Hey fam, welcome back to the Gilead Gazette, where every week the war on women gets fresh letterhead and somehow the same six guys keep signing it. Today Donald Trump hands the FDA to a woman who calls abortion corrosive, the Pentagon explains that being raped is incidental to your service, Texas publishes a maternal death report with the deadly years torn out, and a list of criminal immigration agents triples in a single afternoon. Let’s get into it.

Trump’ “ROCKSTAR” FDA Chief

Donald Trump nominated Heidi Overton to run the Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday and announced it on Truth Social by calling her a “ROCKSTAR,” then added that Secretary Kennedy says she is “ALWAYS RIGHT.” Two capitalized endorsements, zero mention of qualifications, which tracks, because she has never worked a day in federal regulation. What she has done is write. At the America First Policy Institute she co-authored a brief calling abortion “corrosive to children, women, and society broadly.” She called the fall of Roe “a huge victory for life.” And she refers to medication abortion as “teleabortion,” a word she appears to have invented so she’d have something new to be against.

The agency she’d run is sitting on a safety review of mifepristone, the pill used in most abortion care in this country and in miscarriage management, on the market for twenty-six years. Her predecessor Marty Makary quit in May, and Senator Josh Hawley’s complaint was that Makary “slow walked” that review. So the job opened up because a man wasn’t anti-abortion fast enough, and it’s being handed to a woman who thinks the drug is a plague. Anti-abortion groups have already publicly asked her to yank it off the market. They didn’t wait for the hearing. Live Action put out a statement of encouragement, which is what you send a candidate, not a regulator.

She also stood next to the president last week while he cut the childhood shot schedule from eighteen to eleven. Rockstar.

Rape is Incidental to Military Service

The Pentagon logged 8,195 reports of sexual assault in fiscal 2024, and not one of those service members can sue the government over it, because a Supreme Court decision from 1950 holds that being raped is incidental to your military service. That is not my paraphrase. That is the standard. Incident to service. Filed alongside the bad knee and the ringing in your ears.

I spent a year in a combat zone. I signed up for a lot. I knew what I was signing up for. Nobody handed me a form that said you may be assaulted by the guy in the next bunk and the United States government will classify it as an occupational hazard.

The doctrine is called Feres, and it is so indefensible that Justice Clarence Thomas, a man who has never once been mistaken for a feminist, wrote a dissent pointing out that if two people get hit by a bus in the Pentagon parking lot, only the civilian gets to sue. The soldier eats it. In 2021 the Court declined to hear the case of a West Point cadet who said the academy failed to protect her from being raped by a classmate. Attorney Christine Dunn, who represents survivors, said it plainly. “The idea that being raped is ‘incident’ to your military service is so absurd.” Researchers at Brown estimate the real assault numbers run two to four times what gets reported, and about a third of women who do report are discharged inside a year. Report it and you’re out. Don’t report it and you’re stuck. Senators Jeanne Shaheen and John Kennedy filed a fix in June. It has been sitting on a shelf ever since, which for Congress counts as urgency.

Texas Hides Abortion Ban Maternal Deaths

Porsha Ngumezi died in a Houston hospital after being denied care during a miscarriage, and Texas has decided there’s nothing there worth looking at. On September 1 the state’s Maternal Mortality and Morbidity Review Committee publishes its report, and it will not review a single death from 2022 or 2023, the first two years the total ban was in effect. The committee’s explanation is that it wanted more contemporary data. Her husband told the Texas Observer the decision retriggered his grief, which is the phrase you reach for when the state invents a fresh way to hurt you with the same event.

And it gets tidier. The statute that created the committee bars it from reviewing abortion-related deaths at all, a rule some members didn’t find out about until recently. In 2023 the legislature eliminated the community advocate seat held by Nakeenya Wilson, who had nearly died giving birth, so the one person in the room who’d lived it was shown the door. Then the health department filled a “rural community” slot with Ingrid Skop, a national anti-abortion activist whose position is that bans don’t raise maternal deaths and might lower them. Skop practices in San Antonio. Population one and a half million. Rural.

So the committee is barred from reviewing the deaths, skipping the years, and staffed with an expert who already knows there’s nothing to find. Somewhere a Texas official is calling this rigorous.

Increase in ICE & CBP Sex Offenses

The Ohio Immigrant Alliance updated its list of ICE and Border Patrol agents charged or convicted of sexual and violent crimes on Tuesday, and the count jumped from 59 to 152. Director Lynn Tramonte says about 90 percent of the cases involve sexual abuse or gender-based violence, just over half involve children, and in nearly 45 percent of them the agent used the badge to do it. The badge was the tool.

They started counting after learning a Cincinnati ICE supervisor had a documented history of violence against the woman he lived with, including 23 separate police visits to the house. Twenty-three. He kept the job. A year before that, a federal jury convicted a Cincinnati deportation officer of extorting sex from women he had power over.

Homeland Security’s response to The 19th was that its Office of Professional Responsibility “diligently applies the proper personnel vetting regulations.” Meanwhile a former ICE training attorney testified under oath that the program is “deficient, defective and broken,” and that 240 hours got cut from a 584-hour curriculum. The vetting is diligent, the training is broken, the hiring is the fastest it has ever been, and the list is up 93 names.

