kings, and Hightowers; in Bemidji, Minnesota, last names like Whitefeather and Kingbird filled court filings.I could see dozens of little lights from the fish houses out on the frozen lake as I drove into town on a freezing December night. It took 12 hours of driving to get from Peoria to Bemidji, where I had landed a job as a reporter at the Pioneer. Bemidji was in the middle of a trio of reservations: White Earth to the west, Leech Lake to the east, and Red Lake to the north. Like a lot of cities, even small ones, Bemidji is racially segregated, with most of the Natives living on reservations and coming to town mostly to work and to go to court.I made a spreadsheet of cases I wanted to write about. There were killings, stabbings, and sex crimes in this little town that hadn’t gotten much attention in the Pioneer before I got there. I had taken the job because the Journal Star. had no place for me. After working as an intern for more than a year, I interviewed for an open reporter position. One editor told me she was concerned about my lack of a college degree. I had made the mistake of thinking that the words I was putting into the paper themselves were worth more than a degree from some school.After weeks of sending résumés and clips to newspapers around the country, the Pioneer was the only one that took my call. It helped that a friend from Minnesota who had interned in Peoria had taken a job there to cover City Hall. He got my foot in the door. I worried that there wouldn’t be enough bad news in the small town for someone like me to cover. An editor in Peoria told me that there were stories to be told everywhere, and sometimes the small places had plenty of ugly things going on.I didn’t trust the cops or the people in the courthouse and they didn’t trust me. Not long after I got to the paper, a longtime sports reporter at the Pioneer told me that I would attract more flies with honey than vinegar because I was making some people in town angry with my style. They thought I was a hard-charging city slicker or something like that. I was and I was fine with it. As far as I was concerned, vinegar was the only thing that could get the job done. The newsroom was clean, new and comfortable and smelled like carpet glue and fresh paint. The people who worked there were all from the area and had worked there for years and probably had never seen a body under a white sheet. I was convinced something was wrong with this town and that I was going to find out what it was. I began my search by pissing off the police.The cops had killed an Iraq war veteran in his own home during a nighttime standoff. I put the veteran’s widow on the front page with her questions about why police had killed him. Six months later a SWAT team sniper killed another man after an hours-long standoff at his home. I spent the day standing down the road from the man’s home while listening to police chatter on my scanner. I also put out some of the information I heard from the scanner on Twitter. After almost five hours, the standoff ended with a helicopter taking the man’s body to Fargo for an autopsy. The next morning, the sheriff and the police chief came to the Pioneer newsroom and sat in a small conference room with the editor, telling him that I shouldn’t have posted information about the standoff online. They said that I could have put officers in jeopardy and compromised the entire operation. I had a hard time believing that the subject of the standoff was following my Twitter account for updates when he could have simply listened to the same police radio frequencies I was. I also had a few questions about why police had to kill the man. They said it was because he pointed a rifle at them. I think the cops just got tired of standing around in the sun all day and wanted to go home — a thought I did not share with the two law enforcement veterans staring me down in a conference room at the newspaper.Then, a few days later, I reported the name of the officer who fired the fatal shot. In Peoria I had been taught that the profound responsibility society gives to police officers to take a life means that we get to know their names when they do. The town’s two top cops didn’t see it that way. They refused to release the names of the officers involved, so I went around the sheriff and the chief of police and got the names from the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. I called a reporter in Peoria for a gut check and he confirmed my thoughts — it’s that simple, he said. Cops kill someone, you print their name. I didn’t think much of it. I did my job and went about my day, not knowing what would happen next.The newsroom was flooded with letters and emails to the editor and publisher deriding the paper for its decision to publish the officer’s name. In Peoria, this would have been no big deal. It was a city, and everyone there played by the rules of a city. There was an expectation that if you did something newsworthy — whether you were a teacher who had molested students or a cop who justifiably killed an armed madman — your name would end up in the paper. But before I’d arrived in Bemidji, this apparently wasn’t always the case.Plus, I’d learned something else, something that would come back years later and continues to shape the grievance-based politics of our present and future: I had made the mistake of thinking that police considered themselves responsible to their fellow citizens in the same way that I was held accountable by the people reading my stories. I thought we were all part of the same society. Instead, I learned that many police consider themselves separate from the rest of us, maligned defenders holding chaos at bay so we can enjoy cookouts in our backyard without being murdered in cold blood.*** 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

