American Doom

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.

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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…

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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.

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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.

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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.

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It takes a lot of work to put together all the pieces like this. Last March, Rachel Maddow praised my ability to “connect the dots” with my investigation of local election officials throughout the country who support Trump’s election lies. But all this work digging up clues to what’s coming next in our new age of American authoritarianism isn’t easy — and is very time consuming. If you support this work, please consider a paid subscription to American Doom or contributing a few dollars to our coffee fund. I’ve extended the Fighting Season discount through July, so you can get 20 percent off the regular subscription cost. Paid subscribers can also get discounts by referring a friend and giving gift subscriptions. Thank you all for your support. - jg

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Donald Trump has made it clear that he would like to strip Americans of their citizenship — and his loyalists at the Justice Department have now been given new tools to do so.

A June 11 memo to all employees of the Justice Department’s Civil Division advises attorneys and staff to begin prioritizing “denaturalization” proceedings for several categories of naturalized citizens, which is just a more complicated way of saying Americans. Most disturbingly, the memo provides the government with the ability to strip citizenship away from virtually anyone it feels like.

While the directive currently only applies to immigrants who have become citizens through the naturalization process, it isn’t difficult to imagine how easily this can — and likely will — creep toward efforts to strip citizenship away from natural born Americans.

This writing has been on the wall for years. For all of our history, a key plank of American conservatism has been to establish rules about who actually gets to call themselves Americans. You see this in the culture wars — “real” Americans are the folks sitting at diners in the Midwest, being interviewed during an election year on Fox & Friends. Everyone else — like people who live in large cities — are to be considered part of an un-American insurgency. Obviously, the biggest determining factor of who gets to be American has to do with the color of your skin. Second to that is your politics: liberalism is not just un-American but anti-American. Over my lifetime I’ve watched as Republican politicians and their media allies have achieved great success in making “liberal” a dirty word, and making “conservative” synonymous with patriotism.

What the June 11 memo from the Justice Department’s Civil Division makes clear is that any pretense of Trump’s mass deportation operation being directed at “criminal illegal immigrants” is just that — a fake-out, an excuse to expand the practice of determining who gets to be here based not on criminality but on an entirely different set of parameters that are defined by people like Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, and whomever has the most highly-rated show on Fox News at any given moment.

That’s because the memo gives wide leverage for Justice Department lawyers and staff to initiate denaturalization proceedings. There is of course some language about how the government should focus on stripping citizenship away from objectively bad people like terrorists, sex offenders and violent criminals. But the memo makes clear that the Justice Department has carte blanche to denaturalize virtually anyone it wants, for virtually any reason government lawyers can come up with.

These reasons include stripping citizenship from anyone who poses a “potential” danger to national security or are somehow involved in a “nexus” to terrorism. You can see how quickly this can — and almost surely will — be abused by Trump loyalists within the Justice Department.

The memo also orders the Justice Department to pursue denaturalization of anyone who has “acquired naturalization through fraud,” which could apply to transgendered people — a new piece of evidence in growing suspicions among trans Americans that the Trump administration is effectively trying to criminalize being trans.

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Beyond this already-vague language, the memo directs Justice Department attorneys to pursue denaturalization proceedings against anyone with “pending criminal charges,” even “if those charges do not fit” in categories of immigrants like those who have committed violent crimes. Government attorneys can also strip citizenship from anyone it “determines to be sufficiently important to pursue.”

“These categories are intended to guide the Civil Division in prioritizing which cases to pursue; however, these categories do not limit the Civil Division from pursuing any particular case, nor are they listed in a particular order of importance,” the memo reads, in part. “Further, the Civil Division retains the discretion to pursue cases outside of these categories as it determines appropriate. The assignment of denaturalization cases may be made across sections or units based on experience, subject-matter expertise, and the overall needs of the Civil Division.”

In other words: denaturalize anyone you want.

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Stripping away citizenship of Trump critics

With a vengeful strongman at the helm, this is going to get out of hand quickly. In fact it already has. We only need to look at the cases of Mahmoud Khalil and Reyna Ozturk, two university students who spoke out against the war in Gaza and who were subsequently black-bagged by immigration agents before being ordered released by judges.

