Welcome back to This Week in Tyranny. While you were watching the rest of the planet outvote us one hundred sixty four to one on the shape of the world, this happened.

The Pentagon tells a Gold Star widow there was no war. ICE hands out badges without fingerprints. The Pentagon raids the pandemic money. The State Department answers a thousand dead in Nepal with a bake sale. And Tyson fires twenty five hundred people with the doors already locked.

Let's get into it.

Pentagon Denies Widow Combat Pay Because We’re Not at War

The Pentagon told a Gold Star widow she couldn’t have her husband’s combat pay because Congress never declared a war.

Major Alex Klinner was thirty three. On March twelfth his KC-135 went down over western Iraq and six crew died. He left his wife Libby, a two year old, and seven month old twins. Libby Klinner says the casualty assistance officer told her hostile fire pay and the combat zone tax exclusion didn’t apply, because what her husband died doing was not technically a war.

Combat pay is two hundred twenty five dollars a month. It has never required a declaration of war. The standard is being killed by hostile fire, and dying in a burning tanker over Iraq clears that bar comfortably. Troops get paid twice a month. So the Department of Defense went to the mat with a widow raising three kids under three over a hundred twelve dollars and fifty cents.

They lost that fight to an Instagram post. She put up a picture with her son captioned “six months of a war we can’t call a war,” it went everywhere, and the Air Force suddenly discovered it had been meaning to audit her benefits all along.

Nobody at the top will say the word. JD Vance, on Thursday: “I wouldn’t call it a war.” The President, on Friday, called it “small potatoes.” Eighteen dead. Seven hundred ninety wounded. Six months, no authorization from Congress, and a stack of paperwork insisting nothing is happening. And the family of a man who died in it had to go viral to get his last paycheck right.

ICE Skips Fingerprinting for New Agents

ICE has been handing out badges to people it never fingerprinted.

Those are the words of a seventeen year veteran of the agency, a unit chief inside ICE’s own Office of Professional Responsibility, who supervised more than a hundred people whose entire job was vetting applicants. He’s a Republican. He voted for Trump twice. Last August he told the Homeland Security Inspector General that ICE was making final job offers before security looked at anybody, and clearing applicants with no fingerprints, no identity verification, and no credit checks. He called it an “unprecedented lowering of standards.”

Think about what we fingerprint people for in this country. Substitute teaching. Foster parenting. TSA PreCheck. Selling real estate. Working the front desk at a daycare. Cutting hair, in some states. But putting on a mask, strapping on a gun, and dragging somebody out of a Home Depot parking lot, apparently that one runs on the honor system.

At the academy in Brunswick, Georgia, staff later found a recruit previously charged with strong arm robbery and battery out of a domestic violence incident. They found people six weeks into training with no fingerprints on file. ICE hired twelve thousand people in under a year and dropped the minimum age for some law enforcement jobs from twenty one to eighteen. So the masked man at your neighbor’s door might be nineteen, and nobody ever asked him for ID.

Homeland Security’s answer to a seventeen year employee raising a national security alarm was to interrogate him, threaten him with criminal charges, and park him on leave for ten months without telling him what he supposedly did. He retired. Then in February the Inspector General closed the case. No findings. No referral. No report. What the actual feck.

So he gave the memo to reporters and ABC News published it. It’s public now, which means every family fighting an ICE arrest can put it in front of a judge.

DOD Raids NIH Infectious Disease Budget

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon signed a ten year agreement to pull as much as two billion dollars out of the National Institutes of Health, and didn’t tell Congress.

It comes out of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Two billion is about a third of that agency’s budget. That is the infectious disease institute. That is the pandemic money. That is the account that pays for figuring out what the next thing is before it gets here.

Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro says they only found out because Democrats pressed NIH officials until somebody admitted it. Senator Patty Murray said the Pentagon is trying to “rob NIH of billions of dollars that Congress provided for medical research so that it can pad the Pentagon’s budget.”

Why does the Pentagon need it? Because the Navy reportedly ran out of money fighting the war we are not calling a war, and the Secretary of Defense wants another three hundred fifty billion on top of the extra hundred fifty billion he got last year. So he went looking for it in the infectious disease budget.

Embarrassing US Aid Response to Nepal

More than a thousand people are dead in Nepal and four thousand four hundred are still missing. The United States opened with five hundred thousand dollars.

For scale, the ballroom is eight hundred million.

The Guardian talked to Mark Ward, who ran USAID’s disaster response team, and who George H. W. Bush nicknamed Mister Disaster, which is the finest thing ever said about a federal employee. Ward called it “embarrassing for the United States and a bit of a slap at Nepal.”

Then he explained how it used to work, and that’s the real story. A disaster assistance response team would already be on the ground. They’d assess alongside Nepali authorities, work out what was actually needed, and then set the number. Nepal was the country USAID worked with most closely, specifically because Nepal gets hit like this.

That team doesn’t exist anymore. USAID was dissolved. So the State Department sent one adviser and a press release with a number somebody appears to have simply thought of. George Ingram at Brookings said, “I was embarrassed for America,” and added they’d have been better off announcing nothing at all.

After two days of international criticism they raised it to three point six million. Which is still less than one percent of the ballroom. The State Department’s position is that dismantling USAID has “not slowed the US response.”

Tyson Plant Closes - Climate Change, Tariffs & CEO Greed Totally Not the Reason

Tyson closed a beef plant in Joslin, Illinois with no warning and fired twenty five hundred people.

August fourteenth. Workers showed up for their shift and the doors were locked. Two supervisors came outside crying. Permanent, effective immediately. Supervisors stood at the doors handing out paperwork while people cried in the cafeteria. One worker, Ahoro Asselissime, said, “They gave no reason, nothing.”

Joslin itself has about fifty six residents. The plant was the ninth largest employer in the Quad Cities.

The reason isn’t a mystery. America’s cattle herd is the smallest since 1951, down eight million animals in seven years, because drought across the West pushed ranchers to sell the cows that would have made this year’s calves. That’s the climate story, and it doesn’t show up as a polar bear. It shows up as beef going from eight fifty one a pound to ten forty nine, and as twenty five hundred people standing outside a locked door.