Big story last week in Rolling Stone that exposed the genesis of what we now know is the largest single immigration raid in the history of the Department of Homeland Security. Long story short: a Republican congressional candidate and her union-worker helper called ICE on the Hyundai Metaplant outside of Savannah, GA. If you appreciate my reporting on this story — which you won’t find anywhere else — please pay for it. The Trump administration violated two landmark laws that have been in place for over 200 years that codify the military’s presence in everyday American life — and in doing so has laid the groundwork for military interference in the 2026 mid-term elections.Donald Trump, the Justice Department, Homeland Security and the military will face no concrete consequences for violating the Posse Comitatus Act and the Alien Enemies Act, as determined by two federal courts last week. In fact, Trump and his backers throughout the federal government, federal law enforcement, and the National Guard and the military, have signaled they’ll continue to violate laws created to prevent the executive branch from establishing martial law, or otherwise using men with guns to enforce their policies and protect their rule.That includes using the military to “impact” elections, as one of the judge’s who handed down last week’s rulings wrote.If it weren’t for the typical firehouse of news and scandal that has become a hallmark of Trump presidencies, the decisions last week from four federal judges that the president violated both the Posse Comitatus Act and the Alien Enemies Act would be massive, impeachment-level developments. Instead, the judges’ decisions landed like a feather in a nation that is increasingly hurtling toward open authoritarianism even as daily life continues relatively normally.In the days following the decisions — which came from Judge Charles Breyer in the Northern District of California and a three-judge panel in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals — the Trump administration oversaw a military execution in the south Caribbean, while the president himself has continued to threaten Democratic cities with military occupation and infiltration from the federal immigration agencies that have effectively become Trump’s personal law enforcement forces.While all of this is obviously very troubling, the National Guard presence in Washington DC — complete with scenes of Guard members picking up trash and mostly just standing around — belies the seriousness of the precedent that the White House is setting.The grave consequences of accepting Trump’s military and law enforcement occupations of Democratic cities as normal was alluded to in Breyer’s decision, which laid out some of the scenarios with which Trump could use the military toward anti-democratic ends. Those scenarios are made more feasible thanks to a June decision from the Ninth Circuit, which determined that Trump can deploy the National Guard if “his ability to execute federal law has been ‘significantly impeded.’”Breyer compares the legal threshold granted by the Ninth Circuit givingTrump wide leeway to deploy the National Guard or the military to “the stricter statutory requirement that he be ‘unable with the regular forces to execute the laws’” in order to send in the troops, as Trump is so fond of doing.Breyer then lays out several theoretical instances in which, under this broad interpretation of executive power over domestic military deployment by the Ninth Circuit, Trump could use the military. One scenario is simply to halt elections."The President, relying upon anecdotes from state election officials that voting machines are glitching, or that fraud exists, could claim that he is unable to execute the election laws."In fact, we are already seeing this argument being laid out by the Trump administration. Through the Justice Department’s pressure on states for access to sweeping and detailed voter data, in addition to Trump’s executive orders on election rules, plus his statements about completely doing away with mail-in ballots and voting machines, the White House is preparing for a takeover of elections.One way Trump could do this is by claiming some sort of national emergency that would allow him to employ the Ninth Circuit’s interpretation of domestic use of the military.“For instance, the Ninth Circuit’s test would likely enable a President to use federal law enforcement agents to stoke tensions and then use any resistance as justification to call forth the National Guard,” Breyer wrote. “As long as the President actually believed that the resistance significantly impeded his ability to execute federal law, it is hard to see how a court could find that he acted in bad faith, especially under the Ninth Circuit’s deferential standard of review.”In other words, Trump can say crime is really bad in a Democratic city — or that election officials in a blue state are corrupt and elections are rigged — and send in the National Guard to get the situation under control.“Could the President, for instance, assert that he is unable to enforce obscure tax or drug laws and then use the federalized National Guard to execute the election laws?”Yes and yes. This is where we’re headed.On the same day of Breyer’s decision, the Fifth Circuit determined that the Trump administration “improperly invoked” the Alien Enemies Act (AEA) by claiming that the presence of Tren de Aragua gang members inside the United States amounted to an “invasion.”Using this tortured legal rationale, the Trump administration then renditioned undocumented immigrants to the notorious CECOT prison in El Salvador and elsewhere.The same day that the Trump administration was deemed guilty of violating the AEA, it announced that it had blown a boat to smithereens in the waters of the south Caribbean. The boat contained 11 people — either drug runners or migrants trying to make it to the United States, depending on who you believe.Now, military assets are gathering off the Venezuelan coast ostensibly to take out drug cartels, meaning Trump is fighting illegal wars both at home and abroad.