The Kids Are Not Alright

Elect Republicans and watch the children suffer.



More Than 770,000 Children Are No Longer Receiving SNAP Benefits After Trump Changes Federal Food Program

Republican backers of Trump’s signature domestic policy bill repeatedly claimed that revisions to the food benefits program wouldn’t affect the most vulnerable. But reports from a dozen states show children are losing access.

As a House committee debated President Donald Trump’s signature domestic policy bill last year, Republican backers repeatedly emphasized that its changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as food stamps, wouldn’t affect vulnerable people.

SNAP reforms would “restore integrity” to the program and ensure it works for the “most vulnerable among us, including children,” said Rep. Glenn “GT” Thompson, a Pennsylvania Republican and chair of the House Agriculture Committee.

Passing the bill would be a “historic accomplishment” that will ensure “those in need can continue to receive the assistance they need,” said Rep. John Rose, a Republican from Tennessee.

And Rep. Dusty Johnson, a South Dakota Republican, said the bill would focus resources on the “neediest” Americans. “If you are a pregnant woman, your benefits are unaffected. If you have young children at home, your benefits are unaffected by this bill. If you are disabled, your benefits are unaffected by this bill.”

But nearly a year after the measure was signed into law, the number of children receiving food assistance has plummeted by at least 776,000, according to a ProPublica analysis. At least 12 states break down program participation by age, and of the 1,670,011 people who are no longer receiving benefits in those states, 776,134, or 46%, were children.

Another analysis reached the same conclusion: Just last month, the nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found there were 700,000 fewer children receiving food assistance.

Arizona has seen the nation’s largest percentage decline in SNAP participants; 205,223 children are no longer receiving the benefit since July 2025, a 55% drop. Louisiana had the second largest percent decline among children, 22%.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees SNAP, hasn’t detailed the impact on children aided by the program, but initial figures show that compared to February 2025, 4.3 million fewer people received SNAP nationwide in February 2026, leaving 37.8 million participants.

Although children weren’t the intended targets of the legislation’s changes, they’re increasingly “collateral damage,” said Katie Bergh, a senior policy analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

If states are trying to comply with the law’s changes to SNAP, they’re likely not focusing on making the program accessible, Bergh said. Other experts said that people may be pushed off the program because of increased paperwork requirements to remain eligible.

States are required to impose work requirements for most adult recipients, while preparing for two major cost shifts. In October, states will begin covering 75% of the program’s administrative costs. States have been paying 50% of those costs.

In addition, states will have to pay a larger share of SNAP benefits starting in October 2027, based on their error rate. Error rates reflect overpayments or underpayments of SNAP benefits. While sometimes characterized as fraud, such errors are usually the fault of the state agency or the SNAP recipient, according to USDA, which describes them as “largely unintentional.”

If a state agency is facing staffing shortages and struggling to comply with new regulations, it will be harder for low-income families to access the benefits, Bergh said. “Families are falling through the cracks.”

In Massachusetts, for example, the share of SNAP applicants who called an assistance line and couldn’t reach a worker rose from 61% in November to nearly 81% in March, according to the Department of Transitional Assistance, which administers SNAP in the state. The state agency did not respond to a request for comment.

A USDA spokesperson did not address ProPublica’s questions about the number of children who have lost access to SNAP. “There is no shortage of resources for the most vulnerable among us, including children,” the spokesperson said.

Have you lost your benefits? Are you working with those who have? Help ProPublica do more reporting. We need your help understanding what shifting policies actually mean for communities across the country. If your SNAP or Medicaid benefits have been cut or if you work to help people navigate public assistance programs, you can email us at safetynet@propublica.org to share your experience.

The three members of the House Agriculture Committee who defended last year’s bill before its passage — Rose, Thompson and Johnson — did not respond to ProPublica’s questions about their statements now that many children no longer receive SNAP benefits.

Rep. Jim McGovern, a Massachusetts Democrat, asked Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins about her recent comments that it was “good news” that millions of people no longer receive SNAP. If more than 700,000 children have been dropped in the 12 states that report those figures, “that number’s going to be into the millions” when other states are included, he said.

Rollins responded, “The 700,000 number of children is not correct,” contending that most people who were kicked off SNAP were “fraudulent.”

“That is not a nonpartisan group that gave you that number,” she said. (ProPublica independently verified the figures reported by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.)

McGovern said he has talked to people who have lost food assistance. “These are people who actually need and rely on this food assistance to provide basic nutrition for their families,” he said.

Pressure to lower error rates “creates a temptation for the states to bump off working families,” said Parke Wilde, a food economist at Tufts University. Working families may have more volatile incomes, making it harder for state agencies to assess benefits accurately.

“When they say we want to preserve SNAP for those with the greatest need, they’re sort of acknowledging that they want the scale of the SNAP program to be smaller,” he said.

Mariana Chilton, an expert in child hunger at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, said a smaller program won’t save money in the long run. Research shows that children who receive SNAP benefits are healthier, have better academic outcomes, use hospitals less often and have better mental health as teenagers.

