Click here for a Democracy Now YouTube video (playing time 34:04) entitled "The Nerd Reich": Author Gil Duran on Big Tech Fascism, Peter Thiel, J.D. Vance & the War on Democracy." It's frightening.
The tech bros, led by Peter Thiel, following the ideas of Curtis Yarvin, founder of the Dark Enlightenment, an anti-democratic philosophical movement. They believe that democracy is a failed program -- and one of their horsemen is vice president J.D. Vance.
Click here for Paul Krugman's Substack article on August 24, 2026, entitled "The Moose That Roared."
It's a discussion of the Canada-U.S. trade war. I particularly like the graph entitled "Canada's Liberals are on track to victory," which shows estimated probability of Liberals and Conservatives winning the most seats in Canada's April 2025 federal election.
Conservative support was around 90% when the unpopular Justin Trudeau resigned and Mark Carney became the Liberal leader. From there, although Conservative support steadily diminished, it was still around 60%, with Liberal support at 30% and 10% undecided -- until Trump made his inflammatory remarks about making Canada the 51st state. Overnight, the situation switched to 60/40 Liberal over Conservative, and support for Liberals continued to grow.
Until Trump opened his mouth and stuck his foot in it, the question Canadians were asking was: Will the Conservatives, under Pierre Poilievre, win a majority or just a simple plurality -- something like 45% Conservative, 35% Liberal, 20% NDP? Thank you, Donald Trump, for delivering the victory to Mark Carney's Liberals.
This is copy-and-pasted from Patricia Nilsen's (aka the world's best court reporter) Facebook page. Much appreciated, Patricia, and right back at you!
"This is a Ralph Sproxton
appreciation post. I met Ralph on my 25th birthday in Ireland, when he
was checking it out as a potential place to work. He did eventually
work there after I left. Ralph also traveled the world as a reporter
back in his day, working all over Asia as well. When I moved to
Nashville, he reached out to me to see if I needed a scopist, as he was
retiring from reporting. It remains my luckiest break as a freelancer
to this day. The same way there are elite reporters, there are elite
scopists, and Ralph simply is the best of the best. Having him as a
part of my team allows me to take the most complex jobs and know that we
are giving the attorneys the most well researched transcript. In the
last month he and I have taken several depositions in an extremely
difficult patent case with crazy terminology and foreign experts with
accents, and then he hopped into a property trial with me this past
week. The attorneys continue to request me on this patent case, but
Ralph is the invisible man behind the scenes helping me get them their
rough draft shortly after the proceedings end, as well as helping me
spontaneously get to one of Jackson's basketball games in Smyrna that I
thought I would in no universe be able to make. I could not handle the
workload I handle without him. So even though this picture was taken in
2017 and was only probably the second time I've seen him in the past 20
years, he is undoubtedly one of the most important people in my life.
And I already share him with one other reporter, so any of you looking
for another scopist, keep looking!"
Hmm ... National Socialism ... didn't some country try that in the 1930s? Germany, wasn't it?
Click here for Robert Reich's Substack article for July 15, 2026, entitled "Trump's National Socialism." It tells how Trump has been coercing companies to grant the U.S. government shares in the company in return for needed federal grants -- the federal government is now Intel's largest single shareholder.
Click here for Heather Cox Richardson's Substack entry for July 1, 2026. It reports on Trump's corrupt receipt of the $400 million jet from Qatar; the $500 million no-bid contract for Trump's ballroom; Trump and Howard Lutnick's deal for securing from the president of Kazakhstan access to one of the largest untapped reserves of tungsten in the world for an obscure U.S. company, Kaz Resources, and the involvement of "an investment firm partly owned by Trump’s sons Don Jr. and Eric
took a 20% stake in a corporate entity related to the project, and the
investment firm run by Lutnick’s sons Brandon and Kyle, Cantor
Fitzgerald, helped to raise $210 million for a related entity, likely
pocketing millions in fees."
She reports that there are "at least fourteen companies with ties to the Trumps and Lutnicks
that are working with the federal government on mining deals for
materials on which the U.S. depends. The administration has either
provided or is considering providing more than $8.9 billion in taxpayer
money to those companies."Trump has done pretty well in cryptocurrency since his election:
Yesterday a federal filing showed that Trump took in about $1.4
billion from cryptocurrency ventures last year. Bernard Condon of the
Associated Press reports that Trump made more than $500 million from the
World Liberty Financial venture with his sons and Zach Witkoff, who is
the venture’s chief executive officer and the son of Trump’s special
envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff. Much of that money came when an
investment fund associated with the leadership of the United Arab
Emirates bought almost half of World Liberty Financial.
Trump also made more than $600 million from meme coins stamped with his face.
In office, Trump has pushed policies that help the cryptocurrency industry and avoid regulations.
How about insider trading on the stock market?