***It has become fashionable in recent years to compare current events in the United States to those in pre-war Germany — and for good reason. This isn’t because it’s simply easy or lazy on the part of writers, historians, journalists and others, but because it’s so applicable to what we’re currently witnessing.William Shirer’s doorstop of a book, the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, provides, in excruciating detail, the tale of the tape of how Adolf Hitler consolidated absolute power in an otherwise democratic society. The first third of Shirer’s book shows how a nation can vote itself into authoritarianism, dictatorship, and far worse.Fear and violence played a major role in that consolidation of power. Germans of all political, religious and socioeconomic stripes thought they could appease Hitler and his Nationalist Socialists through compromise or cooperation. One after another, each of these groups was crushed by the Nazi party as it ruthlessly continued upon its authoritarian path.Some of our friends and neighbors on the American right — be they pocketbook Republicans, Reagan conservatives, Bush-ian neo-conservatives or whatever other non-authoritarian factions remain of the GOP — think these comparisons to Nazi-era are ridiculous.What these Americans fail to recognize is that the Republican Party as a non-authoritarian institution fails to exist. From the top down, anyone who calls themselves a Republican is either fully supportive of the party’s anti-democratic efforts toward something like total authority or competitive authoritarianism, or they falsely believe that all of this is overblown.Either way, like the Germans who thought the same, they’ll get run over by the authoritarian rumble just the same.The best way to do this is to first convince your party that there is an existential threat that must be eliminated, and only you and your people can do it. Then you have to actually start eliminating the threat — or at least making it look like you are.The deployment of the National Guard and robust Homeland Security forces to Los Angeles in June was called Operation Excalibur. (Breyer alludes to the fact that this is probably no coincidence, writing that “Excalibur is, of course, a reference to the legendary sword of King Arthur, which symbolizes his divine sovereignty as king.”)The goal of Operation Excalibur was “to demonstrate, through a show of presence, the capacity and freedom of maneuver of federal law enforcement within the Los Angeles Joint Operations Area,” according to Breyer.In other words: we can do whatever we want, whenever we want, to you, and there’s nothing you can do to stop us.Further, anyone who does try to stop Trump’s forceful incursions into the territories of his political enemies — either through protest or legal argument — will be accused of crime and disloyalty.When National Guard Major General Sherman told DHS officials that his troops were prevented from performing certain law enforcement tasks by the Posse Comitatus Act, they began “questioning Sherman’s loyalty to the country,” according to Breyer.The questioning of Sherman’s “loyalty” to the United States came from Gregory Bovino, who as DHS chief for the Los Angeles region has emerged as a steadfast authoritarian voice. Bovino was the DHS face of the immigration raid carried out last month at a fundraising event held by California Gov. Gavin Newsom.Bovino’s comment “is relevant because Chief Bovino’s accusations of disloyalty go to the state of mind of decision makers who are tasked with ensuring that the Posse Comitatus Act is followed,” Breyer wrote.Again, in other words, they don’t care about following the laws that prevent military incursion into everyday American life — one of the very things that prompted the founders to declare independence from England.Among the reasons listed in the Declaration of Independence for our separation from Great Britain — many of which could easily apply to Trump — is the issue of troops in our lives.“He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.”All of this comes down to elections — the only thing preventing us from Trump and Republicans obtaining absolute rule. By succeeding in getting the courts to agree with the White House on domestic use of the military, we’re getting closer and closer to free and fair elections being a thing of the past, according to Richard Bernstein, a former clerk for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and a charter member of the Rule of Law Society. If courts continue, as the Ninth Circuit did in June, to accept the Trump administration’s arguments for domestic use of the military, “ […] such a decision would neuter the federal criminal prohibitions on the use of the military, including National Guard units in federal service, to interfere with elections,” Bernstein wrote last week. “These arguments are thus a dagger pointed at elections — the heart of our Republic.”***Here are some other examples of our growing acceptance of martial law.* The Trump administration is using drones to monitor protests and releasing the footage — with no apparent relation to any crime being committed. * The Trump administration is immigration judges and replacing them with inexperienced ones, including military judges.