American Doom

I’m not going to get into the weeds of the White House’s latest “biggest scandal” that is clearly a distraction from Epstein. You can watch the video above to hear all about that. Suffice to say it’s all for show — throw “Obama” and “treason” into a sentence and it’s like chum in the water for our fellow Americans who just want to see a Black man on the gallows. At press time I don’t have the energy to break all this down in these paragraphs because I am pretty damn pissed off after learning about the arrest of two young journalists following a protest in Cincinnati. It’s early, and things may change, but as it stands right now: a judge has refused to drop misdemeanor charges against the reporters even though they were simply doing their jobs in covering what looks like an aggressively violent over-reaction to an anti-ICE protest by local police. Here is one officer beating up a protester, throwing haymakers like it’s a drunken barroom brawl. Man, today is one of those days where I’ve had enough of people. I’ve had enough the Americans who voted for this because their brains are so melted by Facebook and Fox News that they think poor immigrants are their problem — and not the millionaires and billionaires who run this country and don’t give a damn about the average American. I’ve damn sure had enough of guys like that cop — his name is Zachary Stayton and he’s thankfully on administrative leave from the Covington (Kentucky) Police Department, just over the bridge from Cincinnati — although I hold out little hope that he’ll be held accountable for his actions. I’m pretty weary, too, of every other cop like him who has abdicated their oaths to the constitution and has watched as Trump’s federal goon squad has run roughshod over cities and towns all across the country. A judge in California deemed that Trump’s masked immigration agents — essentially his personal army of lawless, secret police at this point — are engaged in widespread racial profiling and are violating the constitutional rights of both immigrants and U.S. citizens. But police there and a lot of other places — when they aren’t outright helping ICE — are standing idly by like a bunch of aw shucks Barney Fifes.It’s past time for local law enforcement to actually do something right for a change and arrest the federal agents violating the law in their own cities and states. This is the stuff of failed states, but unfortunately that’s where we’ve gotten to.For a long time now but especially in the past few months, I’ve had quite enough of supposedly tough, anti-government right-wingers who’ve been salivating over the prospect of armed conflict with the government since the publication of the Turner Diaries and well before who haven’t said a damn thing about the masked thugs terrorizing our cities under the president’s direction. Clearly, when the American right said it was against government tyranny what they meant was they were against it unless the government was oppressing others on their behalf. Democratic mayors, governors and other elected officials need to tell the law enforcement agencies under their command that this has to stop. The longer all of this goes on, the more that people like Trump will try to push. They always want more. This is about control. Someone has to stand up to stop them or else they’ll keep going until there’s nothing left for the rest of us. They will rule over us in a way few will like — as they have been promising to do for years. By then it will be too late. If local cops in blue cities aren’t going to stop Trump’s agents, they should be replaced by those who will. Democracy cannot stand if lawless paramilitary organizations are allowed to continue acting with impunity. It certainly can’t continue if Americans who protest those agents along with the journalists covering those protests are arrested as rioters. We are heading down a dark path. Seeing things like what happened on the bridge between Cincinnati and Covington makes me think we’re speeding up. ***Follow the show:* 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

Hey there, I’ve been doing my best to keep up with the news while also wrapping up my book. I’ll be back to doing some more investigative work once I’m through this bottleneck. Meantime, you can support my work holding the American right accountable through independent, adversarial journalism with a paid subscription (discount here) or a contribution to American Doom. Your support keeps this newsletter free for all comers. It’s all pretty obvious: reeling from the blowback from the decision not to release the Epstein files — after years of revving his supporters up with the prospect — Trump is now in peak distraction mode. His surrogates have been all over right-wing media in recent days pimping theories and possible indictments of Obama- and Biden-era officials, including the two ex-presidents themselves. Obviously, these indictments will never happen but some version of cooked-up “investigations” are sure to make the rounds in congressional committees overseen by the likes of James Comer and other Trump mouthpieces. This is all a desperate attempt to distract from the obvious: as part of its investigation into Epstein — which spanned the previous Trump administration and Biden’s term in office — the Justice Department surely found a ton of ties between Trump and Epstein. They found these ties for the very obvious reason that they quite clearly exist, as has been well reported publicly, and because they are investigators whose job it is to dig stuff up. There is plenty to be dug when it comes to Trump and Epstein, as last week’s Wall Street Journal story based on these investigative findings made clear. After Trump was re-elected, Attorney General Pam Bondi and others began going