Donald Shaw of Sludge, an
outlet dedicated to examining special interest spending in politics,
reported today that the day before Trump paused his tariffs for 90 days,
his investment accounts took advantage of the market lows caused by the
tariffs to buy as much as $12.8 million worth of stocks. His
announcement of the pause caused a huge spike in stock values, with the
S&P jumping nearly 10%, one of the biggest gains in the history of
that index. Trump neglected to report the transactions for almost a year
past the required deadline, but the penalty for a late filing, Shaw
notes, is only $200.
Journalist White notes that
Trump is “essentially day trading,” including in companies operating in
sectors where “the Trump administration is actively focused on setting
policy.” She notes that Trump owns between $12.5 million and $58 million
in NVIDIA and between $9.5 million and $46.5 million in Amazon, both
companies “whose fortunes rise and fall based on decisions made in the
White House.”
She reports that the Trumps have taken about $2.3 billion in income from crypto ventures since the beginning of Trump's second presidency, while investors in those ventures have lost about the same amount. She says "the Trump family structured its crypto ventures so Trump made
money on the front end, taking hundreds of millions of dollars in
transaction fees, for example. Then, when his coins plummeted in value,
the investors who were left holding the bag suffered vast losses."
Click here for Paul Krugman's Substack entry for June 10, entitled "Breaking the Heart of the Heartland," in which Krugman tells how the rural vote has shifted against Trump.
In 2024 Donald Trump narrowly won the popular vote, with only a 1.5 percentage point margin. But he won rural areas by 30 points.
Trump
won rural areas by such a large margin because farmers were wildly
optimistic about what he would do for them. The Purdue/CME Ag Economy
Barometer, which is basically an index of farmers’ economic sentiment,
surged with Trump’s victory:
Today,
the rural Trump bump is nowhere to be seen. In fact, white rural
voters’ views about Trump’s economic policy have turned astonishingly
negative. Normally, partisanship strongly colors economic perceptions.
According to a recent Fox News poll, only 29% of Americans approve of Trump’s handling of the economy, while 71% disapprove. Yet 60% of Republicans still approve.
Remarkably,
however, rural white voters are no longer behaving like non-rural
Republican voters. They are almost as negative on the economy as the
population as a whole, with only 32% of rural whites approving of
Trump’s handling of the economy, and 68% disapproving. Trump has made
the rural economy so bad that reality has overridden Trump voters’ usual
tendency to make excuses for him.
Farmers, who are highly dependent on imported inputs -- farm machinery, chemicals, fertilizer -- have been hit hard by Trump's tariffs and trade war; rival agricultural exporters like Brazil (soybeans) have taken over market share. In 2025 there was a 46% rise in farm bankruptcies; Krugman says it looks worse in 2026, especially with the Iran war raising the price of gas, diesel, and fertilizer in particular.
Recent polls
show that the Senate race in Iowa, which Trump won by 13 points in
2024, is now effectively a tossup. The heartland may be awakening to
reality, with immense political consequences.
Click here for Robert Reich's substack entry for June 10 entitled "The Senate Should NOT Confirm This Person" -- Todd Blanche, for attorney general.
Let me get right to the point. The Senate should not confirm Todd Blanche as attorney general.
Blanche,
who used to be Trump’s private lawyer, has treated the Justice
Department as Trump’s private law firm. He still believes that Trump —
rather than the United States — is his client.
At the very least,
the Senate should insist, as a condition of confirming Blanche, that the
May 19 deal Blanche devised to immunize Trump and his family from all
future prosecutions — which Blanche alone signed — be nullified.
The
purpose of that immunity deal — which resulted from Trump’s own bizarre
lawsuit against the IRS — should by now be clear. It’s to prevent any
future government inquiry into the corrupt dealings of Trump and his
family.
The breadth of the so-called “settlement” agreement between Trump and, well, Trump is staggering. Take a look at it, here.
Here's Reich's list of salient points:
Trump is the most corrupt president in American history. Since
being in office for a second time, he’s so far increased his wealth by
an estimated $4 billion, and his sons’ and daughters’ wealth by billions more. Some examples:
Trump
and his family have created multiple crypto businesses — World Liberty
Financial and the $TRUMP meme coin — that have received favorable
deregulatory treatment and reportedly generated at least $2.3 billion in income for Trump and his family since he won the presidency.
Six
days after a company backed by Eric and Donald Jr. took a 20 percent
stake in an American mining group, the group’s parent company received
$1.6 billion in federal financing. That’s because the president of
Kazakhstan granted the company the right to mine the world’s largest
known undeveloped deposit of tungsten, an element used in
semiconductors, lightbulbs, and warheads.
In late
2025, Don Jr.’s firm 1789 Capital acquired an equity stake in critical
minerals company Vulcan Elements. Shortly after, the White House and the
Pentagon awarded Vulcan a $620 million federal loan without competitive procurement or independent technical review.
Eric and Don Jr. have conducted numerous undisclosed meetings with foreign government officials
(including representatives from Hungary, the UK, Vietnam, and Qatar)
while simultaneously negotiating global real estate deals for the Trump
Organization.
