Nothing but the truth. Even if against me.

Nothing but the truth. Even if against me.

Sunday, September 6, 2026

Scams Thrive in Trump's Deregulated Republican United Scams of America






Donald Trump has been fighting the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) tooth and nail. He claims to want to "deregulate" the economy so as to give unfettered freedom to entrepreneurs...

But his "entrepreneurs" are scammers and criminals like him who thrive on theft and crimes of all sorts. If you ask AI what is the relationship between Trump and the CFPB, this is what you get:

President Trump and his administration, led by acting director Russell Vought and influenced by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), have systematically dismantled the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). This effort began in early 2025 with mass firings, office lockdowns, and the halting of all enforcement work, aiming to reduce the agency’s staff from approximately 1,200 to just 556 positions.

The administration’s actions include dropping dozens of enforcement cases that could have returned billions to consumers, deleting thousands of website pages, and refusing to request new funding from the Federal Reserve to starve the agency of resources. Critics, including a Senate Banking Committee report, estimate these actions have cost American consumers approximately $19 billion in lost restitution and prevented savings in overdraft and late fees.

Federal courts have repeatedly intervened, issuing injunctions to block complete shutdowns and mandate continued funding, noting that Congress must act to eliminate the agency. While the White House scaled back plans to fully close the bureau to comply with court orders, it continues to pursue a "right-sized" agency focused on deregulation, effectively neutering its role in protecting consumers from predatory financial practices.


Do you wonder why would a president dismantle an agency that protects Americans from the millions of financial crimes committed against them every day? It's really simple. Trump is a criminal, a pedophile, a rapist (see: https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/first-term-trump-lawyer-calls-025657320.html), a cheater, an adulterer and a swindler.... He must feel the pain of his criminal buddies (especially the wealthy billionaires like him) and so he decides to help them by opening the floodgates of unaccountability and escape from justice.

I personally experienced a scam attempt by a dubious bank (hiding behind a known bank, US BANK) that sent me a letter (without a letterhead, just an address and a 800-number) telling me that someone has opened a credit card in my name and that I have to call them to confirm. Instead of calling, I wrote back and mailed in a registered letter saying it is not me and that they should cancel that account and card. A week later, I receive a 4-page form that I was asked to fill which asked for ALL my personal information, arguing that they needed that information to ensure their "investigation"'s accuracy. I went online, filed a complaint with the CFPB and within another few days, the anonymous scamming bank sent me a letter confirming that they had canceled the account and the credit card.

Without CFPB, there was nothing I could do and I risked losing all my life's savings. Trump wants CFPB gone because he wants all these scammers to succeed in their rape of US citizens, just like he does.

The case below was "handled" by one of America's most known car rental agencies. If "venerable" institutions like Hertz can somehow enable such scams on American citizens, imagine what less known scamming American "businesses" are getting away with.

On a side note, the entire system is forcing people off cash and into using all sorts of credit and debit cards. I've been through the Houston, Texas airport twice, once during the Covid pandemic and another time a couple of years later. AVOID HOUSTON AIRPORT AT ALL COSTS: You can't buy anything with cash. You can literally go hungry while waiting for your plane unless you surrender your personal and financial information. 

The scamming American businesses used the Covid pandemic to eliminate cash (supposedly because paper money may spread contaminations and to prevent money laundering). Now you know the real reason: By forcing people into the exclusive use of credit and debit cards, they multiply the chances of fraud, identity theft, and all the fine crimes of the American financial system. The United Scams of America doesn't have a Dream for you. It has a nightmare. Americans live in constant fear of their system: They live in a totalitarian system but don't realize it because they are brainwashed to believe that living in fear is the price to pay for friggin' freedom. But freedom is by definition not having to live in fear. 

Nikos Kazantsakis said, "I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free." In America, people 
1- hope to constantly consume and purchase garbage (you've got to buy crap at every holiday they made up to make you buy crap);
2- fear everything around them: their government, their police, their tax agency, their banks, their neighbors, immigrants and all the "others" that don't sound and look like them;
3- Therefore, Americans are not free as they think. They live in a huge "Trump-golden" prison.
================================================


You Handed Your License to the Rental Car Counter for a Few Minutes. That Might Have Been All It Took.
Shawn Henry
Sun, September 6, 2026


You Handed Your License to the Rental Car Counter for a Few Minutes. That Might Have Been All It Took.