Speed Round

Florida Republicans fired Congressman Cory Mills on Tuesday, the fourth congressman this year to lose his seat over misconduct against women, and Donald Trump had renewed his endorsement four months after a judge granted Mills’s ex-girlfriend a protective order and called him untruthful. Congressman Max Miller is still on the ballot in Ohio. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez posted a video of herself freezing her eggs, so commentator Matt Walsh sat down and calculated whether her hypothetical pregnancy would count as geriatric, and a senior White House official told Axios that was “not helpful.” And the Charlotte Lozier Institute ran a webinar pitching Interpol as the way to stop the abortion pill, using an operation built for counterfeit medicine, which mifepristone is not.

Stay angry. Stay loud. Under Her Eye.

Sources:

Make sure to follow Abortion, Every Day

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/6039089-trump-heidi-overton-fda-nominee/

https://19thnews.org/2026/08/military-sexual-trauma-survivors-bill/

https://thewarhorse.org/military-sexual-trauma-surviviors-bill/

https://www.texasobserver.org/maternal-mortality-committee-roe-deaths-lawmakers-politics/

https://19thnews.org/2026/08/ice-border-patrol-agents-violence-data-women/

https://ohiocapitaljournal.com/2026/08/21/ohio-immigrant-group-adds-to-its-list-of-criminally-charged-federal-agents/

https://19thnews.org/2026/08/cory-mills-florida-primary-election/

https://19thnews.org/2026/08/anti-abortion-mifepristone-international-shipments/

A sheriff’s deputy fed a woman’s license plate into a police surveillance network so a camera on a pole would tell him where she was driving, and in two years he walks away with a clean record.

Lamar Roman, in Monroe County, Florida, met his stalking victim on the set of the show Bad Monkey, where he was working off duty security. He hit on her. She told him she had a boyfriend. So he pulled up the state driver’s license database and helped himself to her address, her birthday, every car in her name, and her signature. Her signature. I keep trying to work out what a man learns from a woman’s handwriting that he didn’t learn when she said no.

He knew it was illegal while he was typing: “Right when I did that, I was like, fuck, what did I do?” So naturally, he stopped. Kidding. He escalated. He put her plate on a hot list, the thing built for stolen cars and missing children, so it would alert him when she drove to work.

It pinged. He floored it past traffic and pulled her over with his body camera off, for a stop he had no legal reason to make. Then he told her, “I told you I would find you and pull you over,” and asked why she wasn’t following him back on Instagram.

The detective who investigated him is a woman. Jenna Moeller interrogated him, arrested him, and had to tell the victim a cop had been tracking her car.

She asked the only two questions that matter. Did you know it was her when you pulled her over. Yes. Did you have a legal reason. No. And what was the point? “I think just meeting someone like that, getting the high from it. She was leading on.”

She was leading on. My dude, she told you about her boyfriend and you ran her plates.

A second deputy came into the interview room and told him nobody’s perfect. And Roman apologized. Not to her. To the two men in the room, for ruining their afternoon. “I just apologize for you guys having to do this. I mean, I saw a shiny thing.”

Moeller told him it’d be “a speed bump in a few years.” At the arrest, “you’ll get past this bro.” Then she asked the woman he stalked not to post about it.

And she was right. In July he signed a deal. Two years without trouble, a hundred hours of community service, seventeen hundred dollars, keep seeing his therapist, and the charges are dismissed. Not reduced. Dismissed.

Because this happens constantly, and Moeller said so: “We’ve had deputies misuse databases, we’ve told them over and over again. That’s not what it’s for. You see a hot chick, you don’t look them up in a database.”

Over and over again.

The Institute for Justice has logged more than a hundred and forty cops caught doing this. Flock’s cameras read twenty billion plates a month. There is one reading your plate on the way to work, on the way to your doctor, on the way home. It logged you today. And the only thing between that record and whoever wants it is the character of a man who called a woman a shiny thing.

Sources:

https://www.404media.co/i-saw-a-shiny-thing-cop-explains-why-he-used-license-plate-reader-to-stalk-woman/

https://www.local10.com/news/local/2026/08/11/ex-keys-deputy-who-illegally-tracked-woman-he-met-on-set-of-bad-monkey-avoids-jail-court-docs/

https://ij.org/the-ij-database-of-alpr-abuse/

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins filed a proposal yesterday to open 44 million acres of America’s last unroaded national forest to the logging industry. She says it’s about wildfires. It’s about four billion board feet of timber a year.

The Forest Service has already committed to a 25 percent increase in cutting, with a target of four billion board feet annually by 2028. And USDA’s own press release lists the executive orders this carries out. One of them is Executive Order 14225, Immediate Expansion of American Timber Production, which says our problem is that we’ve failed to fully exploit our timber supply. When these people say manage, they mean log. Rollins says she wants to return our forests to health and productivity, and productivity there isn’t counting squirrels.

They need somewhere to cut. The last 44 million acres with no roads in them is where the big trees still are. Fire is the sales pitch.