Marco Rubio’s State Department led those efforts, which were likely unconstitutional. Threats — both carried out and implied — to detain, deport or denaturalize anyone Donald Trump simply doesn’t like are right at home in the American right’s forever war of determining who is a loyal American and who is not (the constitution be damned). The difference now is, the president and those behind him wielding the logistical power of government agencies like the DOJ, people like Russell Vought and Stephen Miller, are actually putting policies in place that will bring Trump’s authoritarian dreams into the realm of reality.

This includes masked cops on American streets, terrorizing immigrant communities and detaining them at will, as well as new facilities to hold scores of migrants as part of Trump’s mass deportation initiative. It also includes people like Rep. Andy Ogles asking the Justice Department to explore denaturalizing Zohran Mamdani. In just the last 24 hours, Trump has glommed onto this idea, rolling out a Trumpian classic of those ever-helpful but always-anonymous “people” who tell him things. In this case, those “people are saying he’s here illegally.”

Trump’s vague threat to deport Mamdani came during a visit to a new immigration detention facility in Florida, where he once again mused about deporting Americans who have been convicted of crimes — just another group of citizens he would like to remove from the country.

As of the June 11 DOJ memo, the Trump administration’s efforts to decide who is American and who is not also include the memo’s broad directive to strip citizenship away from pretty much anyone, for pretty much any reason. I imagine this includes criticizing Trump himself — an offense that several tourists and others traveling to the U.S. have said resulted in their detention and denial of entry.

But for me, one of the most eye-raising parts of the memo comes in the ninth category of immigrants whose denaturalization should be prioritized by the government — those who have “acquired naturalization through government corruption, fraud, or material misrepresentation.”

This broad language could be applied to lots of classes of naturalized citizens, including the trans community.

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Targeting trans immigrants

First, “government corruption” is extremely broad. If I had to guess, I’d say that this will be applied to asylum-seekers who were granted temporary or other protective status during the Biden administration — which government lawyers under Trump will claim improperly granted asylum to immigrants as part of a “corrupt” scheme to import Democratic voters. (This argument has been made by Trump and many, many others for years now, but it’s not hard to imagine it being made in court in order to support the administration's efforts to continue removing asylum-seekers.)

But what to make of immigrants who were naturalized through “fraud or material misrepresentation?” Thankfully, we have a State Department cable (above) from February to shed some light on what that could mean. Under the guise of transgendered people seeking to enter the country for sporting competitions, the cable provides direction on how to deny them entry.

The cable says that any immigrant or traveler whose self-identified sex doesn’t match their sex at birth on government documents like passports is making a “misrepresentation,” and should therefore be denied entry into the United States. Trans advocates have told me they believe this is an important and troubling step toward charging trans immigrants and even trans citizens with fraud for “misrepresenting” their sex.

If that’s the case, the June 11 Justice Department memo would allow government lawyers to strip citizenship away from trans people whose current sex does not match their sex at birth, as defined on government documents.

Hanging over all of this is the Supreme Court’s decision on birthright citizenship, which allowed the Trump administration to continue to pursue undoing a law that provides citizenship for anyone born in the United States. If birthright citizenship is done away with, does that mean even those of us who were born here will have to go through some new, yet-to-be contrived naturalization process? If that’s the case, the June 11 Justice Department memo makes clear that the government has the discretion to deny citizenship — or take it away — from virtually anyone they like.

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We’re in it, folks. I say that with no pleasure, but what no reasonable person would describe as anything other than obvious authoritarianism has arrived in the form of secret police on American streets and military involvement in domestic matters. The system is failing. Much of the mainstream press continues to bury its head in the sand over this reality, so if you have the ability, please consider throwing a few dollars our way for a paid subscription to American Doom or our coffee fund. Your support keeps this newsletter free for everyone out there trying to stay on top of the madness. - jg

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In one video, agents tackle a man in downtown Los Angeles, pinning him to the ground. An agent then puts the business end of a taser to the man’s head before turning it on a woman filming the scene with her phone. The agent points the taser at the woman’s face.

In another video, agents break the window of a box truck to nab a woman sitting behind the wheel. The man behind the camera — his phone — says, “Are you serious, bro?” and is then taken down by agents. The woman in the truck was a tamales vendor who has been in the United States for 25 years. The man behind the camera was a U.S. citizen who was detained and then released.