* Deportation training is now the sole priority for federal law enforcement, meaning that the occupation of majority-minority American cities will grow. Even without sending in the National Guard, Americans in large cities will become more and more accustomed to the sight of Trump’s masked agents on the streets. * A small company with no experience in large projects won a bid to build a detention camp in the Texas desert, part of rapidly increasing detention capacity for immigrants. This is an example of powerful and growing incentives for people, companies and communities to participate in the enforcement of Trump’s authoritarian policies on immigration and other issues. * Federal law enforcement continues aggressive behavior towards the press, furthering an attitude of lack of accountability to the public and loyalty to the president alone. *** 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

It’s 2:06 a.m. and I’m wrapping up a story at Rolling Stone that details how a Republican candidate for congress in Georgia was partly behind yesterday’s ICE raid at a Hyundai plant here. Like, as basically an informant. Pretty wild stuff! I wish I had more time and energy to lay out more about that story below but I’m pretty tired, so the following will have to suffice. You can read more here. FYI this was not at all what I planned to spend the last 12-plus hours on but when the dystopian stuff happens right down the road from your house, you just sort of have to go. Anyway, if you appreciate this journalism please pay for it.Oh, something cool: Here’s the cover of my first book, which will be published by the University of Georgia Press next year.Cool, right? Anyway, on to the news…On the drive to a massive Hyundai plant outside Savannah, I passed entire neighborhoods that have been built to house the workers there. The plant, which opened in March, was lauded as the biggest economic development project in Georgia history by elected officials like Gov. Brian Kemp. Thanks to Hyundai’s decision to build the plant on the side of the interstate in Bryan County, there are more than 7,000 new jobs there, county officials said last year. The plant and its offshoots have resulted in more than $2 billion in investments in the county.I drove past the new neighborhoods and pulled off the interstate, passing a handful of brand new gas stations that weren’t there last year, and driving through new roundabouts on the outskirts of the plant. Then I drove around the plant for a while until I found the Georgia State Patrol cars blocking an entrance. Overhead, a helicopter hovered. Somewhere past the state troopers were the masked agents from ICE and Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), who arrested as many as 400 undocumented immigrants there on Thursday.I came home to check on the dogs and the wife and checked online to see what folks were saying about the raid. That’s when I found Tori Branum, a Georgia woman who is running as a Republican for the 12th congressional district. Branum claimed credit for alerting ICE to the presence of undocumented immigrants working in and around the plant that the agency raided on Thursday.“For months, folks have whispered about what’s going on behind those gates now the truth is finally catching up (sic)” she wrote on Facebook. “I reported this site to ICE a few months ago and was on the phone with an agent.”I called Branum up to learn more about how she helped ICE in its investigation and operation today in Georgia. She told me she simply contacted the agency on its website at first. At some point, she came into contact with a local union worker who spoke Spanish. That person had access to the facility, apparently spoke to some employees there, and reported to Branum that undocumented immigrants were on site. She then put the union worker in touch with ICE.Barnum said she’s been getting “a lot of hate” but isn’t really bothered by it. She said she feels good about what she did. After all, she said, busting “illegal immigrants” and getting them out of the country is why she voted for Donald Trump in the first place. That, and cracking down on crime, among I’m sure many other things that we didn’t get a chance to talk about.She told me that, if it were up to her, everyone not born in the United States should have to leave, more or less.“Every person that wasn’t born here would go back to the country they came from and come back the right way,” she said. “And we’d have a whole reset of this whole debacle.”Anyway, you can hear some of her comments as well as some videos from the raid above. More at Rolling Stone today and more here next week on election denier stuff.*** 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

Today’s post contains a checklist for progressive Americans to use in fighting back against the authoritarian actions coming from the Trump administration. These tasks are the result of my two decades reporting on American violence, decline and extremism. If you support this work and insight, please consider a paid subscription or contribution to help fund my reporting.After a few days last week digging back into the epidemic of election denialism that has roiled the nation over the last four years, I was struck by just how difficult the task that lies ahead seems.And I’m not just talking about how to combat the scourge of efforts to interfere with — or completely suspend — next year’s mid-term elections and maybe even elections after that.I’m talking about the bigger task, the one that begs the question, How do we get out of this? The path forward seems impossible at times. After all, Republicans have it easy: completely