Friday, August 21, 2026

LONG LIVE THE POWER, BEAUTY, WISDOM, STRENGTH AND LOVE OF THE BLACK RADICAL TRADITION: In Other Words– Do You Wanna Be inspired? Are You Ready To Be Inspired? Are You Strong, Smart, Savvy and Tough Enough To Revel In, Celebrate, Defend, And Share the Good And Necessary News Of That Inspiration To The Entire World No Matter What? Let’s Prepare To Be Inspired by what Is Best and Liberating In All Of Us. Today the Name of Our Inspiration Is ANGIE NIXON. Hear Her Resounding Message And SPREAD…THE…WORD…

Florida U.S. Senate democratic winner Angie Nixon full victory speech

News4JAX The Local Station

August 18, 2026

VIDEO:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSJ2vu6JCS8


Florida U.S. Senate democratic winner Angie Nixon full victory speech. Nixon will take on republican winner Ashley Moody in November.

Welcome to the official YouTube channel of WJXT News4JAX -The Local Station.
 
 
Covering Jacksonville, Florida, and surrounding communities with trusted, accurate, and impactful journalism, our mission is to keep you informed with stories that matter. 
 
From breaking news to investigative reports, weather updates to community events, we deliver honest, authentic coverage you can count on. We're proud to be part of the Jacksonville community.



Thursday, August 20, 2026

FASCIST AMERICA 2026: The Muslims are coming! The Muslims are coming! Islamophobia is on the rise in the US, and it's coming from both the right and the left. But Never Fear: Via the As Always Dynamic Joy Reid Show Such Brilliant, Wonderful, Inspiring and Progressive Muslims as Wajahat Ali, Mehdi Hasan, Hasan Piker, Rashida Tlaib, Aisha Wahab, and Rula Jebreal Are Here To Help Us All Embrace, Learn From, and Celebrate What these Amazing Human Beings Have To Share With the World No Matter What. REJOICE!

The Muslims Are Coming! | The Joy Reid Show LIVE!



The Joy Reid Show

Streamed live 2 hours ago

VIDEO: 
 
The Joy Reid Show

Tonight on The Joy Reid Show, the Muslims are coming! The Muslims are coming! Islamophobia is on the rise in the US, and it's coming from both the right and the left. If you aren't Muslim yourself, you may be tempted to say, "Eh, that doesn't affect me." But not so fast! Fascism is always looking for its next target. Whatever the regime can get away with doing to one group, it'll do to all of us eventually.


GUEST SOCIALS:


Wajahat Ali: X: @WajahatAli IG: @intawajahat 

Substack: https://thelefthook.substack.com/

Mehdi Hasan: IG & X: @Mehdirhasan 
Hasan Piker: Twitch: twitch.tv/hasanabi 
X: @hasanthehun IG: @hasandpiker 
YT: ‪@HasanAbi‬
Tiktok: @hasandpiker

State Senator Aisha Wahab: 
IG: @aishabbwahab Campaign 

Website:
https://secure.actblue.com/donate/dra...

Rula Jebreal: IG & X: @rulajebreal Rep. 
Rashida Tlaib: @RepRashida on all socials 


ABOUT JOY REID: 

Joy-Ann Lomena Reid (AKA Joy Reid) is a LIVE best-selling American author, political journalist and TV host. She was a national correspondent for MSNBC and is best known for hosting the Emmy-nominated, NAACP Award-winning political commentary and analysis show, The ReidOut, from 2020 to 2025.


Her previous anchoring credits include The Reid Report (2014–2015) and AM Joy (2016–2020).