She called the situation a “public health crisis” in the making. “When children are not healthy, this affects children today and it affects them throughout their lifetimes,” she said, likening hunger during early childhood to a brain injury.

As Arizona’s SNAP participation drops, nonprofits are feeling the effects. St. Mary’s Food Bank, the largest in the state, has seen a 15% increase in need this year, which translates into 300,000 more visits from people in search of food, said Milt Liu, the chief executive officer.

“It’s important for everyone to realize that policies have implications for people on the edge, and we’re seeing that in our line every day,” he said.

On a recent morning, Ana Alvarez waited in a line of vehicles at a St. Mary’s food bank in Phoenix. Alvarez, a single mother of five who works at a restaurant, started coming to St. Mary’s after she lost her SNAP benefits in September.

She reapplied for SNAP with the Arizona Department of Economic Security in December, but the application is still pending. The department did not respond to questions about its backlog.

She clips coupons and has cut out trips to the zoo and restaurants with her children. The slow season at the restaurant where she works is about to hit. And as summer temperatures rise, Alvarez wonders how she will afford her electric bill, her rent and her car payment.

At least once a week she contacts the agency about her application. The last time she called, a worker told her what others have in the past: She will have to keep waiting.

Plutocrats At Play

Peter Thiel expresses fear of a one world totalitarian government, while he and his fellow parasite billionaires have been talking about a "post government" world united by shared commercial interests.

Madness.

When it seems the world is falling apart, and nobody in a position of power is stepping up to prevent it, then we have to consider the probability that someone wants it that way.

Leak Exposes Members of Peter Thiel’s Secretive ‘Dialog’ Society

More than 200 of the world's elites registered for a retreat whose agenda runs from panels on cult-building and sex to prepping for World War III.

A trove of internal records from a secret society for powerful figures in US politics, finance, and tech was left exposed online, WIRED has confirmed, naming participants in its events and revealing sensitive personal details they were assured would stay private.

The group, called Dialog, is a private, invitation-only organization cofounded in 2006 by the billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel. It convenes US officials, foreign government figures, and Silicon Valley executives at off-the-record annual retreats. Dialog has spent two decades declining to disclose its members.

A directory in the website's code was first revealed by the Swiss hacktivist maia arson crimew. Known for exposing the US government’s No Fly List and breaching the surveillance-camera company Verkada, crimew tells WIRED the directory surfaced via an anonymous tip. WIRED independently verified its contents.

A source separately provided WIRED with the registration list for Dialog's 2026 retreat, which names 222 people and records what the list describes as each registrant's membership status and attendee type, including “active member” and “guest.” The retreat is scheduled for August 12-16 at a venue near Dublin, Ireland.

The same data lays out a program of off-the-record sessions, including: “Money (Does?) Buy Happiness,” “Bring Back Nuclear,” “Navigating WWIII,” “Battlefield Technologies,” and “How’s Your Sex Life?” Other talks include “Build-a-Cult,” moderated by the founder of the Christian networking site Pray.com, and “Build-a-Party,” run by a former White House national security official.

Together, alongside the mundane fare of a typical thought leadership conference, the documents show an extraordinary convergence of power. The registration records list General Alexus Grynkewich, NATO's supreme allied commander Europe and the head of US European Command, who took the post in July 2025 and is recorded on the leaked list as having attended Dialog gatherings since 2021. The website directory names sitting Trump administration officials, two US senators, six members of the Paypal Mafia, a former Middle East chief of intelligence, and a sitting ambassador to the United States, along with the founders and directors of many of the country's largest surveillance, data-broker, and advertising-data companies.

Those executives appear side by side with senior US officials overseeing their industries. Auren Hoffman, Dialog’s chairman, founded the location-data broker SafeGraph and the identity-resolution firm LiveRamp, two of the most important suppliers in the consumer data economy. He appears in the directory alongside Treasury secretary Scott Bessent, whose department writes the rules on financial data, and Senator Ted Cruz, chairman of the Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, which oversees the Federal Trade Commission and its data-privacy authority.

Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale, whose software runs case management for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement and data fusion for the Pentagon and intelligence community, is listed in the same society as Army secretary Dan Driscoll and Representative Jim Himes, the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, which oversees agencies Palantir contracts with.

None of the individuals named in this story responded to requests for comment. Raffi Grinberg, who lists himself as Dialog’s executive director on his LinkedIn profile and is the author of the self-help book How to Be a Grown-Up, did not respond to a request for comment.

The registration records appear to show not only who belongs to Dialog but who attends. Of the 222 people signed up for the 2026 retreat, according to the leaked records, 87 are marked as first-time attendees. Others list histories stretching back more than a decade, and a handful to the society's founding 20 years ago. None of the registrants, Grynkewich included, used a government email address. All registered with personal or corporate accounts, placing their attendance outside the email systems subject to public-records laws.