Another tamales vendor, an elderly woman named Matilde, had a heart attack when masked agents ripped her from a van. Immigration agents then arrested a U.S. citizen who was filming the incident, telling him that he was “never getting out” and that he had “better get a good lawyer.”

Of course, you have probably seen the video of Narciso Barranco, a landscaper and father of three Marines, being pinned to the ground and punched in the face by immigration agents.

These are just a few examples of the campaign of terror that immigration agents are carrying out on American streets. You can see more at a piece I have out today at Aaron Rupar’s Public Notice newsletter. Gone is any pretense that the Trump administration’s mass deportation plan has anything to do with undocumented immigrants who have committed crimes. Instead, agents wearing masks to conceal their faces and bulletproof vests, tactical gear and bearing assault rifles, are taking down elderly tamales vendors, landscapers, construction workers and apparently any brown person they feel like stopping on a given day.

If you support my work in tracking all of these troubling developments, please consider a paid subscription to American Doom. I’m an independent journalist and your support helps me pay the bills.

In some cases, it’s not even clear who these agents are. LA Mayor Karen Bass noted this week that some agents are wearing generic bulletproof vests that can be purchased online. Concern that DHS has deputized corrections officers and even bounty hunters to carry out immigration enforcement is growing. In a photo released by DHS a few weeks back, an agent is seen wearing a hat with the logo of the U.S. Army’s Psychological Operations division.

I don’t know of a more clear example of authoritarianism than masked agents — secret police, effectively — rounding up people based on their ethnicity, and then threatening, arresting or detaining even U.S. citizens who try to get in the way. After all these years covering the growing extremism of the American right, police brutality, and civil unrest, it seems like we have finally arrived: authoritarianism is here, and the only question that remains is what we are going to do about it.

I’m not saying anyone should attack a cop or an immigration agent. I’m saying that if you see these actions taking place, you should document the incident. Each day, Americans with backbones and morals should be publicly shaming any immigration agent or member of law enforcement involved with these actions.

Preventing American authoritarianism from going any further requires us to make the men and women carrying out these actions pay a societal cost for them. They should be ostracized from their friends and families. They should be made to feel ashamed for what they are doing, because what they are doing is quite simply wrong. They should not be allowed to get jobs in local law enforcement when they leave their work as immigration agents. They should be forced into the fringes of society, and perhaps even have no choice but to work the same low-paying, thankless jobs that immigrants hold. The time for excuses — they’re just following orders; they have bills to pay and families to feed — has passed. Put simply: anyone who is working on behalf of the Trump administration’s mass deportation plan, from DHS Secretary Kristi Noem on down to the agents on the ground inflicting fear and chaos on the streets of Los Angeles and elsewhere, can no longer have a place in our society until they repent for their actions.

This is already happening in LA and elsewhere, where everyday citizens are standing up to agents as they violently detain harmless immigrants. Each day, a new round of videos emerges showing Americans doing the right thing — shaming the agents on the ground and in some cases preventing them from carrying out the often illegal detainments in which they’re engaged. More of this peaceful resistance will be required.

More on authoritarianism from American Doom

* Autocratization in action

* New American fascism and competitive authoritarianism, with Steven Monacelli

* Authoritarian sirens from Day One

* How we live now - What the beginnings of authoritarianism feel like

Those of us who grew up in the aftermath of 9/11 will remember the “See something, say something” mindset that required all of us to keep our eyes open for anyone wanting to do harm to our fellow countrymen. That same mindset is required of us now, but unfortunately must be applied to many of our fellow Americans, who have lost their way and are engaged in an unconstitutional and immoral campaign of terror against immigrants.

Courts ceding power, military involvement in domestic law enforcement

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It’s certainly distressing that it’s gotten to this point. For a while, I thought the systems were holding relatively well, but I no longer believe that’s the case. In recent weeks, the Trump administration’s attacks on the independence of the judicial branch and the failure of the courts to act as a check against the regime’s authoritarian assault on democracy have made it clear that street-level resistance and electoral upheaval are the only ways out of this mess.