And fire is the third pitch they’ve tried. In March of last year they told us this was national security, that foreign lumber was a threat to the country. That didn’t move. Now everything is a tinderbox.

It’s a bad pitch, because roads are how forests catch fire. Roads bring people, and people bring cigarettes, trailer chains throwing sparks, engine blocks parked on dry grass, and campfires somebody definitely put all the way out. Greg Aplet, senior forest scientist at the Wilderness Society, published three decades of ignition data in the journal Fire Ecology this January. Ground within fifty meters of a road burns at about four times the rate of roadless country. Roadless areas are the least flammable land the Forest Service has, and Rollins has a plan to fix that.

The agency knew. When it wrote the rule in 2001, its own environmental impact statement said roads into roadless areas would likely increase human caused fires because of the increased presence of people. They’re repealing the rule for working.

Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz, who came to the job out of the logging industry, says only five percent of the highest hazard roadless areas have gotten fuels treatment since 2014, and hands you that like the rule did it. Here’s what he leaves out. The Forest Service lost sixteen percent of its workforce last year, about six thousand people, and hazardous fuels work fell 38 percent in a single year. Twelve senators put that in a letter to him. He didn’t lose access to those acres. He lost the people, because this administration fired them.

And then there’s the photo they picked for the announcement. It’s Montana’s Basin Creek watershed, and USDA’s own caption tells you it supplies Butte’s drinking water. They put a town’s drinking water on the poster for a logging rule.

They already ran a comment period on this. 625,957 people commented. More than 99 percent said no. They filed anyway.

So we go again, louder. Comments close at midnight on September 21st. Jim Pattiz at More Than Just Parks broke this story and built a map with the Sierra Club of all 2,901 roadless areas, so find the one nearest you and name it. The lawyers fighting this in court need a record, and you’re it.

Sources:

https://www.usda.gov/about-usda/news/press-releases/2026/08/18/usda-acts-remove-roadless-rule-restrictions-exacerbate-rising-wildfire-risk

https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/08/29/2025-16581/special-areas-roadless-area-conservation-national-forest-system-lands

https://www.usda.gov/about-usda/news/press-releases/2025/05/29/usda-invests-200m-expand-timber-production-strengthen-rural-economies-secure-american-industry

https://www.hickenlooper.senate.gov/?p=251555

https://gearjunkie.com/parks-and-public-lands/usda-moves-to-repeal-roadless-rule-44-7-million-acres

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s Navy left three hundred sailors in the South China Sea for four days with no power, no water and no toilets, and didn’t mention it to anybody for three weeks.

The USS Benfold is an Arleigh Burke destroyer. Ten thousand tons, carries Tomahawks, shoots down ballistic missiles. On July 24 the Navy says it suffered an “engineering casualty” involving its generators. Engineering casualty. Which sounds like somebody lost a limb in the math department, and means the generators quit.

Seventh Fleet spokesman Commander Matthew Comer put it this way. “The loss of power impacted potable water, galley services, toilets and air conditioning aboard the ship.” Impacted. Every item on that list is something humans need to stay alive, listed like amenities at a bad hotel. We regret that the continental breakfast has been impacted.

Retired Navy Captain Bradley Martin at RAND says losing power this long almost never happens. He translated it for Task and Purpose. “Toilets would literally be buckets and other containers thrown over the side.” Other containers. That’s a man picking his words carefully so he never has to say what was in the Tupperware. He said the interior would be unbearably hot with no ventilation, and suspects the crew was ordered out to sleep on deck. His assessment: “wholly miserable.” Which is how you know he’s Navy. An Army guy uses one word and it isn’t wholly.

The Pentagon said there were no injuries to the crew, who demonstrated “resilience, grit, professionalism and unwavering steadiness in their response.” Unwavering steadiness. Pulled straight off a performance review template while three hundred people threw buckets into the ocean. And they earned it. But grit is what sailors bring. Generators are what the Navy brings. Guess which one showed up.

Why did it happen? Nobody knows. Three weeks on, still investigating. The Higgins went dark in May. Two destroyers this year, no explanation for either.

And none of it was announced. Sometimes withholding is the job, because operational security is real. Not this. The ship was fixed August 7 and parked in Japan. Nothing left to protect but the story. They didn’t miss it, they decided you didn’t need it, and it held three weeks until USNI News, the Naval Institute’s newsletter, went looking.

So where was the Secretary of Defense. Monday, fifteen senators sent Hegseth a letter demanding answers about the Abraham Lincoln. Also Monday, Hegseth was in a bar at the Iowa State Fair headlining a fundraiser for Congressman Zach Nunn. He flew there on a military aircraft. Ours.

The fundraiser was called Operation Top Nunn: Salute to the Troops.

From that stage he listed his priorities. “Training, lethality, accountability, discipline, readiness.” Readiness, my dude. Three weeks earlier one of your destroyers was a ten thousand ton raft. He also clarified, “According to the lawyers, I’m only here in a personal capacity today, as a veteran and a patriotic American.” According to the lawyers. He stood at a campaign fundraiser and read his own legal disclaimer into the microphone.