What ties the roster together more than any title or office is a shared preoccupation with artificial intelligence, longevity, and the near future. Asked on a sign-up form to predict the future, registrants returned again and again to the same theme: that AI will reorder work, war, education, and belief within a few years. Several foresee mass labor displacement and a swing back toward unions and government programs; others predict an “AI winter,” domestic terrorism targeting data centers, criminal defendants choosing AI lawyers over public defenders, or religious revival provoked by the disruption.

“Societal degeneration,” predicted one person, “will continue to accelerate.”

Members also list talents like “funhouse construction,” accent imitation, backcountry skiing, urban exploration, and “meditative and psychedelic inquiry into the nature of reality”; one offers “compassion and existential dread,” another “dinner parties, keeping secrets, remembering birthdays.” Their book recommendations skew toward the canonical and optimization-minded, Marcus Aurelius and Milan Kundera alongside Annie Duke’s Thinking in Bets, Peter Attia’s Outlive, and, from at least one attendee, Thiel’s own Zero to One.

Dialog also plays matchmaker. Its participant form asks registrants whether they are “looking for love” and offers to include “Single Man,” “Single Woman,” or “Other” respondents in “future matchmaking.” A separate site, dating.dialog.org, hosts an app pitched as “meaningful connections for exceptional people.”

The form also gathers sensitive answers, including each registrant’s "political leaning,” which Dialog promises “WILL NOT be shared in the app or with other participants, ever.” That data, and the matchmaking responses, were exposed in the leak.

The records sit in Airtable, a commercial database. For each participant, Dialog logs a membership status, every retreat the person has attended, a biography, a home city, and a private access token. WIRED is not publishing the tokens, which function as login credentials, or the personalized account links that contain them.

The leaked registration list also names senior figures absent from the public directory of 113: Randy Kroszner, a former governor of the Federal Reserve who now serves on the Bank of England's Financial Policy Committee; Hallie Hoffman, a former general counsel and acting chief of staff of the Drug Enforcement Administration; Jonathan Greenblatt, the chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League; Peter Goettler, the president of the Cato Institute; Ryan Stowers, the executive director of the Charles Koch Foundation; and Roger Myerson, a Nobel laureate economist at the University of Chicago.

It also lists a cluster of Google and Google DeepMind executives, among them Tom Lue, who leads global affairs for the company's frontier AI division, and one working journalist, Souad Mekhennet, a former national security correspondent for The Washington Post. (She is listed as running an event called “Ulysses Book Club.”)

The rest of the membership spans hedge fund and private equity billionaires, current and former foreign officials, network television actors, best-selling authors, and religious leaders.

One of several internal documents Dialog left exposed on the same online database that held its registration records is a guide for event moderators, urging them to remind participants that everything is “off the record” and that comments should be concise and “nonobvious.” It also coaches them to model brief introductions to “avoid status signaling” in a room full of senators, dignitaries, and tycoons.

The discipline imposed by the group did not extend to its website. The directory was embedded in the code of dialog.org, a near-empty page, and was served to any visitor who viewed the page's source. A separate Dialog page, at app.dialog.org, presents a sign-in screen for “Dialog Global 2026,” outside Dublin. The page invites any visitor to sign in by email or Google account and presents no terms of service, no notice that the application is restricted to members, and no indication that an invitation is required.

Dialog has operated with little public footprint since its founding. It holds at least one retreat a year, with assigned seating, moderated sessions, and a rule that nothing said is for attribution. Past gatherings have been held at the Ritz-Carlton Dove Mountain in Arizona and the San Clemente Palace in Venice, Italy, according to Axios, which first reported the group's plans for a campus in the Washington, DC, area. It has been likened to a tech-industry version of Bilderberg, the off-the-record gathering of Western political and business elites.

Accounts describe retreats of around 100 participants. The 2026 registration list reviewed by WIRED names 222. Public glimpses are rare. The statistician Andrew Gelman published one of Dialog’s invitations to his blog in 2022, describing its format and a registration fee of more than $16,000. The 2014 retreat drew renewed attention this year when an invitation forwarded to the financier Jeffrey Epstein surfaced in the US Justice Department's release of the Epstein files. A “Jeff Epstein” appears on an attached list of past participants—but the person is actually the former CFO of Oracle, not the deceased sex trafficker.

Update 6/16/2026, 5:47 pm EDT: WIRED updated this article to correct a conflation of two people named Jeff Epstein. A small revision was also made to address a security concern raised by a Dialog representative.

Update: 6/18/2026: 2:17 pm EDT: Following this article’s publication, The Washington Post clarified that Souad Mekhennet is a former employee of the outlet.

Today's Rich

Plutocratic Technocracy.

Whatever we end up calling it, I think we are beginning to get hip to their tricks.

Technocracy

The plutocrats are coming out of hiding now.

Grease Up And Bend Over - Again

Reminder

Practically all of the people who own and operate "The Liberal Press" are part of The Epstein Class, and while they may have their producers and editors throw us a leftie bone once in a while, they're voting Republican, and the fact that they also send campaign "donations" to some Democrats is an exercise in ass-covering,

• or it's a move to drag the "moderates" a little further to the right
• or it's calculated to reinforce the attitude that politicians are all alike - they're all corrupt - and the neo-liberal corporate Dems are going to fuck us over too, so why bother?
• or
• or
• or

They live their values, and they vote their interests.