detached from fact and truth, all they have to do is convince what appears to be an increasingly uneducated electorate that the scandalous lies they tell about liberals and Democrats are somehow true.I’ll provide some evidence of what this demonization of non-authoritarian Americans looks like, then offer an initial checklist of things we can do to protect our values and communities. That checklist is based on my reporting on myriad issues related to American decline over the course of my career, from everyday street crime, to police brutality, online radicalization, immigration, right-wing extremism and election denialism.You can skip straight to the checklist or keep reading to learn a bit about how we got here. This checklist is incomplete, but can be considered a partial antidote to the authoritarian checklist that Trump and Republicans have had great success in working on these last eight months.To skip straight to this list, scroll down. But first, some evidence of how challenging this will be.***As I combed through election data for Pennsylvania’s 67 counties last week, Doug Burgum was on CNN, repeating what the White House clearly believes is a winning talking point — one of those salacious lies the Trump administration constantly tells. Burgum told CNN’s Kaitlin Collins that he just couldn’t understand why any Democratic mayor or governor wouldn’t welcome Trump’s twisted “offer” to send National Guard troops into the nation’s largest cities. Considering that such deployments would virtually eliminate crime in the country, Burgum concluded that Democrats must simply be “pro-crime.”Now, any reasonable person would understand this is not true. The only people who are “pro-crime” are criminals. But just in case there was any ambiguity in Burgum’s messaging, senior White House advisor Stephen Miller helpfully offered his take on why Democratic leaders don’t want troops on their streets.The entirety of the Democratic Party — including everyday Americans who don’t support the president — are “domestic extremists,” Miller said last week. I’m not sure what’s more depressing: the fact that grown adults have resorted to this pathetic behavior in service of their party’s leader, or that something like one-third of Americans actually believe such obvious nonsense.But the number of Americans who apparently support straight-up authoritarianism is stunning.Ten months after the election, I finally took some time this week to go through county-level election results from important states like Pennsylvania, Nevada, and North Carolina. The data is troubling, to say the least. I’ll have more on my findings in a future post, but for now I’ll just say that the data shows that these three supposedly “swing” states are becoming redder. Perhaps worse: blue counties have voted less and less for Democrats over the last 16 years. Meantime, stable Republican counties have voted at higher and higher percentages for their candidates.The bottom line is, I found no evidence that even progressive areas of the small sample of states I analyzed were becoming more progressive. I did, however, find substantial evidence that the Republican areas of those states are becoming more Republican. This means that — having seen exactly who Trump is, knowing full well what the plans were for his second term — Americans have voted in greater numbers for Republicans.I saw someone the other day posit that the reason that Democrats largely can’t combat Trump’s increasing authoritarianism is that, as relatively well-educated people, they simply can’t believe it’s actually happening. That time is well past. Y’all better start believing it, or we’re double-fucked.Democrats and progressive Americans must start coming to terms with the fact that many of their friends and neighbors — either through ignorance or abject support — back a political party that cannot be thought of as anything but mostly-authoritarian. In the starkest terms, this means that Americans who don’t want to live in an authoritarian society must prepare for the worst. Whatever bad thing you can imagine happening, it probably will.The upside here is that if you prepare for the worst and it doesn’t happen, you’ll be pleasantly surprised.I think that part of this inability or unwillingness to accept the simple fact that our government is now led by an openly authoritarian political party lies in the widespread belief that the United States was sort of post-history. At least, that’s the perception that I had growing up. All that bad shit was behind us — fascism, racism, sexism, tyrannical government oppression. We had figured it out. America wasn’t perfect; there were disagreements, but we had evolved beyond the extremism, the wars, and the ignorance of societies that preceded us. We had a messy but functioning democracy that, through the long arc of history, always seemed to get better. Until it didn’t. That time is now.Part of the reason this can feel so hopeless is because all of us who aren’t on the side of authoritarianism simply cannot compete with the lies. By the time journalists publish their stories fact-checking the false claims and lies, they’ve already rocketed around the Internet, flooding the minds of millions, thanks to an army not of right-wing journalists, but full-on propagandists. People who have come of age as young adults in the last 10 years don’t remember a time when, between the hours of 9-5, Fox News was a relatively normal news network. Now, even as news breaks, the personalities on Fox run cover for Trump and Republicans, credulously sharing their claims as objective fact. This is the most watched news apparatus in the nation. The speed of this cycle has become faster over the last decade, making it so that news no longer holds attention in the way that it once did. As a result, we quickly forget things that have already happened — hastening what I think is a growing perception among younger generations that what is now is what has always been.But those of us who haven’t been swindled by the false promises of authoritarianism remember the lessons of the past. It’s incumbent upon us, then, to ensure that each of our little portions of this society reflect our values.As such, here are some suggested areas of focus for progressive Americans to consider when organizing in their communities. I hope to expand on these more in future coverage here at Doom, in addition to my ongoing investigations of the election denial movement, and other adversarial reporting on the authoritarianism that is increasingly surrounding us.