Brian Krebs remembers the moment clearly enough. He and his mother stood at a Hertz counter, handed over their driver's licenses, and waited while a clerk disappeared behind the desk with them for a few minutes to process the paperwork. It's the kind of moment nobody thinks twice about.

Krebs, a longtime security researcher, didn't think twice about it either, until he found his own license, and his mother's, sitting in a dark web marketplace with timestamps a few seconds apart, matching almost to the second when they'd handed those licenses across the counter.

That's how Krebs traced the origin of what may be the largest single exposure of government-issued identification in U.S. history: more than 153 million driver's licenses from the United States and Canada, plus over 10 million ID cards, three million passports and travel documents, and more than half a million medical cards, all listed for sale on a dark web service called Nexus. The FBI's New Orleans field office confirmed it opened an investigation into an apparent breach at idscan.net, a Louisiana-based identity verification company whose scanning technology, according to its own marketing materials, processes more than 21 million ID checks a month at over 20,000 locations.

Skip past the part where this becomes a generic cybersecurity headline, because the automotive angle is sitting right there in Krebs's own reporting, and it isn't subtle. Multiple people who helped him trace the leak, including his own family, said the only place they'd handed over a driver's license around the date on their leaked file was a car rental counter. Krebs specifically named Hertz, which idscan.net's own site lists as a client brand, alongside Target, FedEx, Motorola Solutions, Caesars Entertainment, and the financial services company Jack Henry.

That client list, it turns out, is not as solid as it looks. After Krebs's story ran, a Caesars Entertainment spokesperson told him the company has not been an idscan.net customer and has not used its VeriScan product since February 2025, despite still appearing on idscan.net's site as a client. idscan.net's response was that the incident should have no impact on Caesars. Maybe. But if a vendor is still advertising a client a year and a half after the relationship ended, the more uncomfortable question is how long it keeps that client's customer data after the relationship ends, too.

The Dealership Business Nobody Mentioned

Rental counters are only half of idscan.net's automotive business. Pull up the company's own site and click into the page built specifically for car dealerships, and the pitch has nothing to do with age checks or convenience. It's built around a single promise: stop vehicle theft before it starts.

That's not marketing fluff. Dealerships adopted ID scanning largely to fight test-drive theft, a genuinely common crime in which someone presents a real or forged license, asks to take a car around the block, and never comes back. idscan.net's own blog keeps a running list of local news stories on the subject stretching back years, everything from a woman who left a fake ID at a dealership and drove off in a customer's car to a ring that used stolen identities to walk off with a pair of Maseratis. The FBI, for what it's worth, estimates vehicle theft costs the country roughly $20 million a day.

The other reason dealers scan licenses is less about theft and more about paperwork. Any dealer who arranges financing is legally treated as a financial institution under federal law, which puts it under the Federal Trade Commission's Safeguards Rule, the same regulation that governs mortgage brokers and payday lenders. That rule requires a written information-security program, encrypted storage of customer data, and, since 2024, a formal breach-notification process. Scanning a license and running it against a database isn't just about catching a thief mid-test-drive. It's also how a dealership builds the paper trail regulators expect when loan fraud shows up, and it does show up: a Ventura, California Jeep dealer recently got sued by Santander over allegations it sold fraudulent loans, one recent example of how ugly that fight can get even without a stolen identity involved.

Dealerships don't exactly need outside help generating fraud headaches, either. Plenty of dealer owners have managed that fine on their own.

The Irony Nobody at the Company Wants to Discuss

There's a detail in Krebs's reporting that's almost too on the nose. idscan.net's own blog post cataloguing test-drive fraud, the one warning dealerships about criminals using fake IDs to steal cars, was written by Jillian Kossman, the company's marketing and operations lead. When Krebs emailed idscan.net asking what happened to the 153 million real IDs sitting in its systems, the person who answered was, once again, Jillian Kossman. She told him she couldn't share details while the investigation was ongoing, but that his findings had been "welcome, and helpful."

idscan.net has not, as of this writing, published its own breach notice. That's worth noting mainly because the company markets itself, in its own words, as the fix for exactly this kind of exposure.