Those values are clearly on display in the Epstein files, and it's getting pretty goddamned impossible to miss what interests they're voting for.

Today's Belle et al

• Huge debt - and getting huger
• The deficit is growing
• Shrinkflation is accelerating
• Job growth sucks
• Mortgage foreclosures are rising
• Personal bankruptcy is rising
• Farm failures are rising
• Consumer Confidence is in the shitter
• and
• and
• and

But hey - The Epstein Class is doing just fine, so who cares about those workin' slob losers in the "middle class"? Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke.

How the hell do I short this market?

During a "shutdown", what essential services are cut, and what is kept up and running?

• The hotlines for reporting things like fraud and ID theft are taken down, but the office that handles corporate mergers and acquisitions is on the job
• Air traffic control operations for private jets may be impacted, but the commercial traffic has to be limited

40% of the gains in the stock markets is due to speculation on AI.

Keith

Fuck Jeff Bezos.

Whenever some schmuck like Dr Oz

argues any point regarding

the economy, it helps to mentally

substitute "my yacht money" for "the economy"

"Starting work younger,

and staying on the job longer

will be a boon to

my yacht money"

"We can't move towards

Universal Healthcare

because that would be

bad for my yacht money"

"We must cut the capital gains tax

because it's good for my yacht money"

"A tax code that's progressive and fair

would negatively impact my yacht money"

IF WE TAX THE RICH NOW

WE WON'T HAVE TO EAT THEM LATER

Follow-Up

After the Vanity Fair piece (I posted it here yesterday), maybe more of the Press Poodles are waking up to just how shitty things are.

And maybe they're also beginning to see the unmistakable pattern indicating it gets a lot shittier (and pretty quickly) if we don't all get with the fuckin' program and put a stop to the Heritage Foundation's accelerating crusade to use our government against us - to finish subjugating us to a small group of plutocratic elites.

USAID cuts could lead to 14M deaths, including nearly 5M kids: report

“No rational person could think the USAID process was a good one,” said White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles in an interview with Vanity Fair published Tuesday of the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development earlier this year. “Nobody.”

Her comment comes just after Elon Musk – the mega-billionaire who spearheaded the effort when he led the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) initiative earlier this year – admitted that DOGE was a disappointment. Before USAID staffing cuts were announced in February, Musk called the agency a “criminal” organization on X, the popular social media platform he bought and re-branded.

According to research published in the Lancet journal this summer, the USAID cuts may lead to more than 14 million deaths globally by 2030. Of those 14 million, an estimated 4.5 million would be children under age 5. That amounts to about 700,000 extra child deaths per year, said UCLA, where co-authors of the study are based.

USAID was established by the late former President John F. Kennedy and it was later mandated by Congress. For more than six decades, the agency helped save millions of lives and served to further U.S. interests around the world through humanitarian efforts.

“The study warns that the impact of USAID cuts could extend beyond the agency’s own programs: international donors may also reduce their commitments, further weakening service delivery in countries already dependent on external support,” UCLA explained.

After the USAID cuts made headlines in February, polling showed that a majority of people (58%) opposed abolishing the agency and folding it into the state department, as President Donald Trump’s administration sought to do. Nearly 90% also said they thought the U.S. should spend at least 1% of its federal budget on foreign aid.

Moves to take apart USAID were also swiftly met with protests and lawsuits. A suit filed by the Public Citizen Litigation Group and Democracy Forward alleged the actions caused a “global humanitarian crisis.”

Wiles said she was “initially aghast,” at Musk’s plans to gut USAID.

“I think anybody that pays attention to government and has ever paid attention to USAID believed, as I did, that they do very good work,” she told Vanity Fair.

Wiles said Musk’s plans were already underway by the time he announced them. She also said his desire for “fast-paced” action was shaped by his business experience, including his work at companies Tesla and SpaceX, and it’s not how she would have handled things.

“When Elon said, ‘We’re doing this,’ he was already into it,” she explained. “And that’s probably because he knew it would be horrifying to others. But he decided that it was a better approach to shut it down, fire everybody, shut them out, and then go rebuild. Not the way I would do it.”

Additionally, Wiles described Musk as an “avowed ketamine [user]” and an “odd, odd duck.”

Musk left the government in May after a public falling out with Trump. However, the impacts of DOGE continue in the form of downstream layoffs, disruptions to the real estate market and more, as Audacy covered last week.

As for the impact of the USAID cuts alone, Davide Rasella, a research professor at the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal) and coordinator of the study published in Lancet, said projections indicate a “sharp increase in preventable deaths, particularly in the most fragile countries.” For example, Reuters reported last week that the Trump administration’s USAID cuts have disrupted life-saving treatment for starving children in Kenya.

“They risk abruptly halting – and even reversing – two decades of progress in health among vulnerable populations,” Rasella said. “For many low and middle-income countries, the resulting shock would be comparable in scale to a global pandemic or a major armed conflict.”