through the Justice Department’s files on Epstein and found all those mentions of Trump — the ones that Bondi and Trump had hundreds and maybe thousands of agents across the country flag in the voluminous material that the government had compiled on Epstein.All of this brings us to the reason why Trump can’t release the files in bulk, as he and many others in his administration have repeatedly promised: Trump is all over the files. To fully explain how all of this is a Democratic “hoax,” Trump would have to do a lot of explaining about his appearance in the files. That’s not likely something he’d be able to do very well, which is why you get people like Rep. Tim Burchett explaining away Trump’s appearance on the Epstein flight logs.You see, rich folks fly on private jets all the time, Burchett explained on CNN the other day. And when one of their planes breaks down, they just hitch a ride on another rich person’s plane! That’s probably what happened with Trump and Epstein, Burchett claimed. No mention of their decades-long friendship or any of the many, many instances of ties between the two men. No, Burchett wants America to reserve its judgment on Trump and give him the presumption of innocence. Trump is now going even further, insisting that he’s innocent and that Obama, Biden and other Democrats are guilty of an ever-expanding number of crimes that Trump’s Justice Department is now going to prosecute them over.Except they won’t, because this is all one big, desperate deflection of the very uncomfortable truth.**** 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’ll have more on this over the weekend but for now I wanted to share a rundown of the completely nonsensical claims about the Epstein files that are being made by the White House, as well as Donald Trump’s 40-year history with Epstein himself. Check the video above for all that. And if you want to support my work, you can subscribe or support American Doom here. I’ll be honest: things have been a little tight lately and it’d be nice to have a few new paid subscribers to give me a boost. For those who haven’t been paying attention to every minute development in this growing saga, Trump and White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt are claiming some impossible things. Mainly, they say that the Epstein files were created by Democrats — ostensibly to make Trump look bad — but also that those Democrats didn’t “do a dang thing” with the Epstein investigation.To put a finer point on this theory: Under President Joe Biden, Democrats who hate Trump and were facing off against him in last year’s election had compiled a dossier filled with extremely damaging information — all false — about Trump and Epstein. These same Democrats then “didn’t do a dang thing” with this intel, as Leavitt said yesterday in the White House press room. Does that make any sense? I didn’t think so. Regrettably, I don’t see a press conference scheduled for today at the White House. That’s a shame, because I was really looking forward to hearing how Leavitt explained the bizarre letter that the Wall Street Journal reported last night that Trump had written to Epstein on his 50th birthday.The letter included a tantalizing line about how Trump wished for Epstein that “every day be another wonderful secret.”Lots of secrets these days, it seems. More coming. - jg***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

Want to support efforts to push back against authoritarian threats to democracy? I humbly submit that supporting independent journalist like myself is a great addition to the fight. You can do so by choosing a paid subscription to American Doom or contributing a few dollars to our coffee fund. Through July I’m running a 20 percent discount on subscriptions — so you can support my work for as little as $4.80 a month. - jg***A California judge has confirmed what any reasonable person has known for weeks now: the immigration raids being carried out by Donald Trump’s masked agents are unconstitutional. In a functioning democracy, society can simply not abide by what are effectively secret police running around and detaining and arresting undocumented immigrants and U.S. citizens alike.The judge, a Biden appointee named Maame Ewusi-Mensaah Frimpong, which the right is up in arms about, noted the obvious: what has been happening in Los Angeles and elsewhere is a clear violation of Americans’ rights against improper search and seizure. Frimpong found that there was no “official” policy when it came to these “roving patrols.” In other words, in a legal sense this is all exactly what it has looked like all along: an unconstitutional, race-based operation by a paramilitary organization that has acted with impunity for the better part of two months now. The U.S. government, through its immigration agents on the streets, has effectively been engaged in widespread racial profiling.The 52-page ruling came down on Friday night and requires the government to stop conducting these raids as they’re currently being carried out. That means that agents have to have an actual reason for stopping someone — other than that they look Mexican, speak Spanish or with a Spanish accent, or are sitting in a certain location — for immigration enforcement operations. Frimpong’s temporary injunctive order (TRO) also requires the government to provide detainees being held in poor conditions in the basement of the federal building in downtown LA better access to attorneys.Frimpong granted the TRO based on a “fairly modest request” made by immigrant advocacy and workers’ rights organizations that filed a lawsuit against the government that Trump’s masked agents simply stop conducting an unconstitutional, racially discriminatory reign of terror.Some key findings from the ruling:* One man, a