The conservative majority on the Supreme Court has been responsible for three unsigned orders in recent months that grant the president more power and discretion over removing immigrants than the constitution allows. In the most recent of these unsigned orders — which are supposed to be used only in emergency cases but seem to be increasing — the court’s conservative majority essentially did away with the due process rights of noncitizens. Now, the Trump administration is free to send immigrants its agents detain to whatever country it pleases — even if the immigrant has no connection to that country. This includes sending immigrants from south and central America to places like Libya and South Sudan, countries in the midst of government upheaval and civil war.

To give a real-world example of why this matters, one of the immigrants at the center of the dispute over what’s known as third-country removals, a gay man, was locked in a room and repeatedly raped by other men in Guatemala. He was only released when his sister paid a ransom. After detaining the man, the Trump administration then facilitated his deportation back to Guatemala.

The court’s Republican appointees granted this sweeping power to the Trump administration to deport immigrants wherever it likes despite the fact that Justice Department lawyers had clearly violated lower court orders. The New York Times has reported that DOJ officials purposefully defied judges by sending immigrants to third countries and elsewhere via deportation flights, but the Supreme Court’s conservative justices let it slide.

The court also recently granted sweeping immunity to immigration agents like those terrorizing American streets from being sued for violating the constitutional rights of citizens and noncitizens alike. This removes another mechanism for holding the Trump administration and its agents accountable for their actions. In early June, the court also sided with the Trump administration — thus giving the president more power over immigration matters — in allowing the administration to remove protections for Cubans, Nicaraguans, Venezuelans and Haitians fleeing unrest and government oppression in those countries.

While the Supreme Court has been busy granting Trump more and more power over everything from immigration to blanket immunity for any crimes he or his administration may commit while in office, the creep of the administration’s foot soldiers into everyday American life has continued. Masked immigration agents are showing up not just in Los Angeles, but in cities and towns across the country. The expansion of the military to deal with domestic matters is also increasing — and not just in the form of U.S. Marines guarding the federal building in downtown LA, where many immigrants are being held in cramped conditions, and immigration lawyers are often prevented from seeing their clients for hours on end.

Members of Trump’s federalized California National Guard — which a three-judge panel in federal court determined the president was within his rights to do — is now helping the DEA with drug busts. So, in addition to masked, secret police roaming American streets, we now have members of the military involved with both immigration and domestic law enforcement operations. It’s hard to imagine a more troubling sign of the arrival of authoritarianism than that.

But in case you’re still on the fence, just look up “ICE raids” on any given social media platform for more evidence of the moment at which we have arrived.

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The following was written before we bombed Iran. This development is cataclysmic for a variety of reasons, but for the purposes of this newsletter — which chronicles the frontlines of America’s wars against itself, waged on behalf of right-wing authoritarianism — last night’s military incursion into Iran presents more opportunities for Trump and the authoritarian right to strengthen their grip on power and control. The future threat of Islamic extremism in response to last night’s attack will be used as pretext to further erode our civil liberties and stifle dissent. Things are almost sure to get worse, I hate to say.

***

This first paragraph is where I would set up what is known in journalism as the anecdotal lede. I would describe something that is seemingly unrelated to the rest of what you’re about to read, but in a very clever way I would tie it all together. The anecdotal lede would become part of a metaphor for the subject matter of this piece, maybe even a lesson I’ve learned or a discovery I’ve made.

Wrapping it all up, the end of this column — “the kicker,” as we call it — would harken back to the lede, completing a circular path that was taught to me by the star columnist at my hometown newspaper, which is now mostly dead. If I were interested in doing this, I might talk about the house projects I’ve completed in the last month, or re-reading Moby Dick, or playing and writing a lot of music — all of which has consumed my time since I’ve been away from the day-to-day business of this newsletter. I would certainly find a clever way to reach a profound conclusion about modern American life from the inglorious work of replacing faucets and cleaning bathroom tile. But I’m not interested in that because it doesn’t feel honest. That’s because for the first time in my journalism career, I am truly questioning whether all of this is worth it. In a bigger sense, I’m questioning not just the merits of journalism as I’ve practiced it over the last two decades but also how I — and we — spend our time and energy.

This is not directly about Trump or the forces of authoritarianism that threaten us. This is about the exhaustion of modern life — the hustle, the noise, the polarization, the addiction and distraction of social media and the Internet, the dumbing down of discourse, the victories of the stupid and evil, the volume of it all, and the general feeling of decline that I just can’t shake.