And not to get too conspiracy-addled, but Musk has been quite vocal about his concerns over "breeding" and first world population decline. Seems obvious to me that one of the things he'd be willing to do in order could to keep the white world white, is to arrange for the demise of lots of brown people.

Just sayin'.

A Shadow Government

Russell Vought is the Dark Prince of the Deep Swamp.

Today's Belle

The stakes are really high, and Republicans are losing, so they're trying to figure out how to kick the table over without making it look like they're fucking over the MAGA rubes - which, of course, was their plan the whole time.

I am wondering why they're going to meet at the Veep's place though.

My contention all along has been that Trump is a cat's paw - false front - patsy - whatever. He's there as a kind of grand diversion. While everybody's up in arms about what a total ass-wipe clown he is, behind the scenes, the Plutocrats are putting in place the mechanisms they'll need to rule this joint once they pull the lever that throws Trump out and puts Technobot Vance "in charge".

I just really don't quite understand why some people believe they can rule when they themselves know that cooperation and collaboration is how you have to do things if you want anything to get done.

Empires and monarchies and dictatorships always hollow themselves out and collapse under their own weight. And that whole process now takes an average of less than about 40 years - two generations - at the outside.

I'll say it again:

Better men than these jokers have been trying to conquer the world for 40,000 years.

And the world remains undefeated.

So Close They Can Taste It

The Republican project is to tear down what's left of our traditions of democratic self-governance in order to install a corporate plutocracy.

The new form of government will have only 3 main functions:

1. Defend American commercial interests abroad
2. Keep the domestic rabble under control
3. Settle contract disputes

Here It Comes

Ever get the feeling the people running the show in Trump's White House - as well as the MAGA freaks in Congress - are so dead set against Keynesian economics they just can't stand the thought of government having anything to do with the economy at all?

Yeah - me too.

This hard push to dismantle American government seems very much in keeping with what Nancy MacLean has been warning us about for years. ie: There's a cadre  of radical libertarians who believe there are only three things government is supposed to do:

1. Defend American commercial interests abroad
2. Settle contract disputes
3. Domestic law enforcement

Barnes & Noble

Here's my thing: I'm a capitalist because god is a capitalist. I think capitalism most closely analogizes the natural order of things.

But that's not enough. I'm also in favor of appropriate regulation because god also favors regulation. Regulation is essential to keep any system healthy.

Blood sugar is a good thing, but too much of that good thing and we die. So god gave us a pancreas.

Without regulation, you create various feedback loops, which gives you runaway growth, and another word for runaway growth is cancer.

So anyway, the total transformation of American government is moving ahead at a rather brisk pace.

US announced job cuts surge 245% in February on federal government layoffs

WASHINGTON, March 6 (Reuters) - Layoffs announced by U.S.-employers jumped to levels not seen since the last two recessions amid mass federal government job cuts, canceled contracts and fears of trade wars, offering the clearest sign yet of the toll taken on the labor market by the policies of President Donald Trump's administration.

Global outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas said on Thursday that planned job cuts vaulted 245% to 172,017 last month, the highest level since July 2020, when the economy was in the grips of the COVID-19 pandemic. It was the highest February total since the Great Recession 16 years ago.

Government accounted for the bulk of layoffs, with Challenger tracking 62,242 announced job cuts by the federal government from 17 different agencies. The government has laid off about 62,530 workers in the first two months of the year, a whopping 41,311% increase compared to the same period in 2024.

"When mass layoffs occur, it often leaves remaining staff feeling uneasy and uncertain," said Andrew Challenger, senior vice president at Challenger, Gray & Christmas. "The likelihood that many more workers leave voluntarily is high."

Tech billionaire Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, is wielding the axe on public spending, an exercise that has resulted in funding freezes, deep spending cuts and the purging of thousands of federal government workers, including scientists and game rangers.

Trump has described the federal government as bloated and wasteful. A federal judge last week temporarily blocked the Trump administration from ordering the Department of Defense and other federal agencies to carry out the mass firings of thousands of recently hired employees.

Federal government contractors have also been caught in the DOGE crossfire, extending the job losses to the private sector. Tariffs already implemented or threatened by the White House also added to companies sending workers home last month.

Challenger said the "DOGE impact" topped reasons for job cuts and was blamed for 63,583 layoffs, linked both directly to the federal workforce and contractors.

Downstream effects of DOGE, like loss of funding to private non-profits, accounted for another 894 announced job cuts. Most of the federal layoffs have been in Washington D.C., which has lost 61,795 jobs so far this year compared to only 60 in 2024.

Outside government, there were job cuts in retail, technology, services and consumer products industries. The federal government layoffs are not expected to show up in February's employment report, which is scheduled for release on Friday, as the purges happened outside the survey week.

But the hiring and funding freezes could have an impact on government and contractor employment. Nonfarm payrolls likely increased by 160,000 jobs after rising 143,000 in January, a Reuters survey of economists showed. The unemployment rate is forecast unchanged at 4.0%.