Why This Is Bigger Than One Vendor

Zoom out and the uncomfortable pattern is that identity verification, the industry built entirely around stopping fraud, has become one of fraud's biggest single targets. It makes sense once you think about it. A company that verifies IDs for car rental counters, marijuana dispensaries, casinos, and dealerships in one shared system is sitting on exactly the kind of concentrated, cross-industry data set that used to take criminals years to assemble one breach at a time.

Organized theft rings already lean on forged paperwork to move stolen cars across state lines long before anyone gets to a rental counter. A dataset like this one doesn't need to be assembled from a dozen separate hacks anymore. It's already assembled.

We've already covered a case where a cloned VIN let a stolen Nissan Rogue sail through a clean Carfax check, right up until it didn't. A leak like this one works the same way on identity instead of paperwork. Everything checks out, until the moment it doesn't.

What To Actually Do About It

If you've rented a car, financed one, or visited any business that scans IDs for compliance reasons in the past year or two, there's a reasonable chance your license is part of this. The FTC's identitytheft.gov recommends checking your credit reports, considering a credit freeze, and reporting any fraud you find.

If you're on the business side of this, a dealership, a rental franchise, or anyone who outsourced ID verification to a third party, this is also the moment to ask your vendor, in writing, how long it retains scanned images after a transaction closes. Because apparently no longer being a customer is not a guarantee your customers' data left with you.

The next time someone behind a counter asks for your license and disappears with it for a few minutes, remember what that wait is actually for. It was never really about verifying who you are. It was about creating a permanent copy of who you are, sitting on a server somewhere, for as long as somebody else decides to keep it.

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Saturday, September 5, 2026

Trump's Racism in White Street: Can Spot Trump Voters as Closeted White Racists





Closeted...because they're hypocrites who know they're filthy racists but don't dare say they are or that they vote for Trump. Very interesting commentary.
==============================================



White Woman Says You Can Spot a Hidden Trump Voter by How They Describe Unhoused People
Sarah M. Stone
Sat, September 5, 2026


Kylie Brewer

TikTok user Kylie Brewer believes that the way white people talk about homelessness and immigration reflects their political beliefs.

TikTok user shared in her video that the way white people talk about homelessness and immigration is a good reflection of their politics, which, according to her, some of them start to hide.

"How white people talk about homelessness tells you everything you need to know about them," Kylie Brewer opened the video.

She went on to talk about what she thinks the political shift will be among some voters.

"And in the era of people starting to become closeted conservatives especially as the pendulum continues to swing between right and left, as again we see the cyclical pattern throughout history, what's going to happen is a lot of conservative people are going to start trying to hide their political beliefs, and they're going to start hiding that they voted for Trump, which is already occurring," she said.

Brewer added that racism remains pervasive.

"Obviously, microaggressions about race are very, very prevalent and difficult to hide, that sort of sneaky racism," she said.

She pointed out that the biggest indication for her is how they describe the homeless people.

"But the best way you could tell is if people describe unhoused people in the way they do," Brewer said. "So if it's with zero compassion and calling them drug addicts or a bunch of other insults, it really does suggest a lack of empathy that can extend to anyone."

That, according to her, is because most people don't understand the financial instability many Americans face.

"Because most conservative white people do not understand that the majority of Americans are only one missed paycheck away from homelessness," she explained.

According to her, the same test will apply to discussions about immigration.

"So really pay attention to the way that white people are talking about immigrants, talk about people who are coming to this country to start a new life for themselves," Brewer said.

She pointed to certain words that signal hidden politics.

"If they call them illegals or any other term that is dehumanizing, hobos or whatever, those are really, really bad terms that indicate how someone views the world," Brewer explained.

She concluded her video by reminding the viewers of something.

"So pay very close attention to this," she said. "Bye, y'all."