All of this makes me want to focus more on what I can control and less on what is well beyond that. I can help out my neighbors and friends with daily tasks. I can make a nice dinner for my wife and take my dogs for a walk because they need to get out of the house. I cannot change the forces of a society that seems bent on its own destruction, and a people that seem to have largely abandoned everything from good taste in music to a societal foundation of reason and intellect.

Part of this is because I’m 41-years-old, and have been at my job of being a journalist for most of the last 20 years. Before heading to Los Angeles, I saw a few new faces on cable news describing the situation on the ground there — another piece of evidence that there are generations coming behind me who both see the world differently than I do, and were not around to experience things like the past unrest that I’ve spent much of my career documenting. “Amateur hour,” I muttered to myself as I watched on Fox News as they interviewed an independent (and, I’m assuming, right-wing) journalist wearing a painting respirator and what looked like a batting helmet.

Let me add to the feeling of dystopia by asking for your money in the middle of a post about how stuff like that feels strange. Thank you for your support!

By the time I got to LA, I watched one of Fox’s correspondents scurry behind the police line for her live shot. She joined other members of the press in staying behind a line of police as they swept down a street, clearing protesters out of downtown ahead of an 8 p.m. curfew. I never attended journalism school so I don’t know if they teach this, but if you are behind the men with the guns who are shooting at unarmed civilians, you are on the wrong side to do your job as a journalist.

Later, I watched a clip of the Fox correspondent explaining to the anchors in New York what was happening there. They asked her questions as if she were embedded with American soldiers storming Omaha Beach. The correspondent expressed much sympathy for the police who were, by then, indiscriminately firing on protesters who were mostly walking away, claiming that they had been throwing “boulders” at the cops. She assured Fox’s patriotic viewers that, even if protesters had their faces covered, that they would be found thanks to the surveillance cameras throughout the area.

Don’t worry, folks at home, the agents of the state who are marching on the citizens will find those citizens and punish them.

In places other than California, Republicans are trying to criminalize wearing masks at protests. At Savannah’s No Kings march, a woman was briefly detained by police for wearing a medical mask. Meanwhile, Republicans apparently see no issue with the masked ICE agents black-bagging undocumented immigrants and detaining U.S. citizens during their raids on American streets.

As the corps of American journalism has been depleted, we’ve lost a lot of institutional knowledge. That includes everything from the simple fact that overly-aggressive law enforcement has been present not just for a very long time, but got a relatively recent moment in the spotlight when we learned of the militarization of American law enforcement in the wake of Ferguson just 11 years ago. If the institutional knowledge of newsrooms were more intact, there would be people around to tell younger reporters things like this, and that a painting respirator is not an effective way to avoid becoming incapacitated by tear gas. (For that, you’ll need something from the excellent line of Mira gas masks, which I swear by. And Mira, if you’re reading this, because I am 41-years-old and need money to fix things around my house, I will happily become a paid spokesperson and/or accept your advertising dollars.)

The institutional knowledge of newsrooms has been depleted thanks to the degradation of the industry. Folks have also simply died. I recently lost two people who played a major role in my journalism career: Chuck Haga, the longtime columnist for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune and Grand Forks Herald, and Bill Kotsatos, the New York-based photojournalist. Chuck was there when I was fired from the Herald in 2013 and went into freelancing. He read and supported my work over the ensuing years. I met Bill in Ferguson the next year, and we spent much of the next few years together on the road covering police shootings and unrest.

As the unrest in Los Angeles unfolded, Bill was not there for me to text to see what he thought about it — and whether he would meet me there, so we could once again do what we did best together.

Bill and I had been in touch quite a bit in the last year as he was diagnosed with and quickly succumbed to pancreatic cancer. At the same time, he was reading the first draft of my book — in which he plays a large role — and looking through photos I wanted him to include in it. I flew to New York to attend his memorial, where his son and ex-wife put on an exhibition of his work. Just inside the door of the room where the exhibition was held was Bill’s bulletproof vest and helmet, which I hadn’t seen since they were on his body as we navigated a riot in 2016.

Strangely, it was not at Bill’s memorial where my faith in journalism was restored — and that’s not anyone’s fault but my own. Bill would have understood the strangeness of what I and many other people are feeling. Still, in the middle of the unrest in downtown LA, which a more just world would have allowed Bill to join me for, I did consider that there is a path out of the troubling place we’ve found ourselves.