Tyson’s own filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission puts CEO Donnie King’s pay last year at thirty four and a half million dollars. Seven hundred ninety eight times his median employee, who made forty three thousand two hundred six. His pay went up eleven and a half million. Theirs went down two hundred eleven dollars.

Joslin isn’t even the first. Last November Tyson cut nearly five thousand more at beef plants in Nebraska and Amarillo. In May a federal judge signed off on eighty seven and a half million from Tyson and Cargill to settle claims that they restricted beef supply to drive prices up. Both companies deny it. Joslin got one to four weeks of severance, signed four days after the announcement by their own union local, which has told them nothing since except to go apply for unemployment.

Glen Beck Tells Orange Menace to DeRegulate Beef

And the President’s plan to bring beef prices down, which he got from Glenn Beck on a podcast, is to let ranchers process their own cattle with fewer federal inspectors.

Here’s what that means for you. A federal inspector is a human being standing in the plant looking at the animal before slaughter and the carcass after. Take them out and contamination doesn’t get caught in the plant. It gets caught later, when people start showing up sick. We already got the preview this year, when thirty thousand pounds of raw Argentine beef had to be pulled off shelves in Texas and Florida after it entered the country without final federal clearance. A routine audit of import logs caught it. That’s the system he wants less of.

The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, not historically a nest of regulators, said “weakening federal meat inspection and food safety standards is not the answer.”

Speed Round

Crews showed up at the Kennedy Center at sunrise Wednesday with cranes and took apart Blue, the Joel Shapiro sculpture that’s stood out front since 2019, with no announcement. The official statement says they’re “honored to have been stewards of his enduring legacy,” which is a hell of a thing to put in writing while a crane takes the legacy apart. It has now been one full year of blowing up boats, two hundred twenty seven people killed in sixty eight strikes, and a defense official told The Intercept, “It’s been a year of murders.” And the White House shipped video games on whitehouse dot gov, including a Snake clone where a man in a suit collects Black, Asian and Latino men into orange jumpsuits, and a Tetris knockoff called Build the Wall that vanished after The Tetris Company posted that they weren’t involved and that they take copyright infringement very seriously, which means the federal government just got run off by a falling blocks company.

And Trump renamed Lake Ontario to Lake America, so Ontario Premier Doug Ford planted a twenty four foot sign on the Canadian shore reading “Lake Ontario. Now and Always,” put on a Team Canada jersey, and posed for photos. Google changed it on Maps over the weekend. Apple changed it Tuesday, after Trump called them and asked. MapQuest was asked too, and said, “Name it whatever you want at your leisure.” So if you want a small free way to be a pain in the ass this week, switch. I downloaded MapQuest this week and paid for the ad free version.

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

Sources:

https://www.notus.org/defense/air-force-iran-war-widow-libby-alexander-klinner-missing-benefits

https://abcnews.com/US/ice-whistleblower-alleged-agency-shortcutting-vetting-process-new/story?id=136210462

https://www.science.org/content/article/outrage-greets-nih-pact-could-funnel-biodefense-research-funds-pentagon

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/sep/02/nepal-flood-aid?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

https://www.labornotes.org/2026/09/treated-worse-cattle-2500-tyson-workers-laid-plant-shutters-overnight

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/100493/000010049325000114/tsn-20251217.htm

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/photos-kennedy-center-disassembles-blue-sculpture-from-its-grounds

https://theintercept.com/2026/09/02/military-boat-strikes-killings-year/

https://www.axios.com/2026/09/01/apple-maps-google-lake-ontario-lake-america

Hey fam, welcome back to the Gilead Gazette, where every Saturday I add up what the men running this country took from women in the last seven days, and every Saturday the number goes up.

Coming up. Murders are down all over America except the ones happening inside people’s houses. The Secretary of Defense pulled an Army officer off the promotion list over a women’s parachute jump, then spent Monday night making fun of a teenager’s body. Idaho’s attorney general got caught misdescribing the state’s abortion ban on the official ballot, and four days later got that ban restored at full strength. And Kentucky’s attorney general is suing a nonprofit because an airplane made him mad.

Let’s get into it.

Homicides Down, Domestic Violence Up - Thanks Trump!

Donald Trump calls a man beating his wife a little fight.

Here’s what’s actually happening, and we know it from reporting out this week from The Guardian. Homicide is falling all over this country. Chicago went from 805 killings in 2021 to 425 last year, the kind of number a mayor gets a parade for. In that same city, over those same years, killings tied to domestic violence went up fifteen percent. Kansas City’s homicides are down since 2023, and last year was its second deadliest ever for domestic violence. Ohio tracked the national drop and had its worst year on record.

America got safer. Houses didn’t.

The National Domestic Violence Hotline took about 637,000 calls in 2020. Last year they answered a million. Nikhita Ved, who runs their programs, says the thing callers ask for first is housing and the thing they ask for second is a lawyer. Somewhere to sleep, and somebody to file the paperwork.

The proposed 2027 budget cuts nearly thirty million dollars from transitional housing and legal assistance grants. One and two. He went straight down the list.

That’s after this administration already stripped hundreds of millions from domestic violence groups serving women of color, disabled women, and LGBTQ women. The termination letters explained the work no longer aligned with the administration’s goals. Keeping women alive, off mission. Which tracks, because we already knew how they feel about a woman bleeding out in a parking lot.

And here’s the President of the United States on what any of this even is. Quote. “Things that take place in the home they call crime.” And then, “If a man has a little fight with the wife, they say this was a crime.”

The Guardian asked the White House about the rising numbers. The White House said go ask the budget office. The budget office said nothing at all.

Speaking of men going down a list.

Sec Hair Gel Blocking Top Promotions for Women

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth pulled an Army officer off the two star promotion list this week because somebody in his office heard there was a mentorship group for female paratroopers in the man’s unit.