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The Muslims Are Coming! Waj Talks to Hasan Piker


Wajahat Ali

VIDEO: 
 
August 19, 2026

#HasanPiker #HasanAbi #WajahatAli

The Muslim left is becoming impossible to ignore — and Hasan Piker has plenty to say about it. Wajahat Ali sits down with Hasan Piker for a wide-ranging conversation about Muslim Americans, progressive politics, MAGA, the Democratic Party, Gaza, Israel, Islamophobia and the future of the American left. Piker has become one of the most prominent online voices on the American left, particularly among younger voters. His political commentary frequently challenges both Republicans and Democratic leaders, while his outspoken criticism of U.S. policy toward Israel and Gaza has made him a major target of controversy. So what happens when Muslim voters and progressive young Americans demand a bigger voice in American politics? Is the Democratic establishment prepared for that shift — or will it continue alienating the very voters it needs? Waj and Hasan dig into the political backlash, the rise of progressive populism, Islamophobia, Gaza, MAGA and what comes next for the Democratic Party.

#HasanPiker #HasanAbi #WajahatAli #MuslimAmericans #Progressives #MAGA #Democrats #Islamophobia #Gaza #uspolitics
 

Wednesday, August 19, 2026

LONG LIVE ANGIE NIXON AND EVERY SINGLE THING SHE REPRESENTS AND COURAGEOUSLY STANDS FOR...YES!

HISTORIC SHOCK DSA Victory In Florida



Breaking Points

August 19, 2026

VIDEO: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjWm9ZJpaSQ



Breaking Points

Krystal and Emily discuss the historic DSA win in the Florida Senate Dem Primary election. 

To listen to Breaking Points as a podcast, check them out on Apple and Spotify Apple:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast...

Spotify: 
https://open.spotify.com/show/033kFes... Instagram: / breakingpoints.yt 
Facebook: / 61575893472315 

#news #politics #youtube




FASCIST AMERICA 2026: The Number One Fascist Crime Family in the United States Today and the Massive CORRUPTION they and their millions of endlessly fanatical supporters and enablers in the Deadly National/Global Cult Known As the Trump/GOP/MAGA Regime Are Directly Responsible For

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/jared-kushner-albania-corruption/

Politics

Jared Kushner Finds Trouble in a Gangster’s Paradise

The Trump princeling’s deal with alleged mobsters illustrates the depths of MAGA corruption.

by Jeet Heer
August 14, 2026
The Nation



PHOTO: Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump attend the Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference at the Sun Valley Lodge on July 8, 2026, in Sun Valley, Idaho. (Kevin Dietsch / Getty Images)

In 2021, while on a Mediterranean yacht trip, Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump thought they had found heaven on earth in an unlikely spot: Sazan, a rocky island off of Albania.

As Trump later recalled in a podcast interview. “We swam to the islands. We went on a hike, barefoot all the way, up to the top. And we were just captivated.” Kusher, who had previously served as an adviser to his father-in-law, Donald Trump, during the president’s first term, was in the midst of turning the political connections he had made in government into lucrative business deals. Albania, a struggling post-communist country with a government eager to win powerful friends in the West, seemed a promising location. Seizing the opportunity, Kushner initiated a deal to purchase Sazan, as well as marshland in nearby Zvërnec that was home to scores of endangered birds, including flamingos. And Kushner’s investment fund, Affinity Partners, working with the family of Qatari billionaire Moutaz Khayyat, started buying more land, with plans to build luxury hotels.

The scheme stank to high heaven from the start. Although Donald Trump was out of power, he was already indicating that he would seek the presidency again in 2024, which meant that foreign billionaires and political leaders had every reason to curry Kushner’s favor. (The president’s son-in-law would in fact return as a senior foreign policy adviser and emissary in Trump’s second term, making him an even worthier investment.)

Further, land deals in Albania were inherently suspect because of the heavy influence of organized crime over the nation’s government. Writing in The Nation in June, Mitchell Prothero noted:

Over the past two decades, Albanian clans have taken over much of Europe’s cocaine trade, which has immersed an otherwise poor country in illegal, hard-to-spend cash. And the government isn’t about to spurn the economic benefits of this influx….

It’s all a recipe for corruption on a massive scale, as powerful business interests coordinate new development projects with the government, and the international mafia ecosystem. Kushner and his consortium of investors aren’t direct players in this system—but it’s unthinkable that his local business backers and government officials friendly to the projects aren’t involved.