But my work in LA is a very specific type of journalism, and not one that can be practiced all the time. That’s because, at least for now, this country is not experiencing street-level, violent upheaval all the time. Riots are relatively rare. So, I have to find a way to spend the rest of my time, and that work has left me wondering how effective traditional journalism can be in a country that seems to be bent on decline — and the path toward something better.

***

The failure of journalism

I think it used to take much longer for a reporter to reach the point at which I’ve arrived, where I’m questioning whether journalism is not just a productive use of my time but whether it can achieve the ideological goals that lie at its core. Even completely objective journalism, which I have never really practiced but was the kind that Bill and many others pursue, is based in idealism. By seeking that “closest attainable version of the truth” there is an inherent belief that it will lead toward justice. I set out to nail bad guys not just because it feels good but because I hope that it will result in change. Over the years, my work has changed some things for the better, but that progress has begun to feel insufficient compared to the exhausting march of the American right and the decline it seems to be hastening. This is the part that is directly about Trump.

He has given up the game in a way. That someone so obviously stupid and corrupt can achieve the heights of power that Trump has speaks to this sense of societal decline. Half of Americans who actually voted for Trump looked at his clear ignorance, heard his childish and abusive words, and witnessed his obvious disdain for everyone other than himself and chose to give him the power he now wields against the very people that voted for him. The many Americans who didn’t even bother to vote prove our decline is not just based on poor decision-making, but in self-obsessed laziness and a flawed or non-existent understanding of how the world works.

All the journalism in the world couldn’t stop this country from continuing down the path of self-destruction. Seeing this firsthand, what evidence do I have that we can somehow turn this doomed ship around? When I look back on the positive changes that my journalism has made, each instance of progress is counteracted by regression.

At one of my first newspaper jobs, in Northern Minnesota, a series of stories I wrote about Native American homeless people resulted in the creation of a 24-hour homeless shelter to help get people off the streets — and freezing to death, as my reporting revealed. Since then, with the relative exception of that small town, I have watched homelessness be largely criminalized, to say nothing of the Trump administration’s crackdown on programs that fund social services like those that help the unhoused.

Around 2018, my reporting likely also played a role in pressuring ICE to release an Iraqi asylum-seeker. Do I need to explain how this has been counteracted in the ensuing years? Also around the same time, my reporting on former U.S. Rep. Chris Collins resulted in the House closing a loophole in the STOCK Act that allowed elected officials to invest in foreign IPOs. This was important because lawmakers could simultaneously pass laws that helped those companies, as Collins did. Now, insider trading among members of Congress and the Trump administration is a regular occurrence that barely elicits controversy.

These are just a few examples of how I’ve reached the point, in less than 20 years in journalism, that used to take much longer to reach. The speed of the news cycle, the proliferation of social media, and the firehose of content have all quickened my path toward this feeling of defeat and exhaustion. But it’s more than just the feeling that my work — and the work of all American journalists — has largely failed to propel this country toward justice, peace and a better way of life than past generations.

In this country, it seems that the social progress of my lifetime has been outpaced — even if only by a little bit and for the most part in the last 10 years — by regression and decline. Whether it’s the investigations that constantly reveal the corruption and ineptitude of Trump and everyone around him, or the day-to-day soundbite coverage that gives him and his people the airtime to expose themselves as the strange and hateful people that they are, all the journalism in the world couldn’t stop the past decade of regression and decline from taking place.

***

An overwhelming sense of being overwhelmed

At a time when it’s perhaps most necessary to be informed about all the bad shit that goes on each day in order to make a living, I find myself simply wanting to check out — and I know I’m not alone. In a world that values the quantity of creative content over its quality, am I allowed to say that? Am I allowed to say that I want you to pay me money to read what I’m writing about but that I don’t care to convince you to do so, and that I can’t guarantee whether you’ll get something to read in your inbox all the time? Am I allowed to also say that I don’t care to promote some of my work on social media because it’s simply exhausting and feels pointless? Because at this moment, that’s how I feel. It seems disingenuous to write this, then hop on over to all the social media platforms to say, “Here’s this thing I wrote about how everything is exhausting and I don’t care to put up a front anymore.”