Friday, September 4, 2026

More Jewish Barbarity in the Zionist Colony in Palestine



Israeli police kill Palestinian in Jerusalem as army blocks aid for Qusra
Al Jazeera Staff and Anadolu
Fri, September 4, 2026

Israeli police have killed a Palestinian man in Jerusalem and the Israeli army has blocked humanitarian assistance from reaching an occupied West Bank village besieged by settlers for weeks.

Officers opened fire on a 33-year-old Palestinian near Damascus Gate in Jerusalem on Friday. Israeli police said its border guard "neutralised" the man, claiming he was attempting to stab one of them.

The Palestinian Wafa news agency identified the man as Ibrahim al-Hendi from East Jerusalem's Beit Hanina neighbourhood. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

Following the incident, Israeli forces deployed around Damascus Gate and the surrounding area of Jerusalem's Old City, Palestinian sources told Al Jazeera.

Separately, the Israeli army said that it arrested Palestinians in the town of Qabatiya in the West Bank, alleging they were "planning to carry out an attack" against Israelis and security forces.

Ten other Palestinians were arrested during a 48-hour Israeli army operation in Nablus in the West Bank. The Israeli army said it seized more than "30 weapon production machines used to manufacture weapons" during the operation.

Meanwhile, Israeli settlers and soldiers carried out attacks across the occupied West Bank on Friday, Wafa reported. Settlers stormed the Khirbet al-Hamra community in the northern Jordan Valley and assaulted one resident.

Israeli settlers, accompanied by soldiers, also attacked Khalet a-Nahlah in southern Bethlehem. Israeli forces also fired tear gas and concussion grenades at a crowd of Palestinians who gathered to resist the attacks.

Israeli forces block peace activists carrying food and water from reaching Palestinian families whose homes have been cut off from supplies by Israeli settlers in the village of Qusra on September 4, 2026 [Jaafar Ashtiyeh/AFP]

Blocking access to Qusra

As violence and harassment of Palestinians continues across the occupied territory, the Israeli army on Friday also prevented around 100 peace activists from delivering food and medicine to Palestinians who have been under siege in the town of Qusra for 28 days.

Since August 9, Israeli settlers have besieged three Palestinian homes in the northern occupied West Bank village, while the Israeli army has also prevented the families from entering or leaving them, claiming the area is a "closed military zone".

"Day 28 of the blockade on Qusra. About 100 activists arrived to deliver supplies to the besieged families," the Israeli Peace Now movement said in a post on X.

"The army blocked us at first, claiming Qusra was a 'closed military zone.' Then let us in but on the way back detained us for 'violating a closed military zone'," it added.

Qusra Mayor Abdel Azim Wadi also told the state-run Turkish Anadolu news agency that the Israeli army has been "preventing the delivery of basic necessities to three families trapped on Mount Ras al-Ain".

US ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee told Israeli public broadcaster Kan on Friday that settler violence against Palestinians is "damaging the image of Israel as a nation and a people, warning that Israel "needs all the friends it can get" and "doesn't need more enemies". [This ultra-religious moron from the backward slavery state of Arkansas is more concerned about Israel's reputation than about the millions of persecuted and ethnically cleansed Palestinians. He himself is as much a religious barbarian as the terrorist settlers he is defending].

Around 750,000 Israeli settlers live in 156 illegal settlements and 360 settlement outposts in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and carry out attacks aimed at forcibly displacing Palestinians, according to Palestinian figures.

Oval-Office-Worthy Lullaby Tunes for Dozy Don. But Where's the Beef?

This is the man in charge of a country at war dreaming of lush green golf courses and a few blonde bimbos.

Asleep at the wheel of his own warmongering machine

(Sung to the tune of French Frère Jacques)
Are you sleeping, are you sleeping?
Dozy Don, Dozy Don?
Midterm bells are ringing, midterm bells are ringing,
Ding deng dong, ding deng dong.