I can see a method to the madness. Put enough people into a bit of a panic over their economic fate, and they'll hand you the power you want.

It's not much different from religion:

1. Sell 'em a make-believe disease
2. Sell 'em your make-believe cure

That's why religion and wingnut politics are so often intertwined - they're both basically the same fucking scam.

From The Bulwark

An oldie but a goodie from Nov 18, 2024

It’s Time to Consider the Worst-Case Scenario
Let’s go to the Bad Place together.

Jonathan V. Last

Until today I’ve resisted writing about the worst-case scenario for Trump’s second term. Instead, I’ve written (twice) about the best-case scenario.

But the conventional wisdom seems to have settled on the view that, Sure, this is all very bad. But also: It’s ultimately fine.

I view this as a dangerous failure of imagination.

So I’m going to lay out two big ideas for you today. The first is something like the worst-case scenario. It isn’t the literal worst-case scenario. The real worst case is always some version of “nuclear holocaust and everyone dies.” Instead what I’m going to describe is a 90th percentile variant: A set of outcomes that are the worst of the unlikely-but-not-black-swan timeline.

The second idea is that I’m going to try to persuade you that if Trump were actively pursuing such a set of outcomes, it would look very much like what we’re already seeing, right now.

In short, I’m going to ask you to expand your mind and peek over the horizon with me. But be warned: This isn’t going to be any fun.

Buckle up.

1. Forests and Trees

Last week Freddie deBoer wrote that liberals shouldn’t panic because, sure, Trump would be bad. But he wouldn’t be that bad.

A lot of awful stuff is going to happen. Some immediate pain points include the replacement of Lina Khan at the FTC with a pliable pro-corporate stooge, the dismantling of Joe Biden’s excellent NLRB, and an immediate gutting of federal wildlife and environmental protections. A lot worse will follow, very likely including even more tax cuts, which are the real reason so many upper-crust types held their nose and voted for Trump. (At the end of the day, there’s always enough will in Congress to cut taxes.) The incoherence that’s inherent to Trump’s foreign policy means that an honest-to-go shooting war might be possible. No relief will be coming for the Rust Belt or any other part of the United States hurt by deindustrialization. This all sucks and there’s going to be some dark times ahead.

At the same time, recent doomsaying has a lot of that usual Trump-era liberal chauvinism in it, where the relentless panic seems competitive and performative. . . . Yes, things are bad, but they’ve been bad before, and as destructive as the first Trump term was it wasn’t as terrible as people predicted. We’ve also had a worse presidential administration in clear living memory.

Is this a joke? Because I’m sorry but if you look at Trump’s second term and put “wildlife and environmental protections” in your top hundred concerns then something is deeply wrong with your priorities.

And the assertion that Trump’s first term “wasn’t as terrible as people predicted”?

He fired the federal government’s pandemic response team and then talked about injecting people with bleach while a global pandemic killed a million fucking Americans.

Then he assembled an armed mob and directed them to march on the Capitol in an attempt to prevent the duly elected incoming president from taking power.

If anyone had predicted either of those outcomes in 2016, they would have been dismissed as barking mad. The reality of Trump 1.0 turned out to be every bit the Worst-Case Scenario 1.0.

DeBoer is, like many people grappling with Trump 2.0, making a bunch of category errors and failing to imagine what a true worst-case scenario could look like.

And let me tell you: It has nothing to do with tax cuts, the FTC, and the NLRB.

When We Were Great

Here in USAmerica Inc, the top 10% currently own close to 70% of all the wealth in the country, while the lower half own down around 3%.

When "we were great" (ie: the late 1800s - back where Trump and his plutocrat buddies want to take us) the top 1% (about 4,000 families) owned as much wealth as all other families combined.

It's my contention that they're not trying to push us back to the 1950s, or the 1850s, but all the way back to the 1750s.

A Question

Why is his left hand not on the bible?

I don't know that it makes any difference in any real sense, but generally, your left hand goes on the bible - or the Baghavad Gita - or Mad Magazine - or whatever the fuck you think might impart a little sense of gravitas to the occasion, or convey to onlookers that you actually mean what you're saying.

C'mon - WTF, Donny boy?

And a purple tie? Purple - as in what - royalty?

You think this isn't going to be one fucked up ride?

We have 651 days until the Mid-Term Elections. 651 days to slug it out with a soon-to-be entrenched administration, that I think is absolutely bent on hot-wiring this thing so they can drive us over the cliff into a full blown plutocracy.

Plutocrats On Parade

The MAGA-verse’s Clash of Titans

Steve Bannon’s attack on Elon Musk exposes one of the biggest fault lines running through

In order to catapult himself back to the White House, Donald Trump has grown his Make America Great Again party into a very big tent. That tent includes many uncomfortable alliances, like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the oil companies he used to fight when he was an environmental lawyer. But perhaps the most tenuous of bedfellows are right-wing techno-oligarchs like Elon Musk and populist nationalists like Steve Bannon, who want to do away with Big Tech’s undue influence over government. And after Inauguration Day, the strength of this unlikely alliance is going to be put to the test.