***GovernmentSchool boards, boards of elections, county commissions, city councils, state legislative offices, metropolitan planning organizations, sheriffs, prosecutors, and judgeships should all be the focus of progressive organizing and get-out-the-vote efforts. The American right has made incredible progress over the course of the last decade in taking over these government bodies, while the left has fallen short.Healthcare and social servicesProgressive communities should partner with hospital systems and universities to continue providing research for and access to vaccines, as well as general healthcare, elder care, and access to abortion and gender-affirming care throughout communities. Local governments should work with allies in business and activist communities to ensure that social services are properly funded as the federal government reduces funding and perverts the missions of agencies like FEMA, HHS, HUD, the FHFA and more.Law enforcementProgressive communities should work with local law enforcement agencies to institute a broad variety of policies that reflect progressive values. At the top of the list is ensuring that local law enforcement in our communities do not participate with ICE on immigration enforcement. Further, cities and states can and should pass rules and laws that prohibit the hiring of ex-ICE agents as police, as well require more robust education qualifications to become a member of law enforcement. Cities and states should create citizen review boards to hold law enforcement agencies accountable for improper use of force and other abuses of power. Finally, cities, counties and states must immediately stop the practice of encrypting police radio frequencies in order to allow the continued monitoring of day-to-day police activity by journalists, community members and activists. Localities that have already encrypted their police communications should, at the very least, provide access to those frequencies to responsible media outlets and activist groups.Investigation and prosecutionProgressive areas of the country should utilize aggressive enforcement of all administrative licensing, taxation, code and ethics rules to pressure Republican elected officials and community leaders. Government agencies, advocacy groups and citizens should aggressively investigate compliance with professional licensing rules and regulations, and tax and code compliance for all businesses, organizations and prominent community members who provide financial or other aid to Republican and conservative causes and officials. Additionally, all Republican elected officials should be aggressively investigated by the press, Democrats and allied law enforcement for compliance with municipal, state and federal rules and regulations regarding their personal and business interests, as well as their compliance with campaign finance laws and financial disclosure rules.MediaProgressive citizens, businesses and activist groups should monitor local press for uncritical, supportive or simply lazy coverage of Republican-authoritarian policies and statements by elected officials. Advertising boycotts, public pressure on editors and news directors, and relationship-building with local reporters, influencers, and media personalities should all be utilized to ensure that local press is accurately and responsibly reporting on authoritarian threats to communities.Activist trainingLawyers, military veterans, first responders, retired law enforcement and others with knowledge of civil disobedience, civil unrest, and conflict zones should offer training and education for citizens and activist groups. Progressive communities should provide regular training opportunities and education regarding individual rights during interactions with local law enforcement, federal authorities and the military. Safety training for civil unrest, mass casualty events and military or law enforcement incursion into communities should also be a part of ongoing education and training within communities.***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

Just a quick thing today about a comment from Trump that most people missed. Then I’m back in the research chamber finding out how the Trump administration, the Justice Department and others are working to interfere with next year’s election. But I wanted to flag Trump’s comment, made during a back-and-forth with reporters and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office.Zelenskyy was asked if he’ll hold elections once peace is reached between Ukraine and Russia. Of course, Zelenskyy said. But he couldn’t safely guarantee “legal” elections while the war continues. That’s when Trump chimed in: Oh, you mean you can suspend elections during wartime? Imagine if I did that, Trump said. Joking? Not joking? It doesn’t matter because something like this is a reasonably foreseeable. If you don’t believe me, just listen to Trump’s own words about how maybe being a dictator isn’t such a bad idea, or how he can declare national emergencies whenever he wants, send the troops wherever he wants, and maybe even serve a third term.Anyway, share this post and video far and wide, because I don’t think everyone is paying close enough attention. It’s going to take a lot of work to expose the massive network of election deniers standing between the nation and a free election. Choose a paid subscription today to support my work. 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

