Trump launches ALARMING election monitor plot
Sunday Dose of Democracy:
VIDEO OF THE DAY: DOJ drops bombshell midterm announcement
Brian Tyler Cohen and legal expert Marc Elias of Democracy Docket break down the Trump administration's deeply alarming announcement that they will be deploying 1,000 "election monitors" to polling places around the country. They say they're to ensure compliance with the Civil Rights Act, but we all know the Trump administration couldn't care less about civil rights...and are VERY interested in tilting the midterm elections in their favor.
Take Action: Stop Trump from destroying the Forestry Department!
Natalie Harp is the high priestess of the Cult of Trump
Jeet Heer, The Nation: "I’ll confess I was leery when Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff turned long-standing speculation about the relationship between Donald Trump and his 35-year-old aide Natalie Harp into a hot topic of national debate. It’s long been known that Harp is obsessed with Trump to the point of creepiness, and that the president is all too happy to bask in the glow of her fawning gaze. Their bizarre bond, which seems to have unsettled many in the White House, was already documented in two books of access journalism. But my mistake was in thinking of the Trump/Harp story as a sex scandal. Their relationship doesn’t have to be sexual to be disturbing. Its true significance is that it proves just how deranged the cult of personality around Trump has become.
Born in 1991, Harp is an evangelical Christian. She finished her undergraduate degree at Point Loma Nazarene University in 2012 before getting an MBA from Liberty University in 2015.
But, as with many politicized Christians, Harp’s focus of devotion has shifted to the unlikely person of Donald Trump. The New York Times reports that Harp 'has said that she suffered from bone cancer and that it was legislation Mr. Trump signed in 2018 that provided her access to experimental treatments.' This story carries an emotional punch, although, as The Washington Post reported in 2020, when Harp told her tale to the Republican National Convention, experts doubted its veracity. The drugs she most likely received were already legal without any assistance from Trump. The factual veracity of Harp’s claims is beside the point, since she’s not interested in accurate reporting. Rather, Harp is a mythologist, creating lore to glorify the object of her worship, Donald Trump.
On Thursday, The Daily Beast published two more letters Harp had written to Trump, both full of effusive praise. On one she wrote, 'Thank you for being my Guardian and Protector in this Life.' In another letter, she echoed a line from Jane Austen and wrote, 'it is I who is unworthy.' Harp might be Trump’s most assiduous devotee, but she is hardly alone. Trump’s monumental narcissism has made self-abasement the surest path to his inner circle. This is a dangerous dynamic, since it means Trump is not listening to any critical voices that might warn him away from his capricious impulses.
Harp’s success in turning toadying into access also explains why she is now the topic of controversy: because the other courtiers and cronies in Trump’s orbit are jealous. Tell-all accounts—such as the ones written by Haberman and Swann or Wolff—aren’t coming from Democrats, who hardly have a chance to near Trump. They’re coming from inside the White House, from people who object to Harp because they want to take her place. After all, the current scandal might lead to Harp’s being exiled from Trump’s A-list, but the president himself will remain a needy man-child. Which means the job of high priestess in the cult will have to be filled by another eager applicant."
Take Action: Impeach Trump budget director Russell Vought!
Union ironworker takes on Big Lie-pushing MAGA radical in battle for critical House seat
Brian Poindexter for Congress: Brian Poindexter is a union worker and city councilman who has worked hard his entire life in machine shops, on construction sites, driving trucks, and serving his neighbors. He’s the perfect candidate to win over the working-class voters of Ohio’s 7th district, which is currently represented by a Republican who has spent his two terms in office towing the MAGA party line — and racking up a slew of nasty allegations, including domestic violence. Will you chip in to to help jump-start Brian’s campaign and help Democrats pick up this vital and winnable House seat?
The new Cold War is an alibi for tech elites’ impunity
Shahid Khan Naeem, Jacobin: "Before the spectacular implosion of his $45 billion AI hedge fund late last month, twenty-four-year-old Leopold Aschenbrenner had laid out a road map for a new Cold War with China. In June 2024, shortly after being fired from OpenAI, Aschenbrenner published a treatise titled 'Situational Awareness,' analogizing his work in Silicon Valley to the race to build the atomic bomb. The nuclear secrets that had permanently changed the world’s balance of power and won World War II for the United States, he wrote, had been upstaged. Advancements being made across Silicon Valley augured the imminent arrival of artificial superintelligence, a technology upon which the future of American economic and military supremacy rested. It was a race, said Aschenbrenner, that would 'determine the future of the free world.' The only question was whether the United States or its authoritarian adversary China would get there first.