The math of the situation is pretty simple: Trump’s campaign and other Republican candidates got about $277 million from Musk, the world’s richest man, who, like so many wealthy donors, now wants his seat at the table. And like it or not (personally I do not), the system is set up to reward donors like him. While many have already been appointed to plum gigs like ambassadorships and Cabinet posts, Musk, who is slated to co-run the Department of Government Efficiency, has other ideas for his role in Trump 2.0. The billionaire CEO wants to drastically cut the federal budget, and he wants to do it with some help from his friends (other millionaire and billionaire tech bros). Musk’s plan to gut the federal bureaucracy does not run contrary to MAGA; in fact, it’s exactly what the folks behind Project 2025 want to do. But his quest to take over the administrative state does set him in direct opposition with Bannon—one of Trumpworld’s loudest voices, who has repeatedly railed against globalism and corporate America’s “ruling elites” while pushing for “populist revolt.”

“The two are pro-Trump, but that might be all they have in common,” Oliver Darcy, who writes the Status media newsletter, texted me over the weekend. “Bannon is a populist and has taken a tough stance on billionaires trying to use their wealth to purchase political influence. My suspicion is that Bannon believes Elon is primarily interested in exploiting the MAGA coalition to benefit his companies and bottom line versus being a real believer in the movement itself. Consequently, Bannon has spent years focusing harsh criticism on Elon.”

Musk and Bannon’s feuding has already spilled out into public view. Last month, after the Tesla CEO praised H-1B foreign worker visas for helping make America “strong,” Bannon told Musk to “sit in the back and study” because he was a recent MAGA convert. Trump’s former White House chief strategist went even further last week, telling an Italian newspaper that Musk “is a truly evil guy, a very bad guy. I made it my personal thing to take this guy down. Before, because he put money in, I was prepared to tolerate it. I’m not prepared to tolerate it anymore.” Bannon has also criticized the billionaire’s upbringing in apartheid South Africa. “Peter Thiel, David Sachs, Elon Musk, are all white South Africans,” he said, arguing that Musk “should go back to South Africa,” and asking, “Why do we have South Africans, the most racist people on earth, white South Africans…making any comments at all on what goes on in the United States?”

Three points on this: First, Bannon probably should have thought about Musk’s “evil” nature before Trump’s inner circle allowed him to basically bankroll Trump’s campaign. Second, the notion that the MAGA movement loathes racism—when the very phrase “America first” originated with antisemite Charles Lindbergh—seems to be a bit of a misdirection. And third, questioning Musk’s MAGA bona fides simply because he’s shifted his beliefs seems kind of strange since Trumpworld is chockablock with converts of all stripes: JD Vance was Never Trump before 2018, Musk donated to both John Kerry and George W. Bush in 2004, and Trump himself was a Democrat as late as 2001. Indeed, perhaps the only trait all these people share is a thirst for self-advancement.

The most likely factor determining Musk’s fate in the MAGA-verse is whether he and his ilk want to make the federal government more dysfunctional—as Musk did with X, a husk of the site formerly known as Twitter—or more efficient. And if it’s the latter, what would a more efficient government actually look like? The New York Times reports that after inauguration, a “group of Silicon Valley–inflected, wide-eyed recruits will be deployed to Washington’s alphabet soup of agencies. The goal is for most major agencies to eventually have two DOGE representatives as they seek to cut costs like Mr. Musk did at X, his social media platform.”

It’s possible that this plan will work, and Musk is far from the first person to muse about cutting the federal government. But it seems probable that the billionaire’s plan will devolve into a fiasco of epic proportions: Musk himself has, worryingly, acknowledged that ordinary Americans will need to endure “temporary hardship” in order to put America on firmer fiscal footing, i.e., pay for Trump’s tax cuts for the very wealthy. Whatever the case may be, Musk’s plan could create a scenario in which he has more control over the levers of power than even Trump.

What does seem certain is that Musk will wield his MAGA clout to help his companies and to grow his personal wealth. “We’ve seen peak Elon, his intrusive nature, his lack of understanding of the true issues, and, quite frankly, his support of just himself, the sole objective is to become a trillionaire,” Bannon told the Italian newspaper. “That’s his objective.” Bannon is likely correct in claiming that Musk wants to achieve “techno-feudalism on a global scale.”

Still, peel back their ideological differences, and it’s hard to see how this is anything more than a power struggle to control Trump 2.0. Are we really meant to believe that Musk is really any more self-interested than, say, Trump? Everyone in and around Trump’s second administration—from the tech founders funding his inauguration to the billionaires in his Cabinet—strikes me as self-interested. We’re about to witness what happens when public service is being conducted by a mass of people who don’t believe in serving anything but themselves.

Time To Save Capitalism ...

... from the capitalists - again.

The plutocrats bought more and more coin-operated politicians who actually made it illegal for the corporations not to pimp their profitability (see Sarbanes-Oxley). They have a perverse incentive to turn everything into a revenue opportunity in order to wring every last penny out of it.

