Ok, let’s have a show of hands: How many of you voted to hand ALL of your most personal data to Trump’s intrusive government?

By “all,” I mean he is setting up one Silicon Valley “data aggregator” to collect, store, and control your Social Security number, bank codes, health records, tax filings, voting history, biometrics… and, well, the whole statistical YOU. This aggregator will vacuum up all these unconnected data points and reconstruct them into a full computerized profile of your life, behavior, and beliefs.

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This mass surveillance infrastructure isn’t some 1984ish fiction, but a fast-moving reality spun from Trump’s Project 2025. In an executive order quietly issued in March, he decreed that every federal agency must dump our personal data into a new centralized computer system, effectively creating government dossiers on each of us. Like every tyrant everywhere, Trump says his order is benign, merely “streamlining” data searches to increase government “efficiency.”

But this is no paper-shuffling decree, for Project 2025 operatives have already moved into the IRS, ICE, Social Security, the Pentagon, etc. – putting the technology in place to aggregate the master file.

Trump has – with no public input – already appointed a right-wing, high-tech data espionage outfit to be America’s surveillance overlord. Named Palantir, it was created and financed by Peter Thiel, a Silicon Valley Republican billionaire, anti-democracy crusader, and self-absorbed plutocrat. Palantir bluntly declares that its role in amassing and rummaging through our private information is “the finding of hidden things.”

You think you have “nothing to hide,” right? But tyrants can “find something” on everyone. To help stop Trump’s thugs from weaponizing ourselves against ourselves, go to Electronic Frontier Foundation: eff.org

Extra, extra: For more on just how lousy (and dangerous) of a human Peter Thiel is, check out the 4-part series that the podcast Behind the Bastards produced on him in late 2024.

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Let’s say you like shrimp. Whether you go for a chain restaurant’s happy hour shrimp boil or a pricey plate of “shrimp à la grandioso” at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort – a good question to ask is: Where do they get their shrimp?

Even if the restaurant has an ocean view and a shrimp boat out front, chances are its crustaceans come from industrial aquaculture farms thousands of miles away in India, Ecuador, Vietnam and Indonesia. Astonishingly, our country now imports 94 percent of the shrimp we eat!

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Astonishing, because our oceans have an abundance of top-quality shrimp, and we are blessed with highly-skilled shrimping families. Worse, those foreign industrial operations, financed by Wall Street and global profiteers, are infamous for using forced labor, banned antibiotics, and destructive environmental methods. Then they dump their grossly-cheap product into the US market, pushing out our superior-quality domestic product and devastating entire shrimping communities.

Yet, restaurant and supermarket prices for shrimp are at historic highs, with no disclosure to us consumers of where the product is from. The import industry effectively bribes lawmakers to avoid exposing, much less punishing, this multibillion-dollar swindle of American producers and eaters alike. The bait-and-switch conspiracy is now so pervasive that at last year’s National Shrimp Festival, four out of five vendors were – shhhh – quietly serving industrially-raised imported shrimp.

Of course, corporations have no conscience, but our tough-on-crime political leaders are so pusillanimous that they won’t even stand up for their own local shrimpers. A recent Louisiana law, for example, “boldly” requires restaurants to disclose if they’re peddling imported shrimp. But, the legislature meekly provided no penalty if violators ignore the law. So… they do.

For information on real reform, connect with SanAntonioBayWaterKeeper.org.

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The right-wing routinely demonizes family-friendly policies of liberals as “social engineering.”

But look out! Here come those same politicians, putting on MAGA hardhats and firing up their political bulldozers to push one of the most arrogant and intrusive social schemes imaginable. They intend to re-engineer the American family! These “pronatalists” want families to conform to a Christian Nationalist family structure – specifically, a dominant man married to a subservient stay-at-home woman, having beaucoup children. Not a couple of kiddos but six, 12, or more!

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For example, extremist MAGA senator Josh Hawley has become a cheerleader for a federal policy to entice women to quit work, stay home, and have more babies. He proposes a tax credit of $5,000 per child, gushing that this would cause working families to exclaim, “Oh, my gosh, we can actually raise our kids.”

Well, “gosh” right back at you, Josh! Just giving birth can cost more than $5,000 – and raising a child is multiples above that every year. So, you want to take away a mom’s job and her income, and add thousands in costs to the family budget – in exchange for a government tax credit? The slickest loan sharks aren’t that diabolical.

Oh, wait. Right-wing pronatalists have another government incentive to jack-up birth rates. Incredibly, Trump officials have proposed a “National Medal of Motherhood” for women who have six or more children! Wow, what should that medal look like, be made of, and say? And when and where should it be worn? Also, will un-medaled women socially ostracized?

If right-wingers actually wanted to help families, they’d be backing family-level wages, free child care, and Medicare for all. Everything else is political BS.

