American Doom

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.

The discussion dives into the unsettling rise of authoritarianism on American streets, spotlighting shocking incidents involving immigration agents and law enforcement. Videos reveal aggressive tactics, like agents tasering bystanders or detaining citizens, sparking outrage. The negligence of mainstream media in reporting these events is highlighted, emphasizing the need for independent journalism. Listeners are urged to document abuses and advocate for social accountability to combat these alarming trends.

The podcast dives deep into the struggles of contemporary journalism, revealing a world increasingly overshadowed by fatigue and disillusionment. It reflects on the evolving media landscape and the emotional toll on journalists facing relentless demands. Technology's paradox of connectivity versus cultural homogenization is also examined, highlighting how modern life disconnects us from meaningful experiences. Ultimately, there's a call for reimagining our engagement with media, advocating for a more thoughtful approach to navigate this complex reality.

Horses, flash bangs and tear gas now being used against protesters around the federal building in downtown LA following the No Kings protest 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

Kilmar Abrego Garcia is currently — as of the last court filing and the Trump regime’s word — residing in one of the worst prisons in the world in El Salvador. He’s there because of a mistake, lawyers representing the Trump administration have said. It was a mistake in the micro sense, but Garcia’s deportation and confinement in a Salvadoran hellhole are no accident: this is about punishment and pain.Today, Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) will travel to El Salvador to try to get Garcia back. This is something pretty brave in terms of American politics — he is standing up for an undocumented immigrant in Garcia, thereby doing what Republicans think will help them. You see, the Trump regime and vehemently anti-immigrant ghouls like Stephen Miller believe it’s in their electoral interest to have Democrats defending people like Garcia — who because of his skin color and where he’s from they naturally associate with being a bad guy. But Van Hollen doesn’t appear to care about any of that and is simply doing the right thing.Remember that? Remember when, regardless of party or whether it was politically advantageous, lawmakers would occasionally do what was right? Like John McCain telling one of his supporters that Barack Obama was a good man, or Obama being courteous and respectful to Trump. That all seems like a thing of the past now that the American right is engaged in a zero-sum, point-scoring game that rushes us ever closer to democratic decline. Meanwhile, people like Garcia get caught in the middle.American Doom is free but is not possible without the support of my subscribers. I’m an independent journalist and your paid subscriptions help keep me independent.Legal immigrants who have played by the rules are also getting the shaft under the Trump regime. Not only are Elon Musk and his pals lying about them getting Social Security benefits, as I reported two weeks ago for Rolling Stone, but now, Musk’s DOGE goons have classified legal immigrants as dead in a ham-fisted effort to cut them off from benefits they aren’t receiving. This will result in many legal immigrants not being able to get on-the-books jobs, access their bank accounts, and many of the other things that require having a Social Security number. The apparent hope is that by making them even more of second-class citizens, these immigrants will deport themselves. Meanwhile, Garcia has been sent to a place that is life-threatening for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that Garcia was granted some level of protective status by an immigration judge because he had fled El Salvador, fearing gangs like MS-13. Now, he’s in one of the worst prisons in the world right alongside of all of those gang members, and people like Trump, Stephen Miller, Marco Rubio, Karoline Leavitt and congressional Republicans are both lying about Garcia being a member of MS-13 and simultaneously saying, Fuck it. He deserves to be there anyway because he came here illegally.That’s some of where we’re at, but unfortunately there’s a lot more where all this comes from. To unpack this distressing case I caught up with Arturo Dominguez, who runs Decolonized Journalism, which you should immediately subscribe to. Arturo has a piece out today that explains how Garcia has gone from a random immigrant from El Salvador to the face of the Trump administration’s illegal and unethical immigration plans. ***Want to scroll more Doom? Why not:* 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