The way 21st century capitalism works is the equivalent of hunting to extinction a prey species vital to the survival of humankind.

Told Ya

That Slippery Slope Thing

The kicker here of course is that they're creating a new agency to grace this fucked up racist shit with the appropriate official imprimatur.

And I realize this is the classic Slippery Slope Fallacy, but if this thing is left to its own devices, it will morph into a spoils system, where people can point at an immigrant-owned business or property, make whatever claims of illegality that seem to fit, and confiscate that commercial entity, splitting the proceeds with the coin-operated asshole running the Missouri Illegal Alien Certified Bounty Hunter Program.

Sure hope everybody's ready for an American version of Kristallnacht. Cuz that's where we're headed if we don't wise up and stop it.

Missouri Republican proposes $1,000 bounty program to turn in undocumented immigrants

State Representative An incoming Missouri Republican lawmaker introduced a bill this week that would offer $1,000 bounties to residents who turn in undocumented immigrants to the state highway patrol.

The bill, filed by Sen.-elect David Gregory, a St. Louis-area Republican, would require the Missouri Department of Public Safety to create phone and email hotlines as well as an online portal where Missourians would be able to report alleged undocumented immigrants.

The bill is among several pieces of legislation that deal with illegal immigration ahead of next month’s legislative session. They come as President-elect Donald Trump and Republicans across the country have made frustrations with immigration, and the U.S.-Mexico border, a hot-button issue.

In addition to the payouts, Gregory’s bill would require the Department of Public Safety to create a “Missouri Illegal Alien Certified Bounty Hunter Program.” The program would certify people to become bounty hunters to find and detain undocumented immigrants.

Individuals who are licensed as bail bond agents or surety recovery agents would be able to apply to become bounty hunters under Gregory’s bill.

Undocumented immigrants who are caught by the bounty hunters would be considered guilty of “trespass by an illegal alien.” Those found guilty of the offense could face jail time and would be prohibited from voting and other rights.

Gregory, who did not immediately respond to a request for comment, had made illegal immigration one of the central focuses of his Senate campaign. He filmed a campaign ad at the southern border with Mexico and has promoted media coverage of his bill on social media.

Edgar Palacios, executive director of Revolución Educativa, a Kansas City group focused on education issues in the Latino community, said Gregory’s bill was “horrendous.”

“Immigrants are human and humans aren’t meant to be hunted,” Palacios said in an interview. “This idea of having a bounty hunter for immigrants is wild and I think it displays a narrative that, again, people see, not everybody, but certain people see immigrants as inhuman.”

Nimrod Chapel, president of the Missouri NAACP State Conference, drew parallels between Gregory’s bill and legislation historically aimed at marginalized groups such as the 1820 Missouri Compromise which admitted Missouri as a slave state.

“This bill by our new senator has returned exactly to those roots,” Chapel said. “You’re going to create a system that is not only going to differentiate people based on how God made them, which, in my spiritual belief, is just fundamentally wrong, but then you’re going to try to create in a system…that seeks to differentiate people in much the same way that some of the Jim Crow laws did.”

Chapel referred to the bill as “a really draconian and racist piece of legislation.”

“It scares the hell out of me,” he said. “And the reason it does is because I already know that Black and brown people have been catching hell in the state of Missouri for a very long time.”

Impact on Kansas City

While Gregory faces blowback for his bill, it comes as Missouri politics have been awash in rhetoric about migrants. The focus on immigration would have an outsized impact on the Kansas City region, which has become a center of migrant arrivals over the last decade, according to U.S. immigration court data analyzed by The Washington Post.

Since 2014, roughly 8,300 migrants have settled in Jackson County since 2014 and 37% came from Honduras.

Earlier this year, Republican Gov. Mike Parson sent Missouri National Guard troops to aid Texas, which has promoted a plan dubbed “Operation Lone Star” that uses Texas state resources to combat illegal border crossings.

Parson, who will term out of office next month, heavily promoted the deployment, even though he later vetoed funding to continue it.

Candidates for office in both major parties emphasized illegal immigration on the campaign trail, including Democrat Lucas Kunce. But the issue was perhaps the most prevalent in the race to succeed Parson as governor, with all three major GOP candidates touting immigration frustrations in campaign ads and public statements.

Each of the three candidates, including Gov.-elect Mike Kehoe, also seized on comments Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas made in April welcoming migrant workers who are in the United States legally.

Amid the campaign rhetoric, outgoing House Speaker Dean Plocher, a Des Peres Republican, also created a committee that focused on “Illegal Immigrant Crimes.” The committee held hearings across the state, including in Kansas City, to maximize public attention on the issue.

For Palacios, with Revolución Educativa, immigrants are coming to the U.S. in search of a better life and to pursue “the American dream.” He said politicians should be focused on ensuring everyone has access to education and opportunities.

“I think the narrative is harmful. I think it’s designed to create fear amongst certain members of our community,” Palacios said. “It riles up a base that may not fully appreciate, again, the value that immigrants and folks from the migrant community bring, not to our state, but to our country.”