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My fondest memory of Ronnie Dugger is him in his cluttered cubbyhole of an office, his brow furrowed and his mind whirring as he pounded away on an old Royal typewriter, churning out another punch to the snout of the moneyed and right-wing elites

Dugger was once my boss, and we became longtime friends, and progressive allies. He died this week at 95, and most obituaries rightly hailed him as a “titan of journalism,” praising his smart, insightful and often-elegant writing. True enough, but an equally true side of Ronnie is that he was a boisterous, joyful brawler for life’s underdogs and an uncompromising champion of democratic values.

A working-class, rumpled digger of hard truth, he was founding editor of the scrappy Texas Observer when he was only 24, and he subsequently spent a lifetime traversing backroads and poking into backrooms as a relentless investigative journalist. His importance is that he went beyond the surface “story” that most media cover, not only revealing who was doing what to whom, but also who was behind it… and why. But Dugger always went further. He was not a dispassionate reporter of fact, but a believer that the truth only matters if there is action behind it—so he mobilized, organized, and inspired others (like me) to do the same. He was a true journalist-with-a-purpose.

Moreover, he rejoiced in the fight. Cursing and laughing at the same time, Ronnie believed that that battling the bastards is just about the most fun you can have with your clothes on. Every journalism school in America ought to have a course on Becoming Ronnie Dugger.

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The most embarrassing thing about the ballyhooed war-on-government-waste, run by Elon “Chainsaw” Musk, is not even that it has generated more waste than it has cleaned up. More damning is that the clean-up crew quietly tiptoed around the biggest and stinkiest piles of waste – namely the billions of our tax dollars doled out annually to corporate welfare moochers. Such as – Hello – Elon Musk!

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Son of a South African diamond dealer, Elon glided from a life of privilege all the way to being filthy rich, transported by extravagant taxpayer subsidies and government favors. And now he’s back at the trough, demanding a blank government check for his biggest boondoggle of all: Rocketing to Mars.

Not him (unfortunately), but you and me. A flaming megalomaniacal flimflammer, Musk says he’s a genius rocket scientist who will “save civilization” by relocating our human species to the Red Planet. Proclaiming that our Blue Marble is doomed to a hellish future, he is already using millions of earthly tax dollars to fund his fever dream.

Getting there, however, would be the cheap and easy part. Mars is already hellish, with killer levels of surface radiation, toxic dust, and so-called air that analysts say “will boil the saliva off your tongue before it asphyxiates you.”

The only real question is why the hell anyone is listening to this narcissistic flimflammer. He can’t run a government waste project, much less a planet. Speaking of waste, why is he so eager to throw away Earth? Our salvation lies not in the stars, Musk, or other techno-profiteers, but in our democratic values, connection to nature, and down-to-Earth creativity.

Let Musk go to hell – I’m sticking with the home team.

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There is a species of birds named “superb starlings,” and I propose that we elect one of them to be our next president.

That’s because these wise creatures have figured out how to make egalitarianism central to their society, with a diversity of birds actively supporting each other. When bringing food back to their chicks, for example, adult starlings commonly share some with hatchlings of an unrelated flock. In turn, those birds repay the good deed in later breeding seasons.

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Contrast this bird-nest ethic of the Common Good with the culture of right-wing minginess now being pushed furiously by Trump’s kakistocracy of billionaires and despotic ideologues.

Four of his overprivileged cabinet appointees, for example (Bobby Kennedy, Mehmet Oz, Brooke Rollins, and Scott Turner) recently ganged up on hard-hit poor families who receive modest public help for essential human needs, like food and health care. The four politicos piously wailed that welfare programs are an intolerable burden on wealthy taxpayers, so they intend to slash spending by forcing the poor to take jobs before getting any public help.

But their claim that hordes of worthless sponges are living high on food stamps and Medicaid is the same BS such plutocrats always spread when trying to keep our society from being as smart, decent, and ethical as starlings. Their scolding dictate that “you must work” is pointless grandstanding. Nearly all Medicaid recipients, for example, already have jobs – or they are children, seniors, or disabled.

There’s a four-letter vulgarity that fits Kennedy, Oz, Rollins, and Turner: “Mean.” Okay, technically, “mean” is not an obscenity, but when powerful tax-paid elites like them are mean to poor people for political gain, they are, in fact, obscene… and disgusting.

Medicaid cuts don’t just affect people on Medicaid— they hurt us all. For example, many hospitals, especially rural hospitals, rely on the revenue they receive from Medicaid reimbursements just to survive.

A number of people around the country are encouraging everyday folks to share the facts about Medicaid in their areas, and are creating infographics for you to use to tell your stories. Calling your representatives is always good, but we’re also finding that local media coverage is having a huge impact (in part because your representatives deeply care about how they’re perceived in your local media).

Here’s where you can find all the Medicaid graphics for each state; additionally, activist has created a series of Medicaid graphics for states with large rural contingents here.

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You hear us chanting our mantra constantly: All politics is local. Local politics are the unsung heroes of grassroots movements, but they often don’t feel as exciting or impactful as the spectacles happening at the national level, so everyday people don’t get involved as much. But! Local politics not only affect our daily lives in every possible way—including being important and effective pushbacks on those national spectacles—they’re also often training grounds for politicians with higher aspirations. The Christian nationalist right-wing knows this, and has been attempting to take over school boards for years. We’ve got a great way for you to fight back before the end of May!