There was. It was there before he got there. He didn’t start it and he didn’t approve it, and the group had done an all women’s jump at some point, which is apparently what got flagged. Nobody in that office checked a single date. A board of senior Army leaders picked this man for two stars, and the Pentagon took him off the list over something that predated his command, and the entire investigation required to catch that was looking up when he took the job.

He was one of seven officers Hegseth pulled on Monday. The Army Secretary quit the same week.

Hegseth has now fired or blocked more than eighty generals and admirals. About one in ten of everybody at the top of the United States military.

And here’s what it’s for. Four percent of this year’s nominees for general and admiral are women. When Hegseth walked in the door it was thirteen percent, the highest it had ever been. Meanwhile, down at the ranks he doesn’t personally review, captain and major, thousands a year, women took twenty three percent of nominations. Highest ever recorded.

So the women are there. Qualified, getting picked, moving up in record numbers, right up until they hit the level where Pete Hegseth reads the list himself. And then it stops.

The Pentagon says promotions go to the people who earned them, and that the process is apolitical and unbiased. That is exactly what the promotion board is for. A room of senior officers with no stake in the outcome, going off the record and nothing else. And then he comes in afterward and crosses out the women. He isn’t protecting that process from bias. He is the bias. He’s the only part of it that isn’t merit.

SecDef Body Shames a Child on Social Media

And then Monday night, Pete Hairgel Hegseth picked up his phone and posted a photo of a Canadian teenager so two million followers could laugh at her body.

She’s a cadet. That’s a youth program, kids twelve to eighteen, at a summer training centre in British Columbia. He added a little flag and the words “this is real,” and turned a child into content for his followers.

The CBC covered it and had to blur her face, because she is a minor. A television network had to protect a kid from the Secretary of Defense of the United States.

Canada’s defence minister said it was below the dignity of the office. The Pentagon said the post speaks for itself.

It does. This is a man with the most powerful military on earth under his command, and he spent his evening picking on a girl for how she looks in a uniform she volunteered to put on.

Big warrior. Real ethos. What a man.

Idaho AG Shot Down for Lying About Abortion Ballot Measure

Now to Idaho, where Attorney General Raúl Labrador had a week.

Idaho has an abortion measure on the November ballot, and Labrador is the one who wrote the official explanation that voters read. He wrote that voting no keeps a law that “protects the life of the mother.”

The law does not do that. The law permits an abortion only to prevent the death of the mother. Not to protect her life. To prevent her death. Those are two completely different jobs, and Idaho only offers one of them. You have to be actively dying. Sick isn’t enough. Deteriorating isn’t enough.

On Friday the Idaho Supreme Court threw his statement out, unanimously, and gave him twenty four hours to write a new one. Justice Gregory Moeller put it plainly: “The choice of phraseology matters.” The court also found Labrador left out the felony penalties, and left out that a rape victim has to produce a police report, and said his statement “inaccurately enlarges the exceptions and understates the prohibition.”

That’s a court catching the state’s top lawyer describing his own state’s law wrong, on a ballot that goes out to deployed troops next Friday.

And here’s what he was covering for. Back on August thirteenth, a federal judge ruled Idaho doctors could act when a pregnancy threatened a woman’s health. Labrador appealed, and the judge cut it down to exactly one physician, Doctor Stacy Seyb, who had testified he was putting high risk patients on planes because he couldn’t tell what was legal anymore. On Thursday, the Ninth Circuit froze even that. Every doctor, then one doctor, then no doctors, in three weeks.

Fifty four Republican legislators filed a brief telling the court that this is their call to make.

KY AG Suing Mayday for Flyover

Down in Kentucky, Attorney General Russell Coleman is suing a nonprofit because an airplane made him mad.

Mayday Health hired a plane to fly over the Kentucky State Fair trailing a banner that said “ABORTION PILLS BY MAIL.” So Coleman sued them, claiming their website is unfair, false, misleading and deceptive.

The deceptive part being that the pills work.

Coleman says, “These out of state activists are not only breaking Kentucky law, they seem to delight in rubbing our faces in it. The State Fair is a beloved Kentucky tradition for families and children.” Yes. And the plane was above it. Nobody’s kid got a pill with their funnel cake.

Mayday’s director, Leo Raisner, says they look forward to defending their work in court and winning, the way they already beat South Dakota on the same theory.

Speed Round

Attorney General Todd Blanche was asked whether the public will ever learn who abused the girls in the Epstein files, and said, “I don’t know whether there are men out there that abuse these women.” My dude, Epstein pleaded guilty. Ghislaine Maxwell is doing twenty years for trafficking a child. It has already been to trial.

And the EEOC voted to stop collecting the workforce data that shows who actually gets hired and promoted in this country, sixty years of it, covering fifty million workers. The chair’s argument is that counting women is the thing that’s really sexist. Problem solved. You can’t have a pay gap if nobody owns a calculator.

The Legacy of Gloria Steinem

All of that happened in the same week we lost the woman who spent sixty years arguing that none of it had to be this way.

Gloria Steinem died Wednesday. She was ninety two.

She went undercover as a Playboy Bunny in 1963 and published what it was actually like. She built Ms. magazine after a cosmetics executive told her women who read Ms. don’t buy makeup and car companies told her women don’t buy cars. She spent more than half a century on the Equal Rights Amendment and died with it still uncertified, because two weeks ago the new Archivist of the United States told the Senate he won’t sign it either.

I met her in Washington in 2000, at the World March of Women. One of the great honors of my life.

She said:

“We’ve begun to raise daughters more like sons, but few have the courage to raise our sons more like our daughters.”

She was saying that decades ago. Look at where the boys are now. An entire manosphere telling young men that being a man means having a woman who obeys you. Everything she warned about, sold back to them as content.

She didn’t build a following. She built organizers, and then those organizers built more, for fifty years, which is why the thing she started does not need her in order to keep going. That was the entire design.

Stay angry. Stay loud. Under Her Eye.