Prothero was right to suspect that Kushner’s deal would inevitably be entangled in political corruption and mob ties. On Saturday, The Wall Street Journal published a detailed report on one of the key players in the deal, Artur Shehu, described by the newspaper as “a suspected gangster who fled to Miami after a gunfight at his bar.”

In 2024, villagers in Zvërnec wrote a letter to Kushner saying that land he was buying from Shehu in fact belonged to them.

The villagers had a strong case. As the Journal reports,

One chunk of land was secured by one of Shehu’s lawyers in 2007 by presenting property officials a mistranslated Ottoman-era land record. While translating from Ottoman Turkish, an archivist substituted out the original owner and inserted Seit Shehu’s name instead, a court found. The lawyer and the archivist were later convicted on falsified documents-related charges, though the lawyer’s case is being retried.

Shehu has been under repeated investigation by authorities in Albania and other European countries for decades. (He hasn’t been convicted and denies wrongdoing.) In June, Shehu was arrested on RICO-style charges by the Albanian special prosecutors’ office, which claimed he was a prominent member of a large drug gang.

It’s hardly a coincidence that Kusher and his Qatari cronies were involved in buying land from an alleged gangster. As the Journal notes, “Gains from cocaine filtered their way to Albania via cryptocurrency and cash smuggled on buses—with the group ultimately laundering money through Albanian real estate.” Albanian gangsters frequently operate by fusing cryptocurrency and real estate, with their corruption greased by access to political power. That is structurally very similar to Kushner’s own putatively legitimate business enterprises. The Trump family also thrives on crypto, real estate, and proximity to political power.

As The Guardian reported on Thursday, Trump’s second term has been a massive exercise in primitive accumulation by grift. In 2025, the president made $2.2 billion

by amassing big cryptocurrency holdings, benefiting from wealthy foreign interests, expanding his Truth Social business and more, while federal oversight of his actions has waned.

Trump last year raked in at least $1.4bn from his crypto ventures according to financial disclosure forms he filed in June…. Monetizing his presidency further this summer, Trump’s Truth Social media business is pushing a new scheme that offers wealthy buyers special early access to his posts for a fee of $100,000 a month.

The sheer scale of the Trump family’s graft is producing a heartening backlash. This is most visible in Albania, where there have been near-daily protests that have expanded into a wide-ranging attack on the country’s crooked government. The spirit of resistance in Albania should inspire Americans. As my Nation colleague Chris Lehmann has lamented, Donald Trump in his second term has been brazenly corrupt, swaggering with a sickening impunity in part because Democratic Party leaders are gun-shy about challenging him. Fortunately, some in the party, notably Senator Elizabeth Warren, have kept beating the drums on Trumpian corruption. If Democrats win back Congress in the midterms, they’ll be in a strong position to investigate Trump family corruption, including the sleazy deals Kushner made in Albania.



ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
 
Jeet Heer is a national affairs correspondent for The Nation and host of the weekly Nation podcast, The Time of Monsters. He also pens the monthly column “Morbid Symptoms.” The author of In Love with Art: Francoise Mouly’s Adventures in Comics with Art Spiegelman (2013) and Sweet Lechery: Reviews, Essays and Profiles (2014), Heer has written for numerous publications, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The American Prospect, The Guardian, The New Republic, and The Boston Globe.
 
PLEASE NOTE: A consigliere is a person who serves as an adviser or counselor to the leader of a criminal organization. In Mafia terms, it’s the advisor to the boss and sometimes acts like a trusted “right-hand man.”

In this unforgettable scene below from The Godfather (1972), Tom Hagen visits Hollywood producer Jack Woltz with a polite request from Don Corleone:

VIDEO:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9xv9SqgPWM

 
ATTORNEY GENERAL TODD BLANCHE IS DONALD TRUMP’S PERSONAL CONSIGLIERE

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/16/us/politics/blanche-trump-attorney-general-justice-department.html

Blanche Refuses to Say He’ll Always Be Independent of Trump as Attorney General

The new head of the Justice Department said on “Meet the Press” on Sunday that the president had never asked him to prosecute specific people — and never would.