What the actual feck.

I spent a year in Iraq. Equipment breaks, and everybody who’s worn this uniform knows it. What doesn’t happen is a Pentagon burying it three weeks, praising the grit of the people it stranded, then saluting the troops from a bar.

Sources:

https://news.usni.org/2026/08/14/uss-benfold-was-stalled-in-the-south-china-sea-for-four-days-after-engineering-casualty

https://taskandpurpose.com/news/navy-uss-benfold-power-loss/

https://thehill.com/homenews/6033332-senators-demand-uss-abraham-lincoln-info/

https://iowacapitaldispatch.com/2026/08/17/u-s-defense-secretary-pete-hegseth-joins-u-s-rep-zach-nunn-at-iowa-state-fair/

The Supreme Court told Donald Trump to go pound sand this morning, and it took one sentence. No explanation, no dissents. Just a line on a routine order list refusing to reconsider the case where a jury found he sexually abused E. Jean Carroll and then lied about her for years. That verdict is now permanent. Unappealable. Final.

In June the court already declined to hear his appeal. So in July he asked them to rehear the appeal they refused to hear. That is not a legal strategy. That is calling somebody from a different phone after they blocked you. Rehearing petitions are almost never granted. The rules require substantial intervening circumstances, and his was a different lawsuit he is also losing.

He had already paid. Carroll got the money in July, five million plus six hundred grand in interest, because the return on defaming a woman for six straight years turns out to be deeply negative. He wired the cash and kept litigating to claw it back.

His entire defense for seven years was three words. “Not my type.” He said it to reporters and under oath. Then in that same deposition they handed him a photograph of himself standing next to E. Jean Carroll, and he pointed straight at her and said that is Marla, that is my wife. Marla Maples. Wife number two. Divorced in 1999. His own attorney had to stop him and say no, that is Carroll. My dude, you looked at a woman you swore you never met and identified her as somebody you were married to for six years. You did not lose that argument. You dragged it to the curb yourself.

Judge Lewis Kaplan already put the rest in writing. Rape under New York law means one narrow thing. What the jury found was that Trump forcibly penetrated her with his fingers. Quote, the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.

And this is a man who takes questions constantly. Motorcade, Oval Office, airplane stairs, forty minutes on the South Lawn about anything. The only thing anybody got out of him today is a statement from his legal team calling this the Carroll Hoaxes, which is a bold word choice hours after the highest court in the country made it permanent. Hey media. About you do your fecking job and ask the orange menace about this?

The second verdict is still pending. Eighty three point three million for defaming her in 2019 while he was president. Trump is appealing it, and so is his Justice Department, in a petition arguing the United States government should be swapped in as the defendant instead of him. If that works, the claim dies, because you cannot sue the federal government for defamation. And the bill moves to you. Your taxes. Covering his mouth.

E. Jean Carroll is eighty two. She sat through two trials, a deposition where he called her a whack job, and seven years of a president telling the country she made it up. She says she is spending every dollar he owes her on causes he hates. And she wrote a book about all of it.

She called it Not My Type.

That is the one thing he ever said about her that held up.

Sources:

https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/6032917-supreme-court-rejects-donald-trump-e-jean-carroll-case/

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/17/trump-supreme-court-e-jean-carroll.html

https://newrepublic.com/post/214403/supreme-court-denies-trump-appeal-e-jean-carroll

https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/5996043-donald-trump-e-jean-carroll-defamation-verdict-appeal-supreme-court/

Welcome back to This Week in Tyranny, where the President spent Friday insisting that Navy families aren’t worried about their kids, while his administration had its busiest week of actual damage all year.

This week, Treasury deleted the federal record of who owns American companies. The Secretary of Defense put a textbook in military schools that treats Christianity and Western civilization as the same thing. A Trump connected oil company hired Halliburton and Dr. Phil before it applied for a permit. Homeland Security sent undercover agents into Lutheran churches to write down license plates. And the Pentagon told Congress it killed a hundred and fifty three civilians in Yemen, then decided nobody’s family gets a dime. Plus bulldozers in Big Bend and the worst measles year since 1991. All my sources are in the description and the comments, so read, follow, and share. Let’s get into it.

Deleting Cartel Corruption

Tuesday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent finalized a rule ending the requirement that American companies disclose who owns them. Friday it took effect. And FinCEN isn’t just switching the system off, it’s deleting the records it already has.

That’s the Corporate Transparency Act, written by Marco Rubio, called the most significant anti money laundering law in decades. Bessent’s statement calls killing it a victory for common sense.

Common sense for who, my dude. Treasury’s own assessment this year documented cartels laundering money through anonymous American shell companies, and then Treasury set the phone book on fire. This is an administration that says the word cartel nine hundred times a day and just made cartels harder to find on purpose. And nobody’s archiving the data. They’re deleting it. Nobody deletes a database they think doesn’t work.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is putting a Western civilization course into the Pentagon’s schools this fall. A hundred and sixty schools, eleven countries, seventy thousand kids, every one of them the child of somebody serving.