Sources:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/sep/03/us-domestic-violence-killings-homicide

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/trump-downplays-domestic-violence-speech-090046200.html

https://gvwire.com/2026/09/01/hegseth-targets-7-more-officers-as-his-frustrated-army-secretary-quits/

https://www.stripes.com/theaters/asia_pacific/2026-09-03/hegseth-canada-cadet-social-media-22737579.html

https://idahocapitalsun.com/2026/09/04/idaho-supreme-court-rules-state-officials-must-re-write-abortion-initiative-ballot-statements/

https://idahocapitalsun.com/2026/09/03/federal-judges-order-allowing-an-idaho-doctor-to-perform-certain-abortions-is-put-on-hold/

https://kentuckylantern.com/2026/09/04/kentucky-ag-sues-national-nonprofit-over-abortion-access-advertisements/

https://newrepublic.com/post/205984/trump-official-epstein-files-cover-up-evidence-other-men

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/federal-civil-rights-agency-moves-to-stop-requiring-demographic-data-collection-after-60-years

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2026/aug/21/new-archivist-says-equal-rights-amendment-still-dead/

Kentucky and Idaho were both surfaced by Jessica Valenti at Abortion, Every Day

The US Forest Service is about to clearcut one of the last stands of big-tree old growth on Prince of Wales Island in Alaska, and its own draft admits it could substantially damage the deer hunt that feeds the island. Tongass Forest Supervisor Monique Nelson signs the decision.

The Tongass is the largest intact temperate rainforest on Earth, holding about thirty percent of that forest type left on the planet. More than half of North America’s coastal rainforest is already gone. This is public land. You own it. And the old growth up there stores the equivalent of about one and a half times this country’s annual carbon pollution, a service it does for free right up until it’s on a truck.

Prince of Wales is Tlingit and Haida homeland. Five thousand people, no road off it, subsistence is how you eat. Deer survive winter in old growth specifically, because the canopy catches snow while letting light down for forage underneath. Fish and Game says so. Deep snow, no old growth, deer starve. Carvers need big old cedar for totem poles and canoes, and June subsistence hearing testimony hammered the government’s analysis for barely mentioning them. You cannot carve a canoe out of a fifty-year-old tree.

The defense is that it grows back. Sure. In a thousand years. The timber rotation, meaning how soon they cut it again, is ninety to a hundred and twenty years. It never becomes old growth. It becomes inventory. The clearcuts from the sixties are the proof. A Forest Service wildlife technician, standing in one growing back since 1960: “There’s no forage for deer at all.” Sixty-six years, and it feeds nothing.

Since 1954, 94 percent of the big contiguous old growth on northern Prince of Wales has been cut. Ninety-four percent. The plan is to go back for the six. That’s eating the whole birthday cake, then coming back for crumbs and calling it portion control.

The payday? The Forest Service’s own estimate for the whole sale, sixteen hundred and fifty five acres, is 6.65 million dollars in labor income and between 113 and 121 jobs. Trump’s ballroom costs north of eight hundred million. They’re liquidating the last big old growth on that island for under one percent of a party room.

Nelson’s line is that “providing a supply of timber to the American people is a central part of the Forest Service’s mission.” My dude. Private land supplies 89 percent of the wood this country cuts. National and state forests together are about eleven. Nobody’s house is going unbuilt because a thousand-year-old spruce is still standing in Alaska.

If the Park Service put sixteen acres of Sequoia National Park up for the saw there’d be congressional hearings by Thursday. Nobody’s holding a hearing about this one, because they called it Unit 346, a name you give a parking space.

Will and Jim Pattiz at More Than Just Parks hiked in with a camera, found an occupied bear den inside the cut boundary, and filed it into the official record before the chainsaws. Two unpaid guys did the looking.

Nelson can pull those sixteen acres out of the sale. Her office is 907-225-3101. Ask her why she’s cutting the biggest trees left in the last great rainforest of its kind on Earth.

Sources:

More Than Just Parks broke this story and did the literal legwork. Follow them and subscribe.

https://www.fs.usda.gov/r10/tongass/newsroom/releases/forest-service-seeks-input-twin-mountain-ii-timber-sale-project

https://www.krbd.org/2026/06/03/forest-service-holds-subsistence-hearing-for-proposed-prince-of-wales-logging-project/

https://www.adfg.alaska.gov/index.cfm?adfg=deerhunting.main

https://www.ktoo.org/2022/11/03/scientists-present-theories-for-deer-decline-at-prince-of-wales-island-deer-summit/

https://www.eenews.net/articles/old-or-young-growth-tongass-logging-at-a-crossroads/

https://alaska-native-news.com/tongass-rainforest-in-alaska-is-a-carbon-sink-of-global-importance/61535/

https://www.fao.org/4/x4995e/x4995e.htm

Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway spent a hundred and sixty seven thousand dollars of public money on an ad built to help overturn the abortion rights Missouri voters passed themselves two years ago. And she wrote it with a group that says abortion has never once saved a woman’s life.

Gloria Steinem died this week at ninety two. She was born when all of this was illegal. She lived to watch Missouri women walk into a voting booth in 2024 and win it back. She died the same week Hanaway started billing them for the ad to undo it.

Three hundred fifty radio and TV stations, running through September thirtieth, paid out of a state account named, I promise, the Merchandising Practices Revolving Fund. KSDK in St. Louis pulled the records Tuesday. The ad warns Missourians their abortion clinics don’t meet basic medical standards. Her office files it under women’s health.

In Missouri, a school board can’t spend one dollar of public money on a ballot measure. The state Supreme Court upheld that statute in 2022. It covers cities, counties, school districts. It does not cover the attorney general. A school board could be prosecuted for what Hanaway just did. In November, Missourians vote on writing an abortion ban into their constitution. Hanaway endorsed it. Hanaway bought the ad.

Her office says it’s just consumer information. It never mentions Amendment 3, never mentions the election. My dude, a burning building never mentions arson either.