U.S, citizen, was improperly detained and had an immigration agent point a taser at his head — another instance of this troubling tactic, which I touched on in late June, which is not an approved use of force for any law enforcement agency I’ve ever reported on* Immigration agents took a U.S. citizen’s ID and did not return it* The government used protests and what they called “riots” as a pretext to deny detainees access to their attorneys, going so far to say that “if ‘riots’ resumed” and a TRO preventing the government from arbitrarily detaining whomever they liked was issued, immigration agencies at the federal building “would not be able to protect their employees and the detainees” there. Frimpong shot down this argument, saying that “granting access to counsel is not the same as granting unrestricted access to the public,” nor was “permitting confidential” phone calls between attorneys and detainees the same as letting protesters in the front door of the federal building.* The government had a week to present evidence to the court that it was basing its arrests and detention of people on something other than that they believed undocumented immigrants were present at certain locations ,but failed to do so.* The government also couldn’t explain why immigrants and citizens who ran away frightened by Trump’s secret police represented “reasonable suspicion.” “Defendants do not explain why fleeing upon seeing unidentified masked men with guns exiting from tinted cars without license plates raises suspicion,” Frimpong wrote.* The government also couldn’t explain how it was identifying possible undocumented immigrants to stop based on any factors other than where they were and what they looked like. “Defendants do not explain why being at a bus stop in Pasadena raises suspicion that [targets] may be undocumented immigrants.”* The government argued that it would have to retrain its agents if the TRO were issued — meaning that the agents are currently either not educated on the basics of constitutional rights against improper search and seizure. Or, what is obviously more likely the case, agents on the streets of LA and elsewhere simply do not care about these rights as they strive to reach immigrant arrest quotas that have been handed down from the White House.Towards the end of Frimpong’s order, the judge says something that should also be very obvious to Americans of any political persuasion with a love and appreciation for personal liberty: “Requiring law enforcement to comply with the Constitution does not prevent law enforcement from enforcing the law.”***Whether the Trump administration, DHS and its immigration agents on the ground will actually comply with Frimpong’s order is an open question. I’m guessing there’s a Trump rampage coming on this TRO pretty soon, probably to be accompanied by a screed from White House Press Secretary Caroline Leavitt on Monday decrying the order as a move by a “liberal activist” judge preventing immigration agents from doing their jobs. By Saturday afternoon, reliable Trump sycophant Rep. Andy Biggs had already begun the proselytizing on behalf of the administration’s unconstitutional behavior:Defiance of the order could — and in my mind, should — bring about a troubling but necessary scenario in which local law enforcement in Los Angeles and elsewhere begins to stop Trump’s masked immigration agents from violating the constitutional rights of citizens and immigrants under the purported protection and jurisdiction of agencies like the Los Angeles Police Department.This scenario is the stuff of autocratic regimes: provincial law enforcement in direct conflict with other law enforcement or military is something typically reserved for failing or failed states. But in the interest of trying to stop the United States from becoming the latter, that difficult choice between allowing the federal government to continue violating the rights of citizens and utilizing local law enforcement to enforce the law may become necessary. If Trump’s immigration agents ignore Frimpong’s order, I think it’s time for local law enforcement to step up and uphold their oaths to the constitution — because the Trump administration, DHS, ICE and agents on the ground clearly will not.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

For anyone who may have missed it, you can watch my conversation with the Texas investigative journalist Steven Monacelli from Friday’s live Doom broadcast. I also wanted to flag a few things that I wasn’t able to get to during this very busy week. If you appreciate my work staying on top of all of the madness, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription or throwing a few bucks my way. I’m still running the Fighting Season discount, which gets you a 20 percent discount to Doom subscriptions. Your support keeps my work free for everyone who can’t afford to chip in, and helps fund my investigations and reporting trips to places like Los Angeles, which is still reeling from the violence that the Trump administration is inflicting on the city through immigration raids, and what I think can be fairly considered straight-up attacks on Americans. Now, some notes from the ongoing transition of American life into full-fledged authoritarianism…Trump’s Justice Department and FTC are infiltrating the relationship between parents, doctors and trans AmericansFrom the Times: The Justice Department has issued subpoenas demanding confidential patient information from more than 20 doctors and hospitals that provide gender-related treatments to minors, according to officials with knowledge of the move.The action marks a new turn in the Trump administration’s efforts to limit transgender medical care. Most of the subpoenas, issued through the consumer protection unit of the