It seems insane to continue fighting in an ecosystem that prioritizes the churn over the thought, knowing that to participate in the churn often means having to be aware of all the things all the time. This apparent utter lack of presence seems like the opposite of what brings a sense of serenity to people. I often wonder what it would be like to live in a time and a place that’s just in that time and place. I wonder what it would be like to go back to a time in which I wasn’t able to know exactly what’s happening in another city because I don’t live in that city. Instead, we are everywhere at once, looking through what increasingly feels like the parlor wall in Fahrenheit 451, except that the escape mechanism that allows us to look at a beach in Tahiti while sitting at our desks somewhere else is in our hands all the time, not just in our living rooms.

Understanding that no one is ever truly where they are anymore, powerful forces have abused the freedom and democratization that the Internet initially promised and have instead flattened modern life. This “tyranny of the algorithm” has led to a homogenization of even our physical spaces. The exploitation of the internet and social media algorithms naturally infiltrated our politics, which is why all politics is now national, not local, as the old adage went. Now, everything is culture war, from the cars we drive to clothes we wear and the coffee we drink.

Simply living in our cities and towns and mostly only knowing about what’s going on where we live seems both very pleasant and impossible to achieve. Instead, the abusers of our modern information ecosystems have created a system that, for the most part, only allows the most extreme voices or those who participate in the firehose of content production to rise to the top. Inundated with this noise, we have all increased our tolerance to the point where the old amount of drugs don’t work anymore. We need more drugs — and stronger doses of them. This is how you get people voting for Trump and Marjorie Taylor-Greene. They are the shiny objects that stick out from the masses of reasonable, thoughtful, kind and hopeful people who don’t wake up each day thinking only of how they can get more of what they want.

They, along with the endless promise of infinite social media scrolling, have rewired many people’s brains to consume in a way that was previously only understood by addicts and alcoholics in recovery, like myself. Except it doesn’t appear that most of us are seeking recovery.

The irony of this lack of presence — where we’re all anywhere we want to be no matter where we actually are, or are getting sucked into things that the powerful abusers of the algorithm want us to — is that everything actually is about right now. Things that happened five days ago, let alone five years ago, are demolished by the unending flow of content that demands we look at what’s happening in this very moment. This is both the definition of news and one of the problems with journalism that has led us to this point: by bombarding the public with context-free content about what’s happening in the current moment, journalism often fails to explain that much of what we’re seeing has happened before. We know where the path that Trump and the American right are trying to lead us ends up, and it’s objectively not good for anyone who is not at the top of that power structure. (Like many authoritarian power structures, our current one is brittle and based on the whims of one man. This means that the structure is constantly shifting. People are in it and then they’re not. Because of this survival-of-the-fittest mentality within authoritarian politics, only the most craven and extreme can rise to the top, exacerbating the extremism of the policies that the regime seeks.)

If all this feels brain-breaking, it probably is.

***

Dystopian blips

While navigating clouds of tear gas in Los Angeles, I was looking at my Google maps to see whether I was getting any closer to my hotel. (In a random stroke of luck, the police were pushing the crowds in just that direction. My long day of walking with protesters and fleeing police volleys had led me right back to where I began!) I closed the app to concentrate on the scene in front of me before getting a notification: “Check out top spots to eat near you.”

This is what I call a dystopian blip. It’s a moment when technology’s invasion of convenience collides with the reality of the physical world. It’s ordering a Waymo in order to set it on fire during a protest, or thousands of phones buzzing at the same time with a notification to leave downtown LA because a riot is taking hold — a notification sent by the same government apparatus whose police largely initiated the riot itself. It’s all of us watching scenes of masked ICE agents scooping people up on our phones only to keep scrolling to see targeted content for whatever our personal algorithm has decided we should see.

Combined with the obvious hypocrisy of our politics — the anti-government right supporting masked, secret police; police in Democratic cities doing the work of an authoritarian White House by clearing out protesters with a heavy hand — it can be difficult to separate reality from works of dystopian fiction. In an environment where reality can seem like fiction and even the most out-there fiction seems like it can’t adequately describe the absurdity of modern life, much of traditional journalism feels equally inadequate to protect us from what’s happening, and what’s coming next.