Then there’s her co-author. Hanaway made this with the American Association of Pro-Life OB-GYNs, a group that thinks IUDs are abortions. That thinks a raped child should give birth. That thinks when a pregnancy is killing you the answer is a c-section, even when nothing survives it. She made a patient safety ad with the only doctors in America who don’t believe the emergency is real.

Before 2024, Missouri was a near-total ban state. Voters ended it with a measure called Amendment 3. So when Republicans wrote this year’s repeal, they named it Amendment 3. Same number, two years later, opposite result. They’re betting Missourians remember voting yes and don’t read the rest. And the rest writes the ban into the constitution permanently, with a ban on gender affirming care for minors stapled on, because if you’re already lying about what’s on the ballot, why stop at one lie.

This is not one weird lady in Jefferson City. Ron DeSantis ran this play in Florida in 2024, and a statewide grand jury just found his administration misappropriated funds doing it. No charges. The grand jury’s explanation was that virtually everyone involved is a lawyer and acted on the advice of other lawyers. Meanwhile Idaho’s attorney general, Raul Labrador, just issued an opinion that churches spending against ballot measures don’t have to disclose their donors, because the money arrives as an act of worship. What the actual feck. Tithe on Sunday, dark money on Monday. Idaho votes on its abortion ban in November too.

Three states, one playbook, two months out. If it works in Missouri, it’s the template for every state with a ballot measure.

Gloria Steinem spent sixty years arguing that women should get to decide this. Missouri women decided. Catherine Hanaway sent them the invoice.

Sources:

https://missouriindependent.com/2026/09/01/missouri-ag-spends-state-funds-on-abortion-psa-ahead-of-november-amendment-3-vote/

https://revisor.mo.gov/main/OneSection.aspx?section=115.646

https://www.cnn.com/2026/09/03/us/gloria-steinem-dead-obit

Abortion, Every Day

ICE is spending two million dollars on robot dogs that can open doors.

They’re called Spot, made by Boston Dynamics. Four legs, 360-degree cameras, sensors that sniff for gas and radiation, and an arm on top that turns a handle. Homeland Security posted the request like it was ordering office chairs.

A senior DHS official promised the robots will not be used to make arrests. ICE calls them “an additional tool to safely assess potentially dangerous situations,” which means the machine goes in first and the men come in behind it. And nobody has ever bought a dog specifically because it can open a door.

Boston Dynamics says any attempt to weaponize its robots is “strictly prohibited.” Fantastic. Legally binding as a sign at the pool that says no diving.

Three weeks ago I told you Homeland Security was buying twenty million dollars in electric shock gloves for ICE. The ones whose own manual says do not use them on children, on pregnant women, on the elderly, or on disabled people. Gloves in August. Dogs in September. At a certain point that stops being a series of purchases and starts being an arsenal.

New York tried police robot dogs and killed the program because the public couldn’t stand them. The Secret Service walked a few around Mar-a-Lago in 2024. Thoroughly field tested, mostly at a golf course.

ICE arrested roughly fifty thousand people last month, and fifty thousand the month before. Highest totals the agency has ever put up, from the people who keep telling you they’re only going after the worst of the worst.

All of which sounds like an immigration story. It was, right up until February.

A Homeland Security official got on a call with secretaries of state and told them, “any suggestion that ICE will be present at any polling location is simply not true.” Flat. No conditions.

Yesterday, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin stood in front of cameras in New York and said ICE will go into polling places if there’s a threat, or if they’re serving a warrant. His exact words were, “If we’re serving a warrant, we will be where we need to be.”

That’s not a denial, my dude. That’s a door.

And Mullin never said who decides what counts as a threat. Not the state. Not the county. Not the people running the polling place. The department that shows up decides, and the president it answers to has spent months announcing Democrats are going to cheat in November. The threat assessment is written by men who already published the conclusion.

In July, House Democrats found out that while DHS officials swore to Congress there were no plans, DHS attorneys told a federal court the department might be holding thousands of documents on the subject.

So add it up. A weapon that leaves no burn and no scar. A machine with a camera and an arm that opens doors. An agency arresting fifty thousand people a month. And the man running it, sixty two days out, saying they will be wherever they decide they need to be.

If you have been telling yourself none of this reaches you, they just told you where they’ll be on November third.

Sources:

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigration/ice-buy-robot-dogs-immigration-enforcement-rcna594897

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/6058739-ice-robot-dogs-2-million-plans/

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

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/ice-arrests-50-thousand-people-august-continuing-record-rcna595510

https://abcnews.com/US/wireStory/dhs-official-promises-federal-immigration-agents-polling-places-130511882

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/dhs-no-plans-ice-polls-midterm-elections-rcna595594

https://democrats-homeland.house.gov/news/correspondence/thompson-correa-ramirez-demand-dhs-turn-over-records-on-potential-ice-deployment-to-polling-places

Donald Trump ordered the Postal Service to build a system that decides whether your mail ballot is allowed to be mailed to you. One of the people building it said there wasn’t time to test it. A senior official’s entire response was “We cannot fail.”

That’s the whole safety plan. A slogan.

A federal official took it to Senator Richard Blumenthal, and it went public this morning. Twenty pages of engineers screaming into a void.

Under a rule finalized six days ago, the Postal Service can now refuse to mail ballots your election officials already approved. First time in its history. States upload every mail voter’s name and ballot barcode into something called the Federal Ballot Mail Portal, then a clerk scans a sample of the envelopes. If one barcode in that sample doesn’t match, the whole batch gets rejected and shipped back to the state.

Batches run into the tens of thousands. Blumenthal’s own example of what breaks a match: a woman recently got married and changed her name. She takes down nine thousand nine hundred and ninety nine other people’s ballots. Congratulations on the wedding.

The Postal Service has never held anything else to that standard. Its own bundle verification allows a twenty percent failure rate. Coupon flyers get grace. Your ballot gets zero.

Work started around June fifteenth. A build this complicated normally takes nine to twelve months. Customer testing got four days. A routine postal project that adjusts stamp prices got forty seven days of testing.