Don Jr. serves as a strategic advisor or investor in prediction market firms Kalshi and Polymarket, which have received favorable, deregulatory treatment from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).
Don Jr. is on the board of prescription drug platform BlinkRX, which will benefit from the administration’s promotion of direct-to-patient medicine sales.
Presumably, someone has made a fortune trading stocks and bonds on the basis of insider knowledge
of decisions that Trump would announce — about tariffs, his war in
Iran, and other news that moved stock and bond markets. The trades
occurred just before the announcements.
In May,
Trump disclosed that his trust was actively trading individual stocks,
an unprecedented practice for a sitting U.S. president in the modern
era.
Trump has pardoned some of the most brazen
financial criminals in American history, and one can only wonder what he
received in return. They include Philip Esformes, convicted in what Trump’s own Department of Justice described as the “largest health care fraud scheme ever charged”; Joseph Schwartz, convicted for a $38 million fraud scheme; and reality stars Todd and Julie Chrisley, convicted for multimillion-dollar bank fraud. He’s granted clemency to Lawrence Duran after a $205 million fraud conviction. He commuted Jason Galanis’s sentence and pardoned Devon Archer, both tied to tens of millions in fraud.
Click here for Heather Cox Richardson's Substack diary entry for May 22, 2026. On that date in 1964, Johnson gave a graduation speech at the University of Michigan, and spoke of how his administration would “enrich and elevate our national life.” That Great Society would demand an end to poverty and racial injustice.
Interesting reading. Its idealism is a far cry from the cynicism and corruption of the Trump administration.
Click here for Heather Cox Richardson's Substack entry in her diary, Letters from an American, for May 16.
Seventy-two years ago tomorrow, on May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court unanimously decided Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas.
That landmark decision declared racial segregation in public schools
unconstitutional because segregated schools denied Black children “the
equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment.”
She goes on to talk about the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957; the murder of the three voting rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi, in "Freedom Summer," 1964, and the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964; the march from Selma, Alabama, to Montgomery and the violence when state troopers attacked the marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge (fracturing the skull of John Lewis). The vote in the Senate was 77-19; in the House, 333-85.
Recalling “the outrage of Selma,” Johnson said: “This right to vote is
the basic right without which all others are meaningless. It gives
people, people as individuals, control over their own destinies.”
She concludes:
And yet, on April 29, 2026, the Supreme Court gutted the protections
for the Black-majority districts Congress provided for in the Voting
Rights Act after years of weakening the law in other ways. In its wake,
Republican-dominated southern state legislatures are rushing to redraw
their district lines to dilute the votes of Black Democrats.
Today,
thousands of Americans, including eighteen members of Congress,
traveled to Selma and Mongomery to call Americans to action to protect
voting rights. Pastor Kenneth Sharpton Glasgow told Joseph D. Bryant of
Alabama news site AL, “This moment is bigger than Democrats or
Republicans. This is about democracy itself. This is about whether Black
communities, poor communities, rural communities, formerly incarcerated
people, and marginalized voices will continue to have representation
and political power in America.”
Speakers united around the theme that those trying to gerrymander
their way into control of Congress in defiance of voters had reawakened a
movement. “They think they can draw us out of power,” Representative
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) told an audience in Montgomery.
“They
do not know the sleeping giant that they just awakened. Because it is
not a coincidence, and our whole country must understand, that it was
not until voting rights were ratified in this country that we got the
Great Society. Because when Black Americans have the right to vote and
that vote is protected, our schools get funded. When voting rights are
protected, healthcare gets expanded. When voted rights are protected,
our country moves forward. And Montgomery, that’s what they’re actually
afraid of. They’re afraid of us coming together. They’re afraid of us
protecting one another.”
Click here for Heather Cox Richardson's diary entry for May 13, 2026, which describes how Southern Republicans are reacting to Louisian v. Callais: "We are watching, in real time, the creation of a one-party state in the American South."
Click here for Heather Cox Richardson's diary entry on Substack for May 11, 2026.
The Trump Mobile scam, launched last June; Trumps fake dominance throughout his career, shielded from his own incompetence in his first term by "Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Secretary of Defense James Mattis, who filtered the options Trump received; chief of staff General John Kelly, who made a pact with Mattis that one of them would always stay in the country to stand in the way of Trump’s impulses; and National Economic Council director Gary Cohn, who stopped Trump from signing disastrous executive orders, sometimes going so far as to steal them off his desk"; his out-of-control rants on Truth Social, including raking criticism of his own Supreme Court appointments and threatening them over the birthright citizenship case; "a long screed about the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the 2015 agreement between Iran and the U.S., United Kingdom, China, France, Germany, Russia, and the European Union to limit Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for relief from sanctions. Trump pulled the U.S. out of the JCPOA in 2018, and this weekend Trump rehashed false right-wing talking points about the deal to claim that former president Barack Obama was “a weak and stupid American President” who worked for Iran"; and much more.