The textbook is The Golden Thread, built with Hillsdale College, the private Christian school in Michigan that writes curriculum for red states and calls it classical education. Historians told the AP it frames Islam as inherently more violent than Christianity. A section called Holy War and Martyrdom in Battle presents the Crusades as Christians protecting Christians, then reaches for 9/11. The introduction warns students that citizens of Western countries are, quote, utterly ignorant of history, and therefore unarmed against the general hostility to their own tradition.

Unarmed. In a book handed to kids whose parents are actually armed.

And in March, Hegseth threw out the schools’ director and replaced her with a man he praised for reorienting the whole system toward patriotic values and classical learning.

Drill Baby Drill

Greenland Energy, a Houston oil company whose chairman appears to enjoy access to Trump’s inner circle, spent this year assembling a complete Arctic drilling operation. February, an ice class cargo ship. March, a Canadian rig. April, Halliburton. Somewhere in there, Dr. Phil, to shoot a documentary.

The one thing it did not do was apply for the permit. This week the company had just started step one, writing a description of the project.

In June a rep told a community meeting in Jameson Land they had permission to land drilling equipment. They didn’t. Chairman Larry Swets explained it like this. Our enthusiasm for the project led us to communicate in a way that created confusion. In July, locals watched a tug drag a barge ashore and unload a dozen containers anyway, and Greenland issued a strong warning.

Wednesday, Greenland said no. Nothing before the winter of 2027. The CEO says operating in the Arctic requires patience, flexibility and a long term perspective. Says the guy who bought the rig before he read the form.

Puppet Master

Homeland Security ran an operation in Minnesota called Puppet Master. Court filings out Thursday put undercover agents inside churches, libraries and union halls across the Twin Cities.

One sat through a beginner martial arts class at University Baptist Church, hosted by a group that calls itself anti racist and queer friendly. At Prince of Peace Lutheran in Roseville, agents wrote down the plates in the parking lot and built files with names, photographs, addresses, family and employers.

They also pulled financial records from the AFL CIO, SEIU and the Minneapolis teachers union using administrative subpoenas, which is the kind where you don’t ask a judge.

So Treasury burns the file cabinet on shell companies, and Homeland Security fills one with people who showed up to a boxing class at a Baptist church.

The Pentagon told Congress this week that three American airstrikes in Yemen last year killed at least a hundred and fifty three civilians and wounded two hundred and forty three. For all of 2024, the official count was two. And in all three cases, the Pentagon determined condolence payments were not warranted. The paperwork came back at zero dollars.

I carried a camera in Iraq. The whole reason those civilian harm offices exist is that somebody writes it down when we get it wrong. Hegseth gutted them. And the boat strikes in the Caribbean and the Pacific aren’t in this report at all. People blown up on the water, and they don’t count as anything, because nobody wrote them down.

Speed Round

Trump was asked Friday whether nine months at sea was too long for the crew of the USS Abraham Lincoln. Not nearly long enough. Told the families are worried, he said no they’re not, which will surprise the mother who says her daughter is afraid she’ll die out there. Hegseth says the coverage is completely misrepresented and that he has more respect and gratitude for those sailors than anybody, which he said from a ship in Panama. Bulldozers are inside Big Bend National Park, and CBP’s own map routes a patrol road over Mariscal Mountain, seventeen hundred feet of limestone the park’s former superintendent says can’t be crossed without dynamite. CBP says it has no blasting plans. The contractor it hired got sued in Arizona after ranchers said its blasting threw car sized boulders onto their property. And measles hit two thousand five hundred and sixty six cases Wednesday, the worst year since 1991, with a federal panel meeting this month to decide whether America still gets to call it eliminated.

That’s your week in tyranny. Welcome to the golden age.

Sources:

The Fucking News

tps://thefuckingnews.substack.com/p/facepalm-the-nation-your-weekly-tfn-7f0

https://apnews.com/article/defense-department-school-classical-hegseth-c29537087c0dbf3271cf293a9b17053f

https://www.democracynow.org/2026/8/11/headlines/trump_linked_oil_company_preparing_to_drill_in_greenland

https://minnesotareformer.com/2026/08/13/feds-spied-on-protesters-left-wing-organizations-and-unions-during-metro-surge/

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/8/12/us-strikes-in-yemen-killed-153-civilians-in-2025-says-pentagon-review

https://www.npr.org/2026/08/15/nx-s1-5932539/uss-lincoln-trump-dire-conditions

https://biologicaldiversity.org/w/news/press-releases/federal-contractors-begin-border-construction-in-big-bend-national-park-2026-08-06/

https://www.cdc.gov/measles/data-research/index.html

Hey fam, welcome back to the Gilead Gazette, where somewhere right now a grown man with a government salary is thinking very hard about your uterus. Today the Heritage Foundation wants to end Title Nine so girls stay fertile, two former NBA players say they identify as women now so they can enter the WNBA draft, the administration pulls health care from trans kids, and a federal judge in Idaho says out loud what that state spent five years burying. Let’s get into it.