There were never any written requirements. Workers were told to figure out what they were building from comments at meetings. When they asked for something on paper, leadership said the requirements were obvious, and also that there wasn’t time to write them down. Both. Same breath.

The software was supposed to have one master off switch. Two teams each built their own, neither knowing the other existed. They found the problem in the final week, decided there wasn’t time to fix it, and shipped both. Nobody can shut this thing down now without finding both of them.

By late August the internal documentation was described as garbage. In the final week, postal officials were calling the project a shit show. When workers raised concerns, a senior official asked them what the problem was, since nobody was trying to stop anyone from getting their ballots.

If it wrongly flags your ballot, there’s no process to fight it. The rule says you’ll be informed of the escalation procedures should you decide to challenge a rejection. Asked how many ballots it expects to reject, the Postal Service expressly declined to answer.

A judge blocked all of this in June. Work stopped. Then on July twenty ninth it quietly started again, nobody explaining what had changed, because nothing had. That same month postal leadership wrote to senators saying they were complying with the courts. The whistleblower says the work never stopped, including after another restraining order last week.

That restraining order is the only thing between this system and your ballot, and it expires next week.

The whistleblower skipped the Inspector General entirely. They no longer believe it’s safe to report anything internally.

We cannot fail. Given what they built, I’d rather they did.

Sources:

https://www.blumenthal.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/2026-08-31_final_letter-disclosure.pdf

https://www.notus.org/2026-election/whistleblower-secret-usps-plan-endanger-mail-in-ballots

Welcome back to This Week in Tyranny. While you were watching the President of the United States sign an executive order renaming Lake Ontario, because he was angry at Canada, here’s everything else you might have missed. A quarter mile of Yosemite is for sale. Career soldiers are filing to get out over what they’re being ordered to do. A reporter’s phone records, ten thousand calls and texts, taken under a customs law. An autopsy that says the National Guard shot a twenty year old in the back. And a mail ballot rule that flipped three times in five days. Let’s get into it.

Yosemite for Sale

Start with the park, because he spent the week renaming a lake he does not own while his Interior Department worked out how to give away a piece of a park he does.

Anna Kramer at NOTUS reported Friday that for the last year and a half, the administration has been negotiating to hand a quarter mile strip inside Yosemite to a Nevada investment firm called Kingsbarn Realty Capital, which bought eighty three acres outside the park’s western boundary through a shell company they named Sanctuary at Yosemite. Bold thing to call the vehicle you’re using to punch a road through Yosemite.

That’s the whole deal. A road. CEO Jeff Pori wants a private driveway to Highway 120, five miles from one of the park’s ancient sequoia groves. Right now he has to drive an hour and a half around, like a person who chose to develop in the middle of nowhere. The previous owner asked Bush for that same road, then Obama, then sued and lost in 2012, because the court found the property already had legal access. Two presidents and a federal judge said no. It took the Orange Menace to say sure.

Park Service staff told NOTUS that Interior’s leadership is leaning on them. One said, “The political pressure being brought to bear is very unusual.” And Pori had no record of donating to a national campaign in his life until October of 2024, when he started giving to Donald Trump.

Then the lobbyist identified himself. Unprompted. Lanny Davis, Bill Clinton’s old lawyer, told NOTUS, “It wasn’t Donald Trump; it was me, liberal Democrat Lanny Davis, former counsel to President Clinton.” My dude, nobody asked.

Conscientious Objector Requests Skyrocket

Now the one I want you to hear from me, because I wore the uniform.

MS NOW reported this week that applications to leave the military as a conscientious objector are running six times normal, the highest in twenty five years. The Center on Conscience and War usually handles about fifty a year. Since the Iran war started in February, a hundred and forty.

Conscientious objectors are usually kids. Nineteen, twenty, first enlistment, in over their heads. Mike Prysner, who runs the GI Rights Hotline, says the people calling now have a decade in, every rank up through major, some of them academy grads. People with a pension in sight, setting it on fire on purpose.

Five of them talked to Priya Sidhar at MS NOW. One believes they were ordered to bomb civilian bridges. One said, “if the president wants to blow up bridges, the lawyers will find a way to say that it is OK to do it, and nobody anywhere up or down the chain of command ever stops and says no.” Another, on the boat strikes: “there’s at least one innocent person that I feel like I indirectly hurt.”

Eighteen killed, more than seven hundred and fifty wounded, and Prysner says fear of dying is not what’s driving this. They’re afraid of what they’re being made to do. When your senior sergeants start putting that in writing, the problem isn’t morale. It’s the orders.

Homeland Security Uses Customs Law to Seize Journalist’s Phone

Homeland Security spent this week reading a journalist’s phone records under a law written to check whether you paid duty on your cargo.

Georgia Fort is an independent journalist in Minneapolis. In January she covered a protest at a Minneapolis church, and she and former CNN anchor Don Lemon were both charged over it.In February, prosecutors asked a judge for warrants on their YouTube accounts. The judge said no. They asked again. He said no again, told them they hadn’t shown probable cause of any crime, and said he wanted Fort and Lemon informed so they could fight it.

So Homeland Security went looking for a law that didn’t involve a judge, and came back with one about cargo. Less than a month later they served Google directly. No judge, no probable cause, no notice. A summons under 19 USC 1509, signed off by a DHS official. And it told Google to keep it secret.

Google said no. Told DHS it hadn’t shown what any of this had to do with customs. T-Mobile said yes, and handed over six months of Georgia Fort’s phone records, more than ten thousand calls and text messages. She found out in July, when government lawyers handed the log to her own lawyers, who wrote that they were stunned. T-Mobile will not say why it complied. Are you fecking kidding me. If you’re with T-Mobile, now might be the time to switch carriers.

They also served the YouTube accounts of Democracy Now, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, and Megyn Kelly. Then they pulled financial records from the Sunrise Movement, two unions, and the Venmo of a nonprofit called Voices for Racial Justice. None of them are charged with anything. John Roth ran the DHS inspector general’s office for three years. “It’s outrageous conduct on so many levels. This is not a customs case; it is not a customs violation.”