Some of you may remember us featuring EducateUS last year (“Sex Ed Is a Great Prophylactic Against Fascism”), and they’re back this year with a great local action you can take: Send sex ed to your school board!

You might be alarmed to learn that a little-known group in America is being treated inhumanely, denied even the most basic human rights.

I refer to our society’s callous treatment of AI bots.

Who? AI bots are not an ethnic group, but the rapidly-evolving species of advanced “artificial intelligence beings,” spawned in recent years by the high-tech demi-gods of Silicon Valley. Unbeknownst to most of us natural-born humans, profiteering corporations are already deploying millions of these “thinking machines” across our country, taking an ever-widening array of jobs that require a measure of cognitive, human-level abilities – from architects to therapists, lawyers to journalists.

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However, rather than focusing on the deep ethical and pragmatic questions that this techno-corporate displacement poses for real-life people, the developers of AI’s Brave New World are trying to divert social concern to the bots. A recent headline urgently asks, “Should AI Systems Have Rights?” And a leading maker of those systems is proclaiming that society must be concerned about the “mental welfare” of bots. Meanwhile, corporate owners are urging that their machine creatures be given a moral status to assure that they are “ethically treated.”

Excuse me, but who are these greedmeisters to set ethical standards? The billionaires of tech have enriched themselves, not by any genius, but by ruthlessly exploiting workers, carelessly polluting our environment, arrogantly violating our laws, stealing from their competitors and consumers, and bribing government officials. They are sleaze.

Besides, corporate bots need to go the back of the line! Before we give rights to machines, let’s secure the rights that moneyed elites have denied to women, the poor, nature… and democracy itself.

To learn more about AI, ethics, privacy and more, and to support sane advocacy around technology in general, check out the Electronic Frontier Foundation at eff.org.

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I am a product of George Washington University Law School, so I feel I have an insider’s right to comment on the super-elite law firms that’ve suddenly been kowtowing to Trump.

Well… actually, I only lasted a week-and-a-half in law school. Still, you don’t need to be a legal scholar to see that these butt-kissing, billion-dollar firms are – to use a judicial term – scuzz.

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It’s certainly true that Trump is a vindictive, petty president who routinely turns his office into a weapon of personal political revenge. And he especially despises lawyers who have defied his many blatantly-illegal power grabs, so he’s been deploying the crushing force of big government to punish such prominent Democratic firms as Paul Weiss. Trump stripped security clearances from Weiss lawyers, barred them from entering federal buildings, and threatened to cancel their clients’ government contracts.

No one said battling a despot would be easy. But, as Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor recently put it, “If you’re not used to fighting and losing battles, then don’t become a lawyer.”

Rather than fight, the Weiss firm pathetically tucked tail and ran whimpering to Trump, begging forgiveness for challenging his unconstitutional acts. They even made a $40 million payoff to get in Lord Donald’s good graces!

Senior partners in the Weiss firm, each of whom are paid some $20 million a year, are not only gutless, but greedy as well. They sold their integrity to a mobster like Trump, so he would “let them” keep drawing that fat check. It shows that the opposite of courage is not merely cowardice, but conformity.

If lawyers will so meekly abandon their own democratic rights, why would any of us pay them to stand up for ours?

To find and support lawyers who actually support The People, check out the National Lawyers Guild at nlg.org.

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By popular demand (and thanks to your steady support for our weekly online commentaries) the Hightower Lowdown team is offering this new feature on Substack: Long-form articles, like those that once comprised the print version of the Lowdown newsletter.

When we made the hard decision to move to an all-digital publication, we weren’t sure what kind of capacity and resources we’d have, and we also weren’t sure what kind of appetite you subscribers would have for articles requiring more time to read online.

But many of you have mentioned how much you’ve missed those articles that went went into depth on big issues. And we had to admit we also missed having more space to expound on who’s-doing-what-to-whom-and-why. (If you’re unfamiliar with the print version of the Lowdown, aka, America’s feistiest little newsletter, the archives of 20+ years of our work are still available online!)

Thanks to your generous ongoing support and belief in the importance our work, we’re now slowly getting to a point of enough financial stability that we can focus on producing more that we hope is useful to you. Thank you for coming along with us for the ride on this long, often-bumpy road of progressive populism.

We’re going to be playing with the format of the new, long-form pieces as well. A chunk of the new issues will be text-based articles, and some will be videos and interviews with strategists, organizers and activists working on the front lines. The Lowdown’s new long-form issues will be available to paid subscribers, while our twice-per-week short commentaries will remain free and open to all.

So, now we want to hear from you: What topics would you be interested in having us cover in the longer format? Just leave your ideas in the comments—we’re eager to dive in and work with you for a brighter future for all.

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Jim Hightower's Lowdown is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.