Heritage Comes for Title IX

The Heritage Foundation published a paper calling for the end of Title Nine. Title Nine is the nineteen seventy two law banning sex discrimination in any school that takes federal money. Gender equality in education, sports included. It’s why your daughter has a soccer team, why women are more than half of medical school, and why a university has to do anything at all when a student reports a sexual assault. One sentence. It’s been sitting there since nineteen seventy two, quietly ruining everything.

Heritage wants it gone. The paper’s by a fellow named Scott Yenor, who doesn’t work on education and doesn’t work on athletics. Heritage’s own website says he writes primarily on the family. So naturally they handed him sports. Yenor calls Title Nine “a powerful engine of feminist social engineering,” and says it’s produced “a new sort of woman,” one who’s “more aggressive, more competitive, more male, less relational, and less oriented toward the goods of family and motherhood.”

His problem is your fertility. He writes that high intensity exercise increases infertility and that “moderate exercise assists fertility more than any other approach.” So he wants girls steered toward activities that emphasize “rhythm, coordination, community, and graceful exertion.” He’s not offering them a different sport. He’s telling them to stop competing. Two hundred and forty three thousand women played college sports last season, and a man who writes about motherhood has decided they should shut down the basketball team and take a yoga mat, so their ovaries can rest.

They spent six years telling us this was about protecting women’s sports. They banned trans women from darts. From billiards. From chess tournaments. Utah passed a sports ban that applied to exactly one child in the entire state. And now that there’s nobody left to keep out, Project Twenty Twenty Five’s own think tank has come for the sports. It was never the trans girls. It was the girls.

WNBA Trans Ban Fight

Sophie Cunningham of the Indiana Fever told ESPN she wants to “protect young girls in a locker room, or young girls in sport who shouldn’t have to go against biological men,” and she was a Fox News star by dinner.

The WNBA has no transgender policy. None. The league and its players ratified a new contract this spring, and the only thing it says is that players who are women are eligible. It never defines the word, because in twenty nine years nobody has needed it to. That undefined word is the whole fight, and the fight started the moment a fresh contract showed up with a gap in it.

So former NBA players Enes Freedom and Royce White announced they’ll declare for the twenty twenty seven draft, on the grounds that they now identify as women. They’re not trans. Nobody involved thinks they’re trans. They’re doing it to force the league to write a ban.

And the number of people they want banned is zero. Not one openly trans woman has ever played in the WNBA. There isn’t one in Division One women’s basketball. Trans girls are already banned from high school basketball in thirty states. Back when the NCAA still allowed trans women to compete, they had to document a full year of testosterone suppression and keep documenting it every year after, and NCAA president Charlie Baker told Congress that out of five hundred and ten thousand college athletes he knew of ten who were trans. Gentlemen, you’re two grown men demanding protection from a person who does not exist.

We’ve run this experiment already. When World Aquatics banned trans women and generously built them their own separate open category for the World Cup in Berlin, every single event got cancelled, because not one person signed up. Not one. They built a whole league for the invasion and the invasion didn’t attend.

Trump Cuts Off Care for Trans Kids

On August eleventh, the Trump administration finalized a rule barring Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program from covering most gender affirming care for trans kids, and for some legal adults at eighteen. Eighteen. Old enough to enlist, old enough to be tried as an adult, not old enough to be trusted with a prescription. And notice they didn’t ban the care. They banned it for the kids who can’t pay cash, which is the same thing with better lawyers. It doesn’t take effect until October, and states and providers have sixty days to respond. Rodrigo Heng Lehtinen at The Trevor Project says that “despite this being called a final rule, we have time to fight back,” and “nothing will change overnight.” Erin In The Morning has that reporting, because almost nobody else does.

In Idaho, pregnant women have been killing themselves, and the state’s answer was to fix the paperwork.

Idaho’s own maternal mortality committee found, five years running, that suicidality was a leading underlying cause of death among pregnant people in that state. Five years. And Idaho’s response was to change how the committee collected data on pregnancy related suicides, so the number would come down. Not the deaths. The number. They solved a body count with a spreadsheet.

That came out at trial this week, and Idaho lost. Doctor Stacy Seyb, who’s treated high risk pregnancies there for thirty years, sued over a ban whose only exception is that you have to be actively dying. Judge Lynn Winmill ruled that the Constitution protects a woman’s right to end a pregnancy that’s destroying her mental health, the first federal court since Roe fell to find any constitutional protection for abortion at all. Winmill called Idaho’s position an “outlier position that contravenes basic principles of our constitutional order,” which is judge for you people are insane. Then he called it self defense. Idaho can’t stop a mother from shooting an intruder in her home. Idaho can’t make her donate an organ to save her toddler. Idaho decided the one thing she may not defend herself against is a pregnancy. Jessica Valenti at Abortion, Every Day is checking whether other states cooked their suicide numbers too, and I’d put money on the answer.

Speed round.