Listen · 4:53 minutes

VIDEO: Blanche Says He Will Not Pledge to Always Act Independently of White House. 1:19
 

PHOTO:  Todd Blanche, the newly confirmed attorney general, refused to say that he would always act independently of the White House in an interview Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press. Credit: Kenny Holston/The New York Times

by Glenn Thrush
Reporting from Washington
August 16, 2026
New York Times


Todd Blanche, the newly confirmed attorney general, refused to say on Sunday that he would always act independently of White House control but claimed during an interview that President Trump has “never” demanded he prosecute specific people.

Mr. Blanche, displaying a greater ease in fielding a variety of pointed questions than his predecessor, Pam Bondi, sought to balance his loyalty to the president and a commitment to the evenhanded administration of justice during an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

“There’s a big difference between saying we will always do our job and investigate any case, and act independently of the White House,” Mr. Blanche said when pressed to pledge his independence by the show’s host, Kristen Welker.

“No, I’m not going to pledge that, and no attorney general should ever pledge that,” he said.

But he suggested in another interview that he was not afraid to push back. “It’s my job to talk to him about those issues, which I have done for many years and I will continue to do,” he said on “Fox News Sunday.”

Mr. Blanche told NBC that Mr. Trump had never asked him to do anything illegal or unethical — and claimed that reports of White House meddling in the department were overhyped.

“There is this extraordinarily false narrative that the president wakes up in the morning and calls me and says, ‘Todd, go prosecute X or Y,’” Mr. Blanche said. “He does not do that. He has never done that. He will never do that.”

In September, Mr. Trump demanded the immediate prosecution of several adversaries in a social media post aimed at Ms. Bondi. He fired Ms. Bondi in April, in part because he thought she was moving too slowly in prosecuting his perceived enemies whom he had identified, with scant or nonexistent evidence, as being criminals.

Mr. Blanche, then her deputy, was elevated to fill the post and was narrowly confirmed by the Senate earlier this month. His confirmation was imperiled by the opposition of some Republicans who questioned his role in a $1.8 billion compensation fund for purported victims of abuses by the Biden-era Justice Department and a deal granting Mr. Trump sweeping immunity from tax investigations.

After weeks of wrangling, Mr. Blanche secured the support of several holdouts by putting on paper a commitment to rescinding his previous order creating the fund and limiting the scope of the tax immunity agreement.

On Sunday, he repeated his claim that the fund was dead but said that those who felt they had been wronged — including Capitol rioters convicted of crimes and pardoned by Mr. Trump — could still apply for compensation through the courts.

On Friday, Mr. Blanche, a former federal prosecutor who served as Mr. Trump’s lead criminal defense lawyer, appeared alongside the president at an event in Long Island with Bruce Blakeman, the Nassau County executive running for governor of New York.

“In my Department of Justice, if anybody touches a federal law enforcement officer in any way inappropriate, we will prosecute them to the fullest extent of the law,” Mr. Blanche said at the event.

When Ms. Welker asked him to square that statement with Mr. Trump’s mass clemency to the rioters on the first day of his second term, Mr. Blanche offered the same answer he gave during his confirmation hearing: Presidents have the constitutional right to pardon anyone they want.

He also expressed support for Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney in Washington who has drawn Mr. Trump’s wrath over her dropping of charges against a man accused of vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool and blaming a “botched” renovation.

Mr. Blanche’s public support was a significant endorsement for Ms. Pirro, a longtime friend and ally of Mr. Trump, who has recently become a target.

“I absolutely support U.S. Attorney Pirro, as does President Trump,” he said — even though Mr. Trump has considered firing her and raged against her decision.

“Now, that’s different than whether the president is extraordinarily frustrated at what happened in that case, and I don’t in any way fault him for that,” added Mr. Blanche, who suggested the department was still investigating vandalism in and around the pool.