department’s civil division, attempt to pierce powerful federal confidentiality protections for patients and their medical providers.The FTC is also involved in the ideological battle against trans Americans. Check this illuminating thread on a meeting held Wednesday in which officials alleged that gender-affirming care involves “deceptive trade practices.”Meanwhile, a trans migrant from Mexico who was raped by cartel members there and fled the country to seek asylum remains in solitary confinement in a mens detention center thanks to a Trump executive order. I’ll have more on this very troubling story soon. The migrant was arrested by ICE when she showed up to her immigration court hearing. A Trump executive order that has forced trans women to be transferred to mens prisons — which a judge had put a temporary restraining order on — has forced the migrant woman to stay in solitary confinement for her own safety. This week, her lawyers alleged that ICE forced the woman to sign documents that she didn’t understand and that could expedite her removal from the country. Georgia’s Republican kingmaker accused of half-million Ponzi scheme — and the money went to big name GOP politiciansThe AJC has the scoop on an SEC investigation of Brant Frost, who along with his family is one of the most powerful figures in Georgia Republican politics. Frost was at the top of a Ponzi scheme that saw more than $500,000 laundered to GOP politicians like Ted Cruz, Chip Roy, Matt Gaetz, and more, as well as the House Freedom Caucus. Remember what I said the other day? A small authoritarian government is an inherently corrupt one? Yeah, that.Trump’s Justice Department lawyers purposefully lied about immigration flightsThe lawyers were texting in court about how one of them had just lied to a judge that the flights were no longer taking place when they were. Now, a former Justice Department lawyer who dutifully worked on Trump’s immigration agenda during the first Trump administration is blowing the whistle, as Lawrence O’Donnell explained Thursday night.Trump’s masked immigration agents vow to continue their occupation and attacks in Los Angeles“Better get used to us now, because this is going to be normal very soon.” Those were the words of Border Patrol’s Greg Bovino, who was responding to LA Mayor Karen Bass’ demands that Trump’s masked and violent immigration agents stop terrorizing her city. The threat is well understood, Mr. Bovino. Meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security is working with local law enforcement agencies to criminalize many protest practices, Wired reports. If this were happening in another country we’d call it what it clearly is: an attempt by the federal government to crush opposition and stifle dissent. DHS is led, of course, by Secretary Kristi Noem. Noem dragged her feet when allocating resources to Kerr County, Texas for days as the missing and dead piled up. Meanwhile, Noem was busy posting to Instagram to ask her supporters which official portrait of her they liked the best. Maybe this one? I know it’s summer and folks are trying to take some time off but the authoritarians in charge of our federal government are plowing ahead. Please consider throwing a few dollars to Doom to help us stay on top of the madness. Until next time. - jg***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

If you want to ante up to a paid subscription or drop a few dollars in the Doom Coffee Fund, I sure would appreciate it. There’s a lot of news lately — I know, it’s summer and we’re supposed to be relaxing — and I’m tracking a lot of things. Election denialism and rampant authoritarianism within the government are combining to present some very real threats to democracy that the seasons care not about. More on that later. Now, on to some news…***Republican lawmakers in Texas passed on providing more funding for the kind of emergency alert systems that might have saved some of the more than 100 lives that were lost at Camp Mystic in Kerr County. As usual, Republicans in the Lone Star state — goaded on by their largely conservative electorate — were worried about keeping their belts tightened. This, despite a $24 billion budget surplus that the state enjoys. But the failures don’t end there. Local officials allowed the camp to build a group of new cabins in a federally-designated flood zone — the exact type of thing that happens when anti-regulation Republicans are put in charge of local governments. This is what electing Republicans gets you. I say this with no pleasure: kids are dead, families are in mourning, tragedy abounds. Making matters worse, much of this tragic death and destruction looks like it could have been avoided if competent, well-meaning professionals who care about more than the money in their pockets had greater power in Texas. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. It’s helpful to think of what happened in Kerr County as a preview of the future for the rest of America, should Republicans continue to be allowed to carry out their minimal-government philosophy thanks to a majority in Congress, possession of the White House, and strong numbers across the judiciary. You get what you vote for — and in this case, Americans are getting a political party that sees the destruction of government as its biggest selling point and primary goal. Contrary to popular Republican belief, it’s not big government that is inherently corrupt, it’s small government, like the kind our federal bureaucracy is being made into under the second Trump administration. When everything has to go through the person at the top, nothing really gets done. That’s why Trump is effectively clueless as to what’s actually happening within his own administration, as Lawrence O’Donnell pointed out Wednesday night.When