National Guard Shot Man in the Back

On the fifth of July, around four in the morning in downtown Memphis, two National Guard soldiers on a joint task force shot and killed a twenty year old named Tyrin Johnson.

Police said he turned toward them with a gun. The autopsy came back Thursday. The bullet went into the right side of his back. No soot, no stippling, so it wasn’t fired at close range. The medical examiner ruled it a homicide.

Lucci Chambless, a family friend who also worked with the family of Tyre Nichols, said the angle makes it impossible that Johnson was turning toward anyone. The family says a bystander recorded it, and that the video shows him running away, an unmarked van pulling up behind him, and soldiers firing almost as soon as they were out of it.

Mail-In Ballot Rule Off & On Like Celeb Couple

And the mail ballot rule had a week.

The mail ballot rule was blocked, unblocked, switched on, and blocked again, all inside five days.

Monday the Supreme Court lifted an injunction on procedural grounds, while going out of its way to say it wasn’t ruling on whether any of this is legal. Wednesday Judge Indira Talwani vacated her own nationwide block, and the Postal Service had the rule live so fast you’d think somebody was standing by with a stopwatch. Thursday she blocked it again, finding that complying before November third was practically impossible.

And that thirty percent error rate everyone keeps citing is not a Democratic talking point. That’s the Postal Service’s own people, saying up to one ballot in three could go wrong, and that is the argument for doing it. First ballots go out in about a week. And the rule still puts your ballot in the same category as cremated human remains and replica explosives.

Speed Round

An ICE officer named Christian Castro shot a man through a closed door in Minneapolis and lied about it. Texas has spent five months determining whether a man who fled to Texas to avoid charges meets the definition of a fugitive. They have not reached a conclusion. Castro walked out of jail Thursday. Senator Ron Wyden wants a criminal investigation of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Junior for lying to the Senate about his trip to Samoa during a measles outbreak, in the same week this country recorded its first measles deaths of the year. And Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth fired the publisher, editor in chief and Middle East reporter of Stars and Stripes for insubordination, the insubordination being a CBS interview five and a half weeks earlier, on the same day the Pentagon put in writing that the paper must stay free from censorship or propaganda. They’re suing. That paper has published since the Civil War.

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

Sources:

https://www.notus.org/agencies/trump-administration-yosemite-private-developer-deal

https://www.rawstory.com/conscientious-objector-iran/

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/29/trump-dhs-1509-summons-records-journalists-nonprofits

https://www.wsmv.com/2026/08/27/autopsy-man-killed-by-national-guard-was-shot-back/

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/judge-again-blocks-trump-mail-ballot-executive-order-in-ruling-thats-likely-to-be-swiftly-appealed

https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/08/26/2026-17238/ballot-mail-for-federal-elections

https://minnesotareformer.com/2026/08/27/ice-agent-christian-castro-charged-in-minneapolis-shooting-released-from-texas-jail/

https://truthout.org/articles/democrat-calls-for-criminal-probe-of-rfk-jr-for-lying-in-confirmation-hearing/

https://www.stripes.com/theaters/us/2026-08-27/fired-stripes-employees-lawsuit-pentagon-22676947.html

Hey fam, welcome back to the Gilead Gazette, your weekly tour of the war on women, where every seven days I think we have finally found the floor and every seven days somebody shows up with a shovel and a permit. This week, the federal government decided that a woman raped in her own bed on a Navy ship had a workplace injury. Senator Bill Cassidy dropped a report on abortion pills twelve days before a court gets to take them away. Health and Human Services published a study concluding that respecting trans people makes you a national security risk. And an anti-abortion group is offering to pay the legal bills of anyone who breaks New Jersey’s new clinic law. Let’s get into it.

Rape is Workers Comp in the Navy

The Department of Labor has ruled that when a ship captain rapes a woman in her bed, that is a workers’ compensation claim.

Elsie Dominguez is a civilian mariner with Military Sealift Command. She is also a lieutenant commander in the Navy Reserve. In December of 2021 she was the first assistant engineer on the USNS Carson City, and she says the captain of that ship, Yamil Sanchez Padilla, used a master key to let himself into her locked cabin and rape her while she slept. She reported it the next morning.

The Pentagon released its own numbers this month. More than twenty thousand service members experienced unwanted sexual contact last year, and roughly one in three said a word about it to anybody.

Here is what she got for reporting. Government lawyers argued that her cabin was her workplace, because her job required her to be on that ship and she had, in their words, nowhere else to live. So the rape happened at work. And things that happen at work go to federal workers’ comp, and workers’ comp is all you get. Those same lawyers admitted in their filings that rape is not part of a mariner’s job, and then argued it was covered anyway. A judge agreed this month and threw her case out.

She took a year of unpaid leave to recover. She lost her health insurance. He kept collecting a paycheck the entire time he was under investigation.

Rape in the military is an occupational hazard now, like a bad back. Rose Thayer reported on this for Stars and Stripes. While they’re still allowing reporting.

Abortion Pill Sermon Study

Over in the Senate, Bill Cassidy, who is a medical doctor, apparently, released his committee’s report on abortion pill manufacturers this week under the title “Mifepristone Without Guardrails.” His own summary of these companies is that they “profit off killing innocent children while putting mothers’ lives at risk.” The man has a medical license and he used it to write an altar call.

The centerpiece is Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith’s claim that “more than 1 in 10 women who take Mifepristone will experience a serious adverse event.” That number comes from a Christian think tank that counted bleeding as a complication, in a procedure where bleeding is how you know it worked. The real rate is three tenths of one percent. Mifepristone is safer than penicillin. Nobody wrote this to persuade you. They wrote it for a courtroom. In twelve days the Fifth Circuit hears Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill’s case to force mifepristone back to in-person dispensing only, which would wipe out the roughly thirty percent of abortions in this country that now happen by telehealth. Now they can cite the United States Senate instead of Liz Murrill. Same claims, better stationery.