Will we have elections next year? I hope so but honestly, I don’t know! What I do know is that there are thousands of election officials and untold amounts of court cases that stand between right now and an honest-to-goodness, free and fair election next year. It takes a lot of work to stay on top of all that and expose bad actors, like I’ve been doing for years. If you want to support those efforts, please choose a paid subscription to American Doom or throw a few dollars in our Coffee Fund. It’s hard to imagine in today’s environment of non-stop authoritarian rumblings coming from the White House, but just less than five years ago, as Donald Trump tried to cling to power amidst an election loss to Joe Biden, the Trump administration hatched what was then a shocking and unthinkable plan.In a never-issued executive order, the most fervent conspiracy theorists and executive power absolutists that the American right has to offer drew up plans to seize voting machines — with the military, if necessary. Trump’s direct involvement in those plans — if any — has never been fully revealed. The plan never came to fruition, and what followed was Trump’s flailing and criminal attempt to overturn the 2020 election. The never-issued executive order was just a part of that attempt, helping conspiracy theories about voting machines to rise from the dregs of the election-denying American right to mainstream Republican policy. Since then, the election denial movement has continued its assault on all aspects of elections, including voting machines. Trump is firmly at the head of the movement. I’ve already touched on efforts by Republicans and the Trump administration to interfere with next year’s mid-term elections. Those efforts and more will only continue. In the coming weeks and months, and — god help me — years, I’ll be detailing developments that will be familiar to those who followed reporting by myself and others in the lead-up to 2024. Among the most extreme scenarios with which Trump and Republicans could seize something resembling absolute power are the cancellation of elections or the throwing out of votes entirely. It is not hyperbole to say that both events are reasonably foreseeable.That’s because Trump continues to accumulate unprecedented military and law enforcement powers.There are many troubling possibilities that arise from Trump’s increasing use of the military for both domestic policing and immigration enforcement, some of which we’ve been seeing for the last few months, since Trump first sent the military to Los Angeles. But since we’re not in an election year, we haven’t seen another scenario play out — yet. It is not implausible to envision Trump using the military or law enforcement to enforce his election demands. The never-issued executive order from 2020 shows that Trump and members of his administration already considered using the military to disrupt the 2020 election or throw out its results completely. Trump has shown no evidence of slowing down, despite the two-term limit that nearly the entirety of the nation’s media-academic complex continues to believe will not be somehow overcome to land Trump back in the White House in 2028.Trump’s election demands — in the form of several executive orders aimed at fundamentally remaking American elections in ways that benefit Republicans and the election denial movement — include completely eliminating voting machines. Trump doesn’t have the authority to do this, not that not having legal power to do things has ever stopped Trump and his administration from simply doing things. That’s why an executive order signed by Trump on Monday caught my eye. The order, which mostly lays out more authority for the National Guard and other agencies as they continue their “mission” in Washington DC, also created a special “quick reaction force” of Guard members to be quickly deployed to, well, what I guess we’ll have to call “domestic conflict zones.” Specifically, the new “quick reaction” forces of the National Guard will be deployed to assist “local law enforcement in quelling civil disturbances and ensuring the public safety and order whenever the circumstances necessitate, as appropriate under law.”As if that last part matters: recent history has shown that the Trump administration will deploy the Guard and whatever other military or law enforcement agencies it wants under the most legally questionable of circumstances. The order calls on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to “designate an appropriate number of each State’s trained National Guard members to be reasonably available for rapid mobilization for such purposes.”In addition to ICE and other sub-agencies of the Department of Homeland Security, Trump is now waist-deep in perverting the mission of the National Guard. Clearly, the powers-that-be within the White House and the upper ranks of the American right view the Guard as a tool at their disposal.How that tool will be used is now apparently up to Trump and Republican governors, who hold tens of thousands of Guard members under their command. ***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