I don’t know where this is all headed and that’s the point. What you’ve read here — if you’ve read it, and if you have, my god, thank you — would never be published in any of the publications that we think of as institutions of American journalism and public intellectualism. That’s because it doesn’t have a tight angle, a concise thesis. It’s also because those publications are still mostly playing by the same rules that got us into this mess. As institutions, they’re part of the mess themselves.

So, it’s time for something new. I think that looks something like a popular uprising against technology overlords, corporate America, monied politics, traditional law enforcement, and media that is either ineffective or directly in cahoots with authoritarianism. It’s about supporting voices, organizations and movements not simply because they are the loudest and produce the most content, but because they have good ideas. The way out of everything that’s wrong with right now, and everything that’s wrong with where we’re headed, is to slow down and think.

Imagine a world based on thought instead of reaction. Imagine a world where we simply create and don’t worry about whether or not the algorithm will pick it up — where things don’t have to fit in the neat little boxes that massive tech companies decide they should in order for us to simply make a living by doing what we love. Imagine having technology, media, and content work for us instead of the other way around. It won’t be easy but it will be worth it.

The circular path of the old-school newspaper column works because it’s a bookend, and it cleverly and neatly wraps things up in a satisfying way. But it requires you to read until the end of the piece, which seems quaint in a world where we’ve trained our brains to only pay attention to something for a few seconds at a time. Maybe if more of us read things all the way through, we’d learn a lesson about where we’ve been, and make a discovery about where we can go.

***

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

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.

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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.

***

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Donald Trump is an existential threat not just to American democracy, but to our role as the world’s most prosperous and powerful nation. Many people have known this for a long time—Republicans have known this, as have decorated military generals who are lifelong conservatives. Americans of all political stripes, socioeconomic statuses and educational backgrounds know this. Democrats certainly know this.

Which is why I am so confused as to why Al Green, the representative from Texas, was the only member of Congress and the only Democrat to forcefully protest Trump’s speech last night. Not long into Trump’s remarks, Green stood to interrupt the president, waving his cane. House Speaker Mike Johnson first called for order, then for Green’s removal.

Outside the chambers, Green said he’d simply had enough. He told reporters he couldn’t stand by anymore as Trump claimed to be ushering the nation into a new “golden age” while working to cut services like Medicaid and Social Security.

“You don’t have a mandate to cut Medicaid!” Green yelled before being removed, referencing Trump’s oft-cited claim of a mandate from the American electorate to do basically whatever he wants.

That’s it. That’s all you need to know. One guy stood up and said this is enough, was kicked out, and now he’ll be in the history books as a footnote to this particular chapter in our ongoing story of decline.

***

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Just a reminder that my work here is made possible by the support of paid subscribers. In the last week I’ve covered the militarization of immigration enforcement; UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s visit to the White House; the Trump-Zelenenskyy debacle; DOGE’s failure to find a single instance of fraud in the federal government; and DOGE’s work dismantling the Social Security Administration. If you appreciate me keeping up with the news—and breaking it—please consider a paid subscription to American Doom for as little as $5 a month, or contributing to our Doom Coffee Fund. Onward - jg

***

Last week, a video went viral that I think is a sad and troubling reflection not just of where we are, but where we’re headed. In it, Teresa Borrenpohl, an outspoken liberal in her community of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, is ripped from her seat at a Republican town hall by three private security guards. Nearby, Sheriff Bob Norris filmed the ordeal, threatening to pepper spray Borrenpohl.

Now, I’ve discovered that Norris is deep into far-right belief systems. His online footprint shows a man who is up to his eyeballs in right-wing culture war battles and messaging, which you can read below at Public Notice.

Private security acting with the approval of law enforcement is a troubling situation in any context, but it becomes more so in a political climate in which many members of law enforcement are openly supportive of the authoritarian tactics of Donald Trump and Republicans.

It’s bad enough that Trump is talking about militarizing immigration enforcement and using the military to crack down on protests. Adding fuel to that fire is the support for and emboldening of private citizens to act as police themselves—vigilantes is a word that comes to mind. That seems like a recipe for widespread civil unrest and the actual denigration of law and order that Trump and Republicans claim to care so much about.

In today’s episode of the American Doom Podcast, I speak to Laura Tenneson and Tamara Sines-Kermelis, two friends of Borrenpohl’s who witnessed the ordeal.

***

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