Trans Allies = Terrorists

Health and Human Services published a twenty page report this week titled “Where the Clinic Meets the Movement: Does Gender Ideology Arm Left-Wing Authoritarian Psychology?” Its conclusion is that people who think trans people should be called by their names and pronouns are more willing to justify political violence. Respect the pronoun, join the insurgency.

They took five positions straight out of the guidance published by the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Psychological Association. Parents should support their kids. Refusing to affirm a trans person puts them at risk of real psychological harm. Then they asked 1,208 people whether they agreed, and agreeing put you in the column marked dangerous.

The work came from the Manhattan Institute and the Network Contagion Research Institute, and one of the authors, Colin Wright, was previously paid by the state of Montana to defend its ban on changing gender markers on birth certificates. The Human Rights Campaign called it junk that “wastes taxpayer dollars.” The New York Post had it up within a day.

Free Legal for Clinic Attackers

And in New Jersey, Shawn Carney, the CEO of 40 Days for Life, announced his group will pay the legal bills of anybody prosecuted under the state’s new clinic protection law. Governor Mikie Sherrill signed it last week. What it bans is physically blocking a door, threatening somebody, or grabbing at them on their way in.

Carney’s response: “Prayer is not a crime. Holding a sign is not intimidation. Offering a woman help is not coercion.” Correct on all three, and none of the three is what the law is about. They wrote a bill about the guys who put their bodies in the doorway. Carney is defending a law that does not exist so he doesn’t have to talk about the one that does. He also promised the free defense is only for people acting peacefully, which means he has publicly committed to funding the legal defense of behavior that is already legal. A week of headlines about standing up to the government and he will never write a check. On his own account he called New Jersey North Korea, which tells you where he keeps his sense of scale.

Speed Round

The President told a rally in South Carolina that hospitals are performing “reverse surgery” on transgender patients, which is not a thing. He could have told that crowd hospitals were installing second spines and gotten the same roar. The Topeka school district agreed to start outing transgender kids to their parents to make a federal investigation go away, which is one hell of a way to protect children. And Salon reported this month that the major AI chatbots are handing women in ban states a flat no when they ask about abortion, leaving out that pills can still come in the mail, and sometimes steering them to fake crisis pregnancy centers instead. Advocates are now rewriting their own websites to trick the machines into telling the truth. The bans got very good at convincing women there is no door. There is a door.

Stay angry. Stay loud. Under Her Eye.

Sources:

https://www.stripes.com/branches/navy/2026-08-25/lawsuit-workers-comp-sexual-assault-navy-ship-22658787.html

https://news.usni.org/2026/08/26/fiscal-year-2025-annual-report-on-sexual-assault-in-the-military

https://www.factcheck.org/2026/05/republicans-repeat-problematic-estimate-of-medication-abortion-harms/

https://opa.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/2026-08/gender-ideology-report.pdf

https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2026/08/new-admin-reports-says-lgbtq-rights-supporters-more-likely-to-be-terrorists/

https://www.salon.com/2026/08/19/ais-abortion-misinformation-problem/

Donald Trump’s war on Iran has run so far past its budget that the Pentagon started raiding the account that pays sailors.

Raiding is not my word. It’s theirs. Aram Roston at the Guardian obtained a Pentagon memo warning of “shortfalls in payroll” because the department has been “raiding” those accounts to fund combat operations. Somebody at the Pentagon sat down to describe taking money from the people who work there, had the entire English language in front of him, and reached for the verb you’d use about a pirate.

A Navy official went further. “The money for payroll was robbed to pay for overseas contingencies.” Robbed. Also their word. Nobody in that building is bothering with a euphemism anymore.

The checks are still clearing. They’re plugging the hole with money from other accounts that hasn’t been spent yet, which is a budgeting strategy I last saw from a guy with three payday loans and a lot of confidence. Retired naval officer Harlan Ullman summed it up. “The piggy bank is broken.” A former officer now working for a Navy contractor was less delicate. “They shot all their weapons, they trashed all their ships, they ran out of their money.”

The Navy’s official response is that it is “actively managing its resources to meet current pay obligations on time,” which is eleven words that mean August cleared.

Then this morning the Chief of Naval Operations said it into a microphone on purpose. Admiral Daryl Caudle told reporters he needs six to eight billion dollars on top of what he was given to be “whole and solvent.” And he named the account eating it. Facilities. The one that builds barracks.

In the Navy, junior sailors assigned to a ship have been required to live on that ship even when it’s tied to the pier at homeport. Not deployed. Home. There weren’t enough barracks and the law wouldn’t let the Navy pay them a housing allowance to live anywhere else, so their permanent address was the boat. Congress finally fixed the allowance rule last year and Caudle built a program on it called No Sailor Lives Afloat, which is a program name that tells you everything about the arrangement it replaced.

Six thousand sailors have made it off the ship. The Navy is still about twelve thousand beds short and is currently looking at RVs and houseboats. The fix for sailors living on a boat is a different boat.

That is the fund this war is eating.

Pete Hegseth told Congress in July the war had already run into “critical shortfalls.” Trump started it on February 28th.

And the ask for next year is a defense budget near one and a half trillion dollars, up more than forty percent. Caudle’s closing plug was “I need my money, okay?” He’s begging for a bed and a chow hall in the same building where Trump and Hegseth spent thirty five billion on a war they never asked Congress to approve. They wanted to play, they broke the budget doing it. The bill lands on a nineteen year old going back to a rack on the boat.

Sources:

Reporting by Aram Roston at the Guardian and Hope Hodge Seck at Military Times.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/27/trump-iran-war-navy-budget

https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2026/08/28/after-epic-fury-navy-may-need-an-extra-8-billion-to-be-solvent-cno-says/

https://federalnewsnetwork.com/defense-news/2026/02/navy-advances-effort-to-move-sailors-off-ships-and-into-shore-based-housing/

https://www.military.com/navy-eyes-rvs-houseboats-as-housing-shortfall-nears-12000-beds