The President went to a law enforcement event on Long Island and was invited to talk about crime. He talked about the beautiful young girls who come up to him at the White House to thank him for their safety. He performed it as a two person scene. He did their voices. In front of cops. Nobody stopped him. South Dakota and Oklahoma have bills requiring the state to log every embryo created, implanted and destroyed, so your fertility clinic can file quarterly with a man in Pierre. And Maryland introduced a bill to ban the lung float test, which is where a medical examiner drops a dead newborn’s lungs in a container of water, and if they float, they charge the mother with murder. Every forensic body that’s looked at it says it’s junk. Lungs float for a dozen reasons that have nothing to do with breathing. ProPublica found it’s still been used in at least eleven cases since twenty thirteen, and it helped put nine women behind bars. It’s from the seventeen hundreds. It’s a witch trial with a coroner.

Stay angry. Stay loud. Under Her Eye.

Sources:

https://www.heritage.org/gender/report/title-ixs-failed-experiment-why-accommodating-sex-differences-beats-engineered-parity

https://www.sportico.com/law/analysis/2026/wnba-trans-athlete-eligibility-legal-questions-1234941584/

https://www.propublica.org/article/is-lung-float-test-reliable-stillbirth-medical-examiners-murder

The Trump administration just handed up to two hundred forty four million dollars to a right wing group whose founder was accused of sex trafficking, and put them in charge of defending immigrant children in deportation court.

Sound of Freedom was the 2023 propaganda film about a guy who quits Homeland Security to run sting operations against child sex traffickers overseas. Trump hosted a screening at his own golf club and sat front row next to the man the movie is about, Tim Ballard. Two months later Ballard resigned after multiple women who worked with him accused him of sexual abuse and trafficking.

The group that movie is about is called Our Rescue. They are not a law firm. NPR could not confirm they employ a single immigration attorney. What their website advertises is legal support to help prosecute offenders. Prosecute. They run sting operations to help cops build cases, and now they’re responsible for defending three year olds from the government.

Running the place now is Derek Benner, who ran Homeland Security Investigations, the investigative arm of ICE, under the first Trump administration. So the kids fighting ICE in court have lawyers, allegedly, run by a former ICE boss.

The award notice went up on the government’s public contracting site at 9:04 on a Friday night, the hour you pick when you want a thing to exist legally and never get read.

Scott Dworkin, who writes a daily newsletter called The Dworkin Report, opened the actual award record. Nobody else bothered. Offers received, one. Competitive bidding, none. It is not a fixed price contract, so there is no ceiling on what they can bill you, and the government waived the requirement that they justify their rates. What the actual feck? A blank check to a group with no legal practice, and nobody has to check the math.

The excuse for skipping the bidding was urgency, which Health and Human Services manufactured themselves. They let the contract lapse with Acacia, which had done this work for almost twenty years, stopped paying them for work already delivered, and watched nearly a hundred legal offices fall apart. A judge had to order that money released. Then they pointed at the hole they dug and called it an emergency.

Twenty four thousand children are in this system and federal law says every one of them gets a lawyer. The Guardian watched kids as young as three face deportation hearings on a video screen in New York this summer with nobody to represent them. A three year old cannot spell deportation, but apparently he’s expected to argue it anyway.

Every piece of this gets sold as protecting children from traffickers. So here is their actual trafficking enforcement. Reuters went through the federal court records this week and found the Justice Department has charged fewer sex traffickers than any year since 2010. Seventy three through June. One reason is that agents and prosecutors who worked trafficking cases got reassigned to immigration enforcement.

So the Justice Department isn’t catching traffickers. Health and Human Services isn’t paying the lawyers who defend the kids. But somebody found up to two hundred forty four million dollars, uncapped, for people who have never done this before.

The tagline of that movie, the line theaters cheered for, was God’s children are not for sale. Turns out they go for two hundred forty four million, no receipts required.

Sources:

https://prospect.org/2026/08/11/our-rescue-disgraced-anti-sex-trafficking-ngo-migrant-kids/

https://www.npr.org/2026/08/12/nx-s1-5929456/migrant-children-our-rescue

https://www.thecityreporter.nyc/2026/07/31/unaccompanied-children-migrants-without-lawyers-trump/

https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/trump-promised-sex-trafficking-crackdown-his-justice-department-hasnt-delivered-2026-08-13/

Sailors on the USS Abraham Lincoln are trying to kill themselves, nine months into a seven month deployment, on a ship with moldy showers, broken toilets and no soap, where nobody has set foot on dry land since December. Pete Hegseth’s Navy responded yesterday by announcing it has “not identified an increase in reported suicidal ideation or suicide attempts aboard the ship.” Not identified. Like it wandered off.

A carrier pulls into port every thirty to forty five days. Resupply, maintenance, and letting five thousand people stand on something that isn’t moving. The Lincoln left San Diego on November 21, got rerouted into Trump’s war with Iran, and has stopped twice. Guam in December, where most of the crew wasn’t allowed off. Then two hundred and eight days straight at sea, a modern record, until a stop in Oman on July 7, where the sailors who got off were penned in a fenced compound inside the port. They got to look at land. Through a fence. As a treat.

Meanwhile the ship is falling apart around them. Moldy showers. Toilets that don’t work. Laundry broken for weeks. No deodorant, no toothpaste, no soap. Oman resupplied fresh fruit the crew hadn’t seen in months. And this is Pete Hegseth’s Navy. The man cannot stop saying the word warrior. He put lethality on a coffee mug. His warriors are rationing soap.

