Recap of this week in the revolution: Conservative Charlie Kirk murdered, Missouri joins gerrymandering war, and FBI leaders incompetent and vengeful. Republicans cheer on troop deployments to US cities, GOP rule change fast-tracks Trump nominees, and ICE abolishes need for approval prior to arrests. Learn more about DOGE's mismanagement of the SSA.
The bad...
Image by Gage Skidmore from Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.
Charlie Kirk, an ultra-conservative Christian Nationalist and one of the most well-known voices for the MAGA movement, was murdered last week while he was speaking with students at Utah Valley University. The suspected killer, later captured and arrested, had no prior convictions. The 22-year-old suspect came from a family that was not particularly political, and had no party affiliation on his voter registration. Nevertheless, authorities believe that Kirk's death was a political assassination.
Kirk was an outspoken advocate for Christian Nationalism, a radicalized extremist movement that seeks to abolish religious liberty and turn the United States into an ultra-conservative, Christians-only theocracy. Kirk is known for promoting truly abhorrent ideologies that claim women need men to lead them, that gay marriage is an abomination, that MLK Jr. was "not a good person," that passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a huge mistake, that Jews are to blame for what he calls anti-whiteness, that all immigration to the United States should be stopped, and that shootings on school campuses could be prevented if more people carried guns. Kirk was not a good man, nor a kind man. He did not embody the teachings of Christ, and his views were not representative of the predominant views of the people of the United States of America.
Despite his many flaws, Kirk should not have been murdered. He was exercising his right to free speech when he was killed. He was an invited speaker at a planned event on a college campus where students were welcome to listen to what he had to say or not at their own discretion. While his views may have been unpopular, controversial, and easily perceived as hateful, he had every right to hold them and to share them at that event.
Missouri House Republicans have proposed a new congressional map to jump into the Great Gerrymandering War to show their fealty to Donny 2-Dolls by increasing their Republican congressional representatives from six to seven.
Texas has already approved their redistricting map, and California has promised to retaliate, although they are actually waiting for voter approval before making changes. Missouri is the third state to enter the fray, though several other states are planning to join the war at some point before the 2026 primaries.
FBI Director Kash Patel
Senior FBI officials who fail to demonstrate sufficient loyalty to Donny 2-Dolls are being targeted and removed from the agency. FBI Directory Kash Patel promised to protect employees from being unjustly terminated for political reasons, then broke that promise as soon as he had the chance.
Three of the fired agents represent some of the highest-achieving agents in the FBI, and have filed a suit against the FBI, claiming their dismissals violated their right to due process and free association/free speech.
The attorney representing the fired officials, Abbe Lowell, had this to say:
They were willing to sacrifice those people who had done nothing all of their lives but to protect the American people, for no other reason, than to be some sort of emblem of revenge or retribution...Going after people to make a statement became more important than the core mission of the FBI itself.
The ugly...
Donny 2-Dolls is treating the military as his personal goon squad, and instead of putting a stop to this anti-American abuse of power, Republican leaders in the regime are cheering him on.
Historically, the deployment of troops on U.S. soil has been reserved for extreme civil unrest and for rescue and aid missions during national disasters. There is no extreme civil unrest in the country at the moment, and the only national disaster is the Trump regime itself, and the troops are certainly not being sent to provide aid and rescue.
There are laws that govern the deployment of U.S. troops on American soil, and it is Congress' job to enforce those rules. But the Republican majority has not only stood idly by as Trump has violated those rules, but they have actively encouraged him. They are not alone, either. Second Amendment advocates like the NRA, who have long claimed that an armed citizenry was needed to prevent the government from abusing its power are throwing their support behind the most flagrant example of such abuse since the Revolutionary War began.
United States Senate
Republicans have modified Senate rules in an effort to confirm Donny 2-Dolls' nominees for certain political appointments, though not for Cabinet members or the judiciary. Instead of individually confirming each nominee, the new rules allow nominees to be approved en block.
This is referred to as the "nuclear option" because it involves changing the rules of the Senate in a way that will help one party achieve its short-term goals, but it also means that it can be used by the opposing party in the same way when they have a majority.
The rule change was made to speed up the process of confirming the Trump regime nominees for dozens of posts, which have been held up by endless debate. When both parties have close-to-equal representation in Congress, it can be nearly impossible to hit the threshold of 60 to 67 votes to confirm a nominee. By lumping the nominees into groups, Republicans are hoping to lump those who are mostly acceptable to Democrats in with one or two highly controversial nominees in the hopes that the group, as a whole, will be able to get enough votes to be confirmed.
Image by Master Steve Rapport from Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.
For the past 15 years, ICE officers have been required to fill out paperwork about their intended targets and submit it to their supervisor for approval before any immigration arrests could be made (with a few minor exceptions). The Trump regime has dropped this policy, meaning ICE agents can roam the streets at will and arrest anyone who looks vaguely Hispanic to them without any prior approval or justification.
This policy shift is yet another proof that Tom Homan's claims that ICE is prioritizing immigrants with criminal histories is an outright lie. In July, an analysis of ICE detention records showed that 71.7% of the people detained by ICE had no criminal convictions. This staggering level of incompetence should be cause for the United States to permanently disband ICE. Instead, the Trump regime has increased their budget and freed them from any accountability for their Gestapo-style activities.
Keeping you informed...
When DOGE invaded the Social Security Administration in February, Leland Dudek (the acting chair at the time) was hopeful. After all, DOGE was promising to improve efficiency, and Dudek knew the SSA desperately needed an update. The agency's core software is over 40 years old, so the prospect of a "crack team" of technologists working together to "fix" the agency sounded like it might be exactly what was needed.
But the so-called experts DOGE brought in had no real interest in understanding the intricacies of the agency, its functions, its software, or its staff. Dudek had started off trying to help DOGE staffers, but that quickly turned into him desperately trying to protect the agency from "a bunch of people who didn't know what they were doing, with ideas of how a government should run—thinking it should work like a McDonald's or a bank—screaming all the time."
Elon Musk may have retreated from public scrutiny, but his minions still hold permanent jobs at the SSA and Dudek and thousands of other staff members have been ousted. Social Security is still running, for the most part, but DOGE has completely failed to do anything to update the agency's software, streamline the process beneficiaries have to go through, simplify the policies agency employees have to learn, or decrease wait times for disability claims and appeals. Instead, DOGE came in with the belief that the SSA was overrun with fraud and staffed by incompetent people. All of their efforts were spent on trying to prove those false beliefs instead of actually trying to understand or improve the agency.
Perhaps the biggest failure of DOGE's efforts has been destroying the public's faith in Social Security. Due to the ongoing chaos in the administration, hundreds of thousands of people have filed for early retirement, hoping to lock in reduced benefits now rather than gambling on receiving their full benefits at retirement age. As a result, SSA is paying out more in benefits than ever before, which means it is spending more money after DOGE came in to "cut costs" than it was before.
On the lighter side...