Mr. Blanche emphasized his commitment to focusing on law and order during a speech at Justice Department headquarters last week, seeking to shift the narrative away from the political maelstrom that has engulfed the department during his tenure.

Mr. Trump, he told Fox News, “wants law enforcement out there arresting bad guys.”

Glenn Thrush covers the Department of Justice for The Times and has also written about gun violence, civil rights and conditions in the country’s jails and prisons.


The Latest on the Trump Administration:
  • U.S. Cuts Back Military Drills With South Korea: President Trump had ordered the Defense Department to reduce joint exercises with the key U.S. ally, declaring the drills “hostile” toward North Korea.
  • F.D.A. Commissioner: The president plans to nominate Dr. Heidi Overton, a White House domestic policy official and a proponent of the administration’s Make America Healthy Again agenda, to serve as the next commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, according to two senior administration officials.
  • Trump’s Most Devoted Aide: Trump’s White House aide Natalie Harp is always by his side. What, exactly, does she do?
  • University Investigations: A former Justice Department lawyer says Trump administration leaders ignored findings that elite schools, including Brown and Columbia, hadn’t broken the law as they pressed them into deals.
  • Watchdog Replacements: Trump is installing his allies in the offices of inspector general, which are meant to provide independent government oversight.
  • Logging in National Forests: The Trump administration advanced a plan to open nearly 45 million acres of wilderness in national forests to road construction and logging, removing protections that had been in place for a quarter century.

Monday, August 17, 2026

FASCIST AMERICA 2026: Where the United States Is Actually Going At This Very Moment and Why Its Primary All Consuming Strategic Target is the Structural, Institutional, and Systemic Destruction of All Vestiges of Social Democracy and Its Foundational State Apparatus Writ Large/In General

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/elon-musk-maga-white-nationalism/

Politics

The New Right’s Toxic Addiction to Racial Conflict

A former fellow with the Claremont Institute explains how white nationalist dogma sets the terms of political belonging on the MAGA right.

by Pedro Gonzalez
August 14, 2026
The Nation



PHOTO: Brothers in race-baiting: Donald Trump and Elon Musk attend a SpaceX launch in 2024. (Brandon Bell / Getty Images)

It seems like ancient history now, but it was only a year and a half ago that Elon Musk found himself on the wrong side of the new right after he signaled support for the H1-B visa program. No one contributed more money to Donald Trump’s reelection—and no one seemed to fall from grace faster. Musk’s thought crime was to acknowledge that the talents of foreign workers have “made America strong” and built his companies. MAGA turned on Musk with shocking speed and ferocity, and he was defiant in turn. “Take a big step back and FUCK YOURSELF in the face,” he told critics.

Then, a few months later, Musk began feuding with Trump himself over the outlays in the GOP’s signature spending and taxation bill—a fight that soon metastasized, given the magnitude of the egos involved. Musk went so far as to accuse Trump of intentionally sabotaging the handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files. Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon called on Trump to nationalize Musk’s companies and deport him. Online, Trump’s most fervent sycophants fantasized about Musk being executed for his disloyalty.

Many observers believed Musk’s MAGA affair had come to an end. But as a recovering MAGA adherent myself, I noticed something that made me suspect otherwise: Around the time the world’s richest man saw his influence with the right slipping, he began to post more about race. The right, in response, slowly warmed to him again. An analysis by The Washington Post found that, from October 2025 to mid-April, Musk indeed “significantly increased his rate of online posts about race and his concerns about perceived threats to Whiteness or what he views as calls for a ‘genocide’ against White people.” He posted about race almost every day during this period, at “nearly triple the rate for the previous two years.”