When the reports came out he called them fake news. Today he upgraded to “completely misrepresented.” He’s workshopping it.

I did a year in Iraq. Long deployments break people, I watched it. But we got two weeks of leave in the middle. Somewhere to go. The Army runs the longest tours in the military and even the Army worked out you have to let people off.

Two hundred family members went to Navy leadership in San Diego last week. One woman stood up crying and said she’d gotten a message from her husband that day telling her he hopes he doesn’t wake up tomorrow. A parent said their son told them he and his shipmates constantly think about jumping off the ship just for relief. One spouse has a baby at home born during this deployment. Vice Admiral Joseph Cahill told the room, “We hear you loud and clear,” which is a beautiful thing to say from a building with a parking lot.

Their congressman, Mike Levin, put it plainly. “More than 5,000 troops are at sea in the ninth month of what was supposed to be a seven-month deployment, all for a fight with Iran that lawmakers never authorized.”

Annabelle Loma’s husband tried to jump. He’s on medical hold. Thirteen years in, and what he told his wife he’s scared of is a dishonorable discharge. They ran him into the ground for nine months and he’s the one bracing to get punished for it.

Maria Rodriguez’s husband was on watch when he saw a shipmate getting ready to go over. He got there in time and pulled them back. Three more sailors came running.

So when do they come home? Acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao told the families a relief carrier is being prepared, then declined to give a date, citing operational security. The enemy must never learn when American sailors are allowed to see their kids.

Two hundred and sixty four days. The only firm number anybody has given these families is the one nobody wanted, and it goes up every morning.

Sources

https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2026/08/11/multiple-uss-abraham-lincoln-sailors-have-tried-to-go-overboard-amid-extended-deployment-families-say/

https://www.stripes.com/theaters/us/2026-08-11/abraham-lincoln-middle-east-mental-health-town-hall-meeting-22506344

https://www.ms.now/news/navy-meeting-san-diego-uss-lincoln

https://democrats-naturalresources.house.gov/media/press-releases/blumenthal-demands-answers-uss-lincoln

Homeland Security is spending twenty million dollars to put electric shock gloves on thousands of ICE agents, and Markwayne Mullin’s department can post the no-bid paperwork as early as Friday.

The Associated Press broke it Monday off a procurement notice. DHS calls them “conductive distraction and de-escalation devices.” Distraction. Like jazz hands. De-escalation, at three hundred and eighty volts.

The product is called the G.L.O.V.E. It’s an acronym. Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter. Somebody in Lexington, Kentucky started with the word glove, worked backward until it spelled itself, and billed us for the afternoon.

It looks like an ordinary patrol glove until the officer flips a switch. It has to touch bare skin and won’t go through clothing, which narrows the target area to your hands, your neck and your face.

The manufacturer wrote a manual and it reads like a confession. Do not use as punishment. Do not use on someone only being verbally defiant. Do not use on children, pregnant women, the elderly or disabled people. No more than two gloves on one person. No more than fifteen seconds. Somebody tried three. That rule exists because somebody tried three.

The company website warns it can raise your blood pressure, alter your blood chemistry, change your heart rhythm and increase effects that, quoting the sales page, “can cause sudden death.” No watchdog wrote that. They put the sudden death in the marketing.

Here’s the oversight. The officer is supposed to announce “GLOVE on.” Out loud. Like a catchphrase. Like there’s a crowd. Twenty million in federal electricity, and the safeguard is a grown man hyping himself up in a stranger’s driveway.

Now look at who’s getting them. ICE shot a United States citizen dead in Minnesota in January, and a Colombian man in Maine last month at a traffic stop. The Hill cites four hundred and twelve misuse-of-force incidents at immigration protests in one year. And two weeks ago we learned ICE releases body camera footage only when it serves ICE’s own “best interests.”

So Mullin is buying a weapon that leaves no burn and no scar, for the agency that already decides when the camera exists. The ACLU’s Jenn Rolnick Borchetta nailed it. Agents can deliver shocks “with the slight push of a button that maybe nobody else can see them do.”

John Peters studies these devices. He told the AP it feels like a bee sting, then said this to a reporter, on purpose. “For smaller officers or weaker officers or older officers, I think it has a great advantage.” Well thank goodness. Here I was thinking ICE had a judgment problem, when all along it was a grip strength gap.

The AP asked Jeff Niklaus, who founded Compliant Technologies and runs it, to explain the sale. He emailed back, “Unfortunately, we are unable to speak on this subject.” The compliance company will not comply.

So read that do-not-use list one more time. Children. Pregnant women. The elderly. Disabled people. The manufacturer wrote down the four groups this thing must never touch, and Mullin bought twenty million dollars of it for the one agency in America that specializes in finding all four in the same parking lot.

The paperwork posts Friday. No competing bids, no other companies, nobody voting on it.

Sources:

https://apnews.com/article/ice-electric-shock-gloves-85ff746d3e0ee5f39e7a9a3f1f576252

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/6024004-dhs-ice-shock-gloves/