Or better yet this English lullaby for the most hated and dumbest president in US history:

Nobody likes me, everybody hates me
I think I'll go trade stocks!
Big fat juicy ones
Eensie weensy squeensy ones
See the almighty dollar churn!
==============================================


Trump, 80, Struggles to Stay Awake in Weird Oval Office Display
Sarah-Jane Collins
Sat, September 5, 2026



President Donald Trump again appeared to nod in and out of sleep during a scheduled Oval Office event on Friday.

Sitting at the Resolute Desk surrounded by Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins and ranchers from around the country, including at least three men in cowboy hats, Trump visibly struggled to stay awake as Rollins discussed the two executive orders he had just signed.

Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins speaks before Trump signs executive orders related to beef processing and cattle ranchers. / KENT NISHIMURA / AFP via Getty Images. [The morons in cowboy hats were brought in as decoys in a desperate attempt to rally disgruntled angry farmers and ranchers whose businesses are falling apart because of the Great Moron's tariffs and his "beefy" gifts to the his equally moronic Argentinian buddy.]

With her body turned toward Trump, and her words directed at the geriatric president, Rollins appeared to be attempting to engage him so that he would not succumb to the delights of slumber.

Trump repeatedly blinked and let his eyes close for long periods.

Having already signed the two orders aimed at protecting and promoting American beef, Trump appeared uninterested in what was happening around him. At one point, he closed his eyes as Rollins was speaking directly to him.

This is not the first time Trump has struggled to stay awake during an official event.

During an hour-long event last month that gave the elderly president a chance to laud new agreements with drug companies, Trump closed his eyes for more than 20 seconds.

There have now been at least 22 occasions on which Trump has been caught appearing to snooze at public events.

August was a busy month for sleep slips. On Aug. 10, Trump slumped over in his chair as he struggled to keep his eyes open during an afternoon event to sign an executive order on childhood vaccines.

He also appeared to fall asleep repeatedly at the White House Correspondents' Dinner in July.

His frequent doziness has sparked concerns among observers over Trump's ailing health and how to keep the president awake and engaged during the day.


Not even the mention of foe Joe Biden did the trick in the Oval Office on Friday afternoon.

As Rollins brandished the charts Trump had asked her to present, she took a jab at the man Trump nicknamed "Sleepy Joe."

"We talk about 2023 just being a catas.. catas... catastrophic year for farmers and ranchers," Rollins said, stumbling over [or hesitating to utter] the word 'catastrophic'.

Donald Trump also denied falling asleep during events at the White House, with the 80-year-old insisting he is just resting his eyes. / Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

"That was the year that we began to import more food for the first time, under Joe Biden."

Trump's eyes briefly fluttered open at the mention, but then as Rollins pivoted to "again, freedom—if you can't feed yourself," the president's eyes were again closed.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
===============================================

Trump signs pro-rancher orders after backlash over beef imports
Pedro Oliveira Jr.
Fri, September 4, 2026 

Trump has been facing criticism from ranchers since he waived tariffs on imported beef to ease rising costs ahead of the midterms elections. 

Sept. 4 (UPI) -- [A sleepy] President Donald Trump on Friday signed two executive orders aimed at strengthening the country's ranching industry.

Trump has been facing criticism from beef producers since he waived tariffs on up to 300,000 metric tons of imported beef in an effort to ease rising costs as the nation heads into the midterm elections.

Trump's first executive order directs the Interior Department to study removing gray wolves from the Endangered Species Act list, allowing ranchers to kill them on their properties. Gray wolves are a major threat to herds in the West.

The second executive order would allow ranchers to process their beef and sell directly to consumers, instead of going through USDA inspections.

"People have been asking for this change for decades, and we're getting it done," Trump told reporters at the White House. "This is the largest-ever government effort to change all federal rules and regulations necessary to support our ranchers and our farmers."

Beef prices have risen this year due to drought and high feeding costs. The United States currently maintains the smallest herd since the 1950s.

The National Cattlemen's Beef Association said it was "disappointed" by Trump allowing more foreign beef to flow into an industry already under severe stress.

"While America's cattle producers share the goal of keeping groceries affordable for consumers, flooding the market with government-subsidized, below-market beef is not the way to rebuild the American cattle herd," the association previously said in a statement.

"Cattle markets have already turned sharply lower this morning, to the detriment of farmers and ranchers."