The online right took notice. “This rethoric [sic] from Elon Musk is huge and if he keeps it up, it will save lives,” wrote one influtential race-baiting X user. This shift reached a crescendo this summer, when Musk publicly supported Citizen Vigilante, a film about a man who kills immigrants—criminals and noncriminals alike. One person posted a menacing image of the film’s titular vigilante captioned, “First the traitors, then the invaders.” Musk replied, “Yes,” endorsing the notion of executing perceived race traitors. The phrasing and the sentiment behind it were lifted right out of The Turner Diaries, an infamous white supremacist novel about a race war in which non-whites and their white allies are slaughtered by a group of radicals who usurp the federal government. The novel had helped shaped the worldview of the right-wing terrorist Timothy McVeigh, who killed 167 people and injured 684 in his 1995 bombing attack on the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

Musk was able to survive the fallout from his initial break with the MAGA right, because he, like Trump, understands something important about the present moment: There is no more powerful force in the right-wing psyche than racial conflict. It’s the reason that Musk is once more viewed as a movement hero on the right—and why the conservative movement remains is in Trump’s thrall. Every other issue and consideration is a far-distant second to the specter of the racial conflict that, in the right-wing imagination, is forever looming on the horizon.

This tendency has always existed in the GOP, though under the pressures of maintaining respectability in the political mainstream, gatekeepers in the conservative movement sought to marginalize its uglier manifestations. The racial panics that gained more recent favor in the conservative movement were also somewhat more targeted than the race hatreds that convulsed the right in the 20th century, zeroing in narrow, disfavored groups such as Muslims.
 
Current Issue




With Trump’s takeover, however, the GOP has once more become a clearing house of viral racial animus, building up a far more extensive—and expanding—list of enemies. The centrality of racial conflict also why the efforts of Republicans such as Mike Pence—who recently launched a think tank to reclaim the party from Trump’s influence—are doomed to fail. People like Pence want to go back to serving warm beer after Trump has had everyone slamming the hard stuff for the last decade. In 1968, Republican strategist Kevin Phillips said that “the whole secret of politics is knowing who hates who,” and no one has embraced that cynical philosophy—or utilized it more effectively—than Trump.

Phillips is an important figure in GOP history because it was his 1968 memo for Richard Nixon’s presidential campaign that outlined the “Southern strategy” to exploit racial resentment among certain white voters. Phillips built out his strategy in response to segregationist George Wallace’s third-party bid. Wallace, then the Democratic governor of Alabama, ran for president on an openly anti–civil rights platform. By dog-whistling about “crime, decentralization of federal social programming, and law and order,” Phillips wrote, Nixon could implicitly appeal to the racial anxieties of Wallace supporters without using the governor’s incendiary language, which would jeopardize the support of white moderates. The Southern strategy worked so well that every Republican president since Nixon has embraced it to some extent.

Trump’s central innovation in his second term has been to elevate the Southern strategy from a campaign tactic to a governing agenda—a fact the right simultaneously celebrates on its own terms and denies when others notice. Take, for example, the case of Scott Greer, who was fired from The Daily Caller, the right-wing website founded by Tucker Carlson, for his ties to white nationalist groups. In an interview with The Ezra Klein Show, Christopher Rufo, the senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute best known for his crusade against critical race theory, argued that Greer should still be granted a platform, since Greer himself has since advocated against the white nationalist label. But this proves to largely be a distinction without a difference. Greer hasn’t so much reconsidered his core views on race; rather, the MAGA GOP has gravitated more closely to them—which means that he can rehabilitate his standing in the movement with minimal, and mostly cosmetic, changes to his rhetoric. He’s comfortable calling himself a “conservative” because that label now includes views that once were relegated to fringe white nationalist figures. Even the self-described “white advocate” Jared Taylor has criticized Greer and those like him for wanting to “have it both ways”—discarding fraught segregation-friendly labels for the sake of optics while claiming that the Trumpified GOP is the best vehicle for advancing the views associated with those labels.