Today, however, Aschenbrenner’s manifesto is a foundational text in the growing Silicon Valley consensus around the new Cold War. In his own 6,500 word essay this month, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg wrote that obstructions to the AI build-out’s necessary energy and data center infrastructure represented a national security risk to US dominance in the AI race with China. Others, from liberals like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic chief Dario Amodei to right-wing venture capital heavyweights Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen, agree.
What he sees is what the CEOs of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, and Amazon see, along with many of their twenty-four-year-old engineers: opportunity. The idea of looming conflict with China has its conveniences, offering an existential AI arms race that entices funders and increases firm valuations while providing built-in marketing for products that are still searching for consumer desire. Some benefits are more personal. The Situational Awareness treatise enabled Aschenbrenner, who lacked investing experience entirely, to raise an initial $100 million for his hedge fund — which, in the span of under two years, reached a scale that its peers took decades to achieve — and cushioned his fall from grace when it came crashing down around him. Today investors are clamoring to reinvest.
But the ultimate return on this vision is even more lucrative. At its core, the new Cold War with China is a framework that provides Silicon Valley crucial insulation from democracy. At a congressional hearing in 2018 where he was grilled about an infamous Facebook data breach, Mark Zuckerberg’s notes laid out the strategy as simply as it gets: 'Break up FB? US tech companies key asset for America; break up strengthens Chinese companies.'
A bipartisan backlash against the growing power of Silicon Valley to dictate the terms of American life is underway, with Americans across the political spectrum finding common ground in opposing the automation of their jobs, data centers and their associated energy costs, the increasing prevalence of surveillance tools like Flock cameras, and the spread of extractive rent-seeking tools like algorithmic price-fixing of groceries and apartment rents. Against this backdrop, arguments about national security and great-power rivalry offer an attractive way for tech firms to short-circuit growing public demands for control over the technologies shaping their lives.
How many people desire to live out Leopold Aschenbrenner’s vision — a world in which a few hundred people scattered across Silicon Valley AI labs and Washington national security posts are afforded 'situational awareness' through their proximity to unassailable power and can act to shape the world accordingly? Few to none. The shadow of the new Cold War with China points to the unanswered question straining at the heart of Leopold Aschenbrenner’s Silicon Valley vision: How much longer will Americans be willing to surrender democratic control of the world-structuring institutions that shape their lives?"
Take Action: Restore the Voting Rights Act!
What American doctors saw in Gaza
Jonah Valdez, The Intercept: "It’s been nearly three years into Israel’s genocidal war on Palestinians, and still no step closer to its end. Since the latest 'ceasefire' began in October 2025, Israel has continued to bombard Gaza and has killed more than 1,200 people, United Nations experts reported earlier this month. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu more recently rejected President Donald Trump’s Board of Peace agreement with Hamas for Israeli troops to withdraw from the Gaza Strip. 'The burden has really continued to devastate the healthcare system in general. So you’re hearing from colleagues every day. They don’t have the materials that they need to serve their patients,' Dr. Thaer Ahmad tells The Intercept Briefing. 'They don’t have even the basic sort of guarantee that there is a cloak of security allowing them to operate in the traditional ways that they would like to.'
Jonah Valdez speaks to Ahmad, an emergency medicine physician and humanitarian who has provided medical relief in conflict zones including Gaza, and director Poh Si Teng about their new documentary 'American Doctor.' It follows three U.S. physicians from three different states who volunteer to enter Gaza to provide emergency medical care as best they can, with the insufficient supplies they have, to save lives — under the threat, as healthcare workers and hospitals have repeatedly been the target of strikes, of losing theirs.
The American doctors were not just targeted by the Israeli military, however. Upon returning home and trying to share the atrocities they had witnessed in Gaza, they were 'pummeled,' says Teng, in interviews with mainstream media outlets and ignored by lawmakers in Congress.
'There’s this refusal to acknowledge what most American people are interested in — and that is money out of the Middle East in terms of military and wars, and into our communities here, into healthcare, and into some of the services that we are deprived of, that, for example, Israeli society is able to provide for their citizens: free education, free healthcare,' says Ahmad. 'We don’t even have that here, and yet we’re still providing a significant amount of aid.' Teng says, 'For everybody who’s trying to do something in this moment, it’s not like as individuals we have no agency. We do. But it’s also important to remind people of the systems in place that make it very hard for us to do the right thing. If there was any path forward or a glimmer of inspiration, I felt, follow these doctors.'"
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