[updated] Trump Prepares to Screw up the Midterm Elections he Knows He will Lose


Read below in the CBS report through the harrowing voting requirements that Trump has imposed and that need to be implemented by the Post Office and by State administrations before this November.


It's nothing more than a ploy by the criminal Trump administration to undermine the elections by challenging millions and millions of ballots under false pretenses built into these requirements. Every one of the detailed requirements below is a trap that Trump will use to challenge and discard ballots on claims, requirements that State officials and the Post Office are saying are unimplementable.

Trump's attorneys are readying themselves for endless challenges to election results that do not go Trump's way. Remember his "find me 11,780 votes" to Georgia's Secretary of State in a telephone call in 2020?  Notice the precision in the numbers reflecting the exact margin that the idiot Trump needed to overturn the 2020 elections. A criminal but a fool nonetheless.

This is exactly what he's planning to do with every State election this coming November. His weapon? Those requirements that are impossible to meet, and when they are not met, Trump can argue that the ballots in question must be thrown out. He will do this in States he will lose, but not in States he will win. His criminality is of such stupid mediocrity.

All the challenges Trump filed for his loss in 2020 returned one verdict: No widespread fraud occurred. Trump says he is tightening voting rules because he keep falsely claiming that non-citizens vote, a xenophobic argument that makes his herd of racist peasant morons drool. Then, the criminal-minded moron assumes that non-citizens vote Democrat, which is not true. Immigrants generally are non-elitist, religious and conservative-minded and vote republican. Moreover, the fact is that non-citizen voting is vanishingly rare, accounting for less than 0.001% of all ballots cast in U.S. elections. Here are the stats per AI:

In the 2020 election, the Census identified over 24,000 non-citizen voter records out of nearly 160 million total ballots, a figure that includes data matching errors and does not confirm actual voting.

A 2017 Brennan Center for Justice study found only 30 suspected non-citizen votes across 23.5 million ballots in 42 jurisdictions (0.0001%), a suspicion that remains unfounded.

State audits consistently yield minimal results; for example, Utah’s 2025–2026 review of over 2 million registrants identified just 27 confirmed non-citizen registrations, while Nevada’s Department of Homeland Security confirmed only 185 non-citizens on its rolls after initially claiming thousands. And these are "registered" but not actual "voting" individuals whose names and addresses are often mixed up with citizens names and addresses.


===============================================


Election officials raise alarm over mail voting rules: "Virtually impossible"
Melissa Quinn
Updated Fri, September 4, 2026




Washington — As legal battles over the U.S. Postal Service's new regulations for mail ballots move forward, state and local election officials are raising concerns about the logistical hurdles they will have to surmount to implement the requirements just weeks before the November elections.

Mail ballots will go out to voters in several states in mid-September — and by Friday in one — leaving election officials with little time to make the changes that the Postal Service is calling for, if the rule is allowed to take effect. In Wisconsin, clerks in two municipalities have already sent out ballots, since state law allows them to do so as soon as the results of the primaries are certified.

The Trump administration has said the rule imposes "modest informational requirements" on states and localities, and "should not prevent a single voter from voting by mail."

But numerous top election officials are warning that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to satisfy the new requirements, saying they would impose significant financial costs and strain resources.

"The bottom line is that it is effectively impossible for these requirements to be implemented in advance of 2026 without causing mass disenfranchisement and ballot delays," Anna Baldwin, director of voting rights litigation at the Campaign Legal Center, told CBS News. "There are 10,000 local jurisdictions in the country that administer elections. When we think about this as a rule imposing requirements on the states, that's true. But more importantly, it's a rule that imposes requirements on every jurisdiction that actually does the mechanics of absentee balloting."

The states' concerns over the new processes have been detailed in remarkable court filings in the ongoing legal battle. One official in New York said that adding voters to a new portal would require more than 10 years' worth of cumulative work by state and local employees. Another from California said that based on Postal Service estimates, scanning individual ballots for every voter in the state would take roughly 43 years, underscoring the huge logistical hurdles that states are facing.