On one level, this feud among white nationalists is eloquent testimony to how far right the GOP has veered on race; what might have earlier been fodder for an unhinged right-wing Reddit flame war is now a platform for commentators on the right like Rufo to ally themselves with white nationalists who until very recently disparaged his work as an accomodationist obstacle to full-blown “right-wing identitarianism.” And by most reasonable measures, both Greer and Taylor are right: racists can have it both ways on the right, and the savvy career move for ambitious white nationalists like Greer is to throw in with the GOP. After all, the people running White House social-media pages have incorporated themes and even music drawn from self-consciously white supremacist scenes. What was once relegated to the fringe is now mainstream on the right.

I know this firsthand, as a former enthusiastic recruit to the MAGA right. I watched this transformation happen in real time from the inside.

I traveled from the edge of the right to becoming a Lincoln Fellow of the Claremont Institute—which, like virtually every other conservative institution today, has given Trump carte blanche under the belief that he is the only thing standing between the West and “race communism” or, more commonly now, “Third Worldism.” The nomenclature is always fungible; what’s constant is the invocation of a mortal racialized threat to civilization as we know it.

In a nutshell, the right understands itself as being in a struggle against a racial and demographic clock. Without some drastic intervention, a long line of demagogues on the right routinely lament, the United States will be swamped by a coalition of nonwhites, immigrants, and white enablers who will bring about a dark age of acute government dysfunction and naked corruption. The prime directive of this new regime will be the formal persecution of whites, who will become the victims of an ever-intensifying system of racial favoritism that places them at the bottom.

As the Musk episode showed, no one on the right can be seen as a backslider from this vision and still have a viable political career: It has bulked into a badge of right-wing identity, fulfilling much the same role that tax-cutting antigovernment ideology did in the 1980s and ’90s. Its status as an unshakable article of faith in the MAGA movement also means that it doesn’t really matter whether the leaders who’ve bought into it really subscribe to it; its instrumental value is simply too great, so long as these apocalyptic delusions have the movement’s base in their grip. Trump understands this instinctively, and Musk figured it out by paying attention to him. So did JD Vance. An empty suit is a reliable weathervane, as we’ve seen in Vance’s cunning reinvention from a Never Trump conservative who compared Trump to Hitler into an ardent purveyor of MAGA racial panics.

The price of this sort of cynical demagoguery is steep. The “civilization” that’s dogmatically held to be imperiled by brown and foreign-born hordes has degenerated under Trump’s watch into a kleptocratic kakistocracy without an analogue in American history. It’s impossible, in this compass, to detail all the ways Trump has made American life materially worse and more dystopian while profiting from the collective misery of millions of everyday people. A partial inventory would include monetizing the White House for Trump to make more money than he did as a businessman, Musk’s own colossally destructive and deadly reign at DOGE, unleashing new disease threats through sheer incompetence, the relentless onslaught against the environment and wildlife, the unprecedented weaponization of the Department of Justice, the killings of American citizens by federal agents with impunity, and the construction of a digital police state that groups like Claremont, prior to their own MAGA makeovers, would have decried as a civil-liberties travesty.

Yet all this criminal dysfunction is only part of the cost of doing business, so far as the white nationalist right is concerned. Within its charmed Caucasian chalk circle, there’s simply no price that’s too high for “saving” America from “Third Worldism”—even if the rescue operation turns America into the very sort of squalid authoritarian regime the right associates with that incoherent term. This is also why there is no reason to believe an internal course correction is in the cards. If there is hope, it is in an expanded Democratic coalition that is more amenable to dissent, disagreement, and defectors.

After the cavalcade of race panics, the second most powerful tool in the right’s arsenal is the fear of no return: the notion that the mandate of civilizational restoration means that there’s no alternative but to be locked in to the right—that changing one’s mind is irrelevant, or futile, because one’s allegiance is preordained in one’s genetic makeup.

Of course, this is another lie—one that appeals to the worst aspects of our nature. The truth is that America’s story, at its best, is one of reconciliation. Even George Wallace turned a hard corner later in life and found redemption. It’s high time that conservatives in America took due note of how Wallace turned his life around, rather than mimicking his opportunistic descent into bigotry and hatred.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
 
Pedro Gonzalez

Pedro Gonzalez is a writer based in Ohio. You can find him online at readcontra.com.