confronted by a reporter with the fact that Trump wasn’t aware that munitions shipments to Ukraine had been suspended, Trump lied — or bumbled, or more accurately, rambled his way through an answer that ended with saying that he’d “most likely give the order” if something like withholding weapons shipments to an ally were carried out. “I’d most likely give the order.” When a president and a government only have to answer to the feelings of less than one-third of Americans — the percentage of the population that voted for Trump — how can any of us expect that government to perform effectively? It cannot. A government run by the few will be inherently corrupt because it limits the amount of stakeholders from across society from contributing their expertise and manpower. A government run by an even more select few — like the coalition of hard-right authoritarians and unbelievably wealthy businessmen who populate the Trump administration — will be even more corrupt. It will only be effective in achieving things that benefit those people, which is to say, Trump’s government will never help out the average American — even if that American voted for Trump.Sadly, the people of Kerr County have learned this lesson in the most tragic way possible. Whether they, all of Texas, and the rest of America will learn that lesson, will begin to become more clear next year. ***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

Do you believe Pam Bondi when she says it wasn’t the list she was talking about on Fox News in February, but the Epstein case in general? My bullshit detector started vibrating the whole house when I heard her fib the other day. I laughed. It is laughable! This is the type of stuff — bumbling and obvious lies over gussied-up claims that should have never been made — that you’d see a small town mayor make. (Speaking of, remember this one from the stacks?) Instead, it’s the Attorney General of the United States, getting crossed up by a reporter on live TV. Anyway, this was always coming because Epstein was just another crumb that Trump and his people handed to their supporters to get their votes. Now that they have the power granted to them by (our still somewhat functioning) elections, they don’t care to give them anymore crumbs.But don’t believe the hype that Trump’s MAGA base or his “coalition” of conservatives, fascists, and everyday Americans who very proudly don’t read the news is fading. Just because Alex Jones cried on Tik Tok doesn’t mean that any of these people are going anywhere. They’ll support him to the last man. Trump could come and take all of their belongings — leaving them with an empty bag of hopes and dreams — and they’d still believe he was doing it for them.This empty bag was supposed to contain all the secrets of Jeffrey Epstein that proved their suspicions about liberal pedophiles. Trump sold them that bad bill of goods and then bailed, like he always does. You get what you pay for — or in this case, what you vote for. *** 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

Note: Still got that Fighting Season discount going. Get 20 percent off subscriptions to American Doom so I can buy a steak this weekend. On to the news…***Good Wednesday morning. Hot as hell here in Savannah. I took a brief cruise through some sources yesterday and after only an hour or two I had enough material to reach an unsurprising conclusion: the Republican party is already hard at work trying to rig the midterm elections in their favor. I really wish I wasn’t already talking about elections again but the GOP just can’t keep their hands off the process. From the promise of politically-motivated prosecutions of election officials from Trump’s Justice Department to the current (and legally questionable) prosecution of voting rights groups in Texas, Republicans are laying the lawfare groundwork for suppressing the vote and silencing opponents who are, in most cases, simply competent public servants who believe in free and fair elections. As has been increasingly apparent over the last five years, Republicans do not believe in this tenet of representative democracy. Last week, the Times reported that the Justice Department is exploring criminal prosecutions of state and local election officials for failure to properly secure election infrastructure — a part of a sweeping strategy to suppress free and fair elections that harkens back to Project 2025. You might remember this from my story about the right’s plans to prosecute Democratic election officials at Rolling Stone in April.This is quite rich considering a few things. First, the only actual breaches of election equipment in recent history came at the hands of Republicans. In Coffee County, Trump-supporting members of the election board gave access to voting machines and other election equipment to the Trump campaign, its lawyers, and probably Mike Lindell, although his direct involvement has never been specifically proven. Also in Georgia, in Spalding County, lawyers from that same firm were in talks with Trump-supporting election officials there to access voting machines in their attempt to overturn the 2020 election.If all that weren’t enough to prove my point, since taking office for the second time, Trump has gutted the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA. CISA is responsible for helping state and local election officials secure their equipment against bad actors like Russian hackers. Trump has reduced CISA’s abilities to perform these tasks, which according to Democratic election officials like Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, have made our election systems less secure.As usual, Texas is leading the way in the GOP’s aggressive legal efforts to suppress voter turnout and stifle dissent. There, a politically-motivated prosecution of voting rights groups signals bad things ahead for free elections. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has indicted nine voting rights advocates for helping voters turn in their ballots — despite the fact that courts are up in the air whether these actions even constitute the “ballot-harvesting” crime that Paxton alleges. (Another way to think of their actions is that they were simply helping seniors navigate the complicated mail-in ballot process.)Paxton’s efforts to suppress voting are mirrored elsewhere, like in North Carolina where Republican legislators are trying to pass a bill that would prohibit election officials from “promoting voter turnout.” (That Republicans are explicitly against promoting voter turnout should tell you everything you need to know about their support for representative democracy.) The bill would also further entrench partisan politics in the electoral process by expanding the number of political appointments at the State Board of Elections. Meanwhile, Marjorie Taylor Greene is leading efforts to remove immigrants from the U.S. census count. This will result in fewer congressional seats for swing states with large immigrant populations like Georgia and North Carolina. Whether Republicans like it or not, undocumented immigrants live here — and they are actual human beings. By not counting them in the census, Republicans are essentially erasing our neighbors, the people who often cook our food, clean our homes, tend to our lawns. This is just another way to establish minority rule.And to wrap things up for now, Burt Jones is running for governor of Georgia. For those who might have forgotten, Jones is an avowed election denier who was deeply involved with the illegal scheme to have fake electoral college electors hand over their votes to Trump in 2020. Jones avoided legal consequences for his role in the fake electors scheme because the prosecutor who had charged him, Fani Willis, was deemed to have a conflict of interest because she once donated to the campaign of Jones’ political opponent. ***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

Hey, I’m still running that Fighting Season discount where you can get 20 percent off subscriptions to American Doom. Also, you can throw a few bucks my way at the Doom Coffee Fund so I can stay hydrated while holding the authoritarian right accountable. Now, on to the news…Good Monday morning and welcome back to the show. I spent most of this weekend gloriously offline but pulled up my phone Sunday morning to see the latest from the craziest wing of the craziest political party in American history. Yes, the batshit brigade of the GOP is all over the flooding in Texas, working hard to right the wrong of the many young children who died there. Marjorie Taylor Greene and her fellow Georgian, a woman named Kandiss Taylor who you might remember running for governor under the campaign slogan “Jesus, Guns and Babies,” believe that cloud-seeding and geo-engineering are responsible for the deadly flooding in Texas.These are two woman who — along with the entirety of the Republican party — consistently lecture Americans who call for gun control in the wake of mass shootings. The aftermath of deadly gun violence is simply not the time to “politicize” a tragedy and restrict Americans’ access to weapons like military-grade assault rifles, they say. It’s interesting, then, to watch them spring into action in the wake of the deadly Texas floods. Taylor spend some time over the weekend writing about how she supports legislation in states other than the Georgia that would ban the practice of geo-engineering. (Just FYI: 10 states use cloud-seeding and other forms of geo-engineering on what the Government Accountability Office describes as a pretty limited basis to induce more rainfall and prevent hail.) Greene touted a bill she’s working on that would make geo-engineering a crime — despite the fact that it almost surely helps out a lot of farmers who she counts on for support.Anyway, Taylor is an up-and-coming Greene clone who has announced her bid for Georgia’s First Congressional District — my district, as it happens. She probably won’t win but… who knows? Donald Trump is president. As far as I know, no Georgia Democrat has announced their intention to run to replace Rep. Buddy Carter, who would like to replace Sen. Jon Ossoff.Hate to say it, but I’ll probably have to put my political reporter hat on pretty soon in order to start covering these races. Meantime, I’m keeping my eye on immigration matters and a whole lot else. If you have any tips on anything related to authoritarian rumblings — election denialism, improper use of the military, extremism in law enforcement, illegal immigration practices — I’m all ears. ***On a completely different note, I’m doing quite a bit more music these days now that all my time isn’t taken up by book work, elections, etc. (The constitutional crisis is slow-rolling so I figure I can justify spending some time not steeped in the news.) If you want to check out my band, the Savannah Morning Blues, you can access all our social channels and hear our music at this link. For those of you on YouTube, you can subscribe to SMB’s page there, as well as American Doom’s home on YouTube. ***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

A troubling memo from the Justice Department signals a push for denaturalization, targeting naturalized citizens. The discussion revolves around its implications for vulnerable communities, including the transgender population and dissenters. This alarming trend raises questions about the future of citizenship in America under the shadow of authoritarianism. The podcast dives deep into the potential ramifications and the chilling effect on civil liberties.