Wake the HEL* UP!

Dr. Eddie S. Glaude, Jr.

Dr. Eddie S. Glaude, Jr.

August 15, 2026

VIDEO:

*New book: America, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation's Anniversaries get it here at this link: https://amzn.to/4uev5RN
 
 

"The Nerd Reich":
Author Gil Durán on Big Tech Fascism, Peter Thiel, JD Vance & the War on Democracy

Democracy Now!
Democracy Now!

August 17, 2026

VIDEO: 

A new book by longtime Bay Area journalist Gil Durán investigates “tech fascism” and its mounting influence on U.S. politics. The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy follows the rise of Vice President JD Vance, the former venture capitalist whose “outsider” campaign for Senate was bankrolled by the billionaire co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, Peter Thiel. Durán traces the ideological lineage of the current Trump administration back from Vance to Thiel and the far-right-wing monarchist Curtis Yarvin, whose “right-libertarian” political theory has long made the rounds among Silicon Valley elite. “These guys were never libertarians,” says Durán. “Now that they are the government, we see their true face: They’re fascists, and they’re authoritarians.”


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Zeteo 
 
 
It’s a measure of the president's staggering corruption that preliminary approval of an application for a charter by Trump’s crypto firm is just another story. Also, Hakeem Jeffries finds a new low.

by MARTIN PENGELLY
August 17, 2026
First Draft
Zeteo

On this day in 1998, President Bill Clinton admitted in grand jury testimony that he had a relationship with Monica Lewinsky, a White House intern, which he then told the nation “was not appropriate. In fact, it was wrong.”

Good morning… Martin here, delighted as ever to wish you a Happy Monday. It’s almost late summer now, but summer it still is, so Congress is still on its extremely generous holidays. Fear not: Donald Trump is here to fill the news with yet more absurd corruption.

In today’s ‘First Draft,’ we look at two aspects of the second Trump administration that go hand in hand: the financial self-dealing allowing the president’s family and associates to rake in untold riches, and the obsequious yes-men who populate his Cabinet, ready to act with complete disregard for convention and the law.

Trump looks set to turn his crypto firm, World Liberty Financial, into a bank, while his new attorney general, Todd Blanche, gets on with targeting the boss’s enemies and rigging the law in his favor, without even pretending to do otherwise. It’s staggering – as is Hakeem Jeffries, very possibly the next speaker of the House, opposing Medicare for All, a policy favored by nine in 10 in his party. We’ll look at that and more, including Trump’s continuing stalemate with Iran. Let’s read in.  


‘The Most Brazen Act of Self-Dealing’

Trump before boarding Air Force One on Aug. 14, 2026. Photo by Samuel Corum/Getty Images.

On Aug. 1, Capital One bank said it closed more than 300 Trump Organization accounts for “anti-money laundering reasons.”

“The closures were the result of months of analysis and a careful review by ‌Capital One’s AML team in accordance with bank policies and regulatory guidance,” it said.

Two weeks later, on Friday, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, a national regulator whose head, Jonathan Gould, was appointed by Trump last year, granted conditional preliminary approval of an application for a bank charter from World Liberty Trust – the Trump family’s cryptocurrency company.

World Liberty co-founder Zach Witkoff – son of Trump real estate pal turned all-purpose diplomatic envoy Steve Witkoff – said: “Our ambition is clear: to build the most trusted and widely used digital dollar in the world while strengthening the role of the U.S. dollar across the global economy.”

Among those crying foul, and there were plenty, the top Democrat on the Senate banking committee, Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, said: “This is the most brazen act of self-dealing our financial system has ever seen. I’m introducing a bill to stop this kind of unprecedented corruption.”

Which is precisely what this is: absolutely staggering self-dealing by the president, his family, and their cronies. But this is also the U.S. under the Trumps. The staggering self-dealing story was a Friday story, Saturday too, tops. By Sunday, the torrent of Trumpist slurry was washing other threats into view...