What the new rule does

The new rule was published by the Postal Service on Aug. 21. A federal judge overseeing a lawsuit brought by 24 states led by Democrats and the District of Columbia has temporarily barred the agency from implementing key aspects of the measure for the Nov. 3 elections. The judge, Indira Talwani, is considering whether to grant the states longer-term relief.

But while Talwani weighs that request, the Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court to intervene and allow the Postal Service to enforce the new regulations just weeks ahead of the midterms.

Under the rule, states must include specific design elements on mail ballot envelopes, including barcodes that are unique to each voter. State or local election officials must also submit certain voter information into an online portal, including their names, addresses and barcodes. Those voters will be enrolled with the Postal Service and included on state-specific "Mail-In and Absentee Participation Lists."

The rule requires postal workers to review and verify ballot mail being sent to voters by states and localities. Any ballot mailings that don't comply with the requirements "will not be accepted and will be returned" to the election offices, the Postal Service said.

The court submissions from election officials highlight not only the difficulties with adhering to the Postal Service's new regulations, but also the varying procedures and rules that govern each state's elections, a reflection of the Constitution's command that states are responsible for setting the "times, places and manner" of elections.

"Deciding whether to have a mail voting program, when to say everybody's eligible to receive a mail ballot or only some people who have an absentee excuse who are sick or out of the jurisdiction, that is the variability that states have defined and it's their power to do that under the Constitution," Baldwin said. "The idea is that state governments get to create those powers and those laws because they're in touch with their voters and they're responsive to their constituents."

Separate from the concerns of election officials, a whistleblower has warned of "potentially catastrophic problems" with the Postal Service's system. The agency's new mail ballot portal is "untested" and its development "rushed," the whistleblower said in a disclosure provided to Congress. The anonymous official also warned that the Postal Service's new verification process could keep significant numbers of mail ballots from being delivered.

Paper shortages and already-printed envelopes

In declarations submitted to the federal court in Boston, numerous election officials from different states said that in order to adhere to the ballot design requirements, they would have to scrap envelopes that have already been paid for and printed.

Scott Nago, Hawaii's chief election officer, said in a filing that the state would have to throw out the envelopes used by voters to return their ballots, since they were printed with a static barcode for each of its four county clerks. Those already-ordered return envelopes cost the state $79,000, Nago said.

He also warned that "it may not be possible to get new orders of [those] envelopes delivered to Hawaii from the continent on such short notice."

In Colorado, which expects to mail more than 4 million ballots to voters for the upcoming election, two of its vendors have said that they would have to get rid of a combined 1.3 million already-printed ballot return envelopes because they don't contain individualized barcodes.

Reprinting those envelopes "would impose significant costs on Colorado counties and may not even be possible depending on how widespread an issue this is and whether the vendors can procure sufficient paper," Hilary Rudy, the deputy state elections director, said in a filing.

Vendors for Washington state have also poured cold water on their ability to reprint ballot envelopes to meet the Postal Service's design rules. The state anticipates sending ballots to 5.1 million voters for the upcoming election. But one of three vendors used by Washington counties to print election materials indicated it couldn't reprint ballot envelopes after Aug. 27, while a second indicated it didn't have the capacity to print new envelopes at all, Director of Elections Stuart Holmes said.

Even still, the state estimates reprinting all ballot envelopes would cost $1.9 million.

"This would be catastrophic for Washington elections because Washington is an entirely vote-by-mail state and the State no longer has the infrastructure to accommodate a last-minute reversion to in-person voting," Holmes said.

Potential paper issues are also plaguing Oregon's ability to reprint envelopes.

The state's vendors "do not have a stockpile of paper," said Oregon Elections Director Dena Dawson. "Post-pandemic paper supply shortages mean that paper suppliers may not be able to timely supply our vendors with the paper they need" to provide new envelopes.

But even adding the unique, voter-specific barcodes required on ballot envelopes presents issues for states and municipalities, election officials said.

In Massachusetts, state law does not require envelopes to include the specific barcodes mandated by the Postal Service, so its 351 municipalities would have to obtain new computer software to create and apply the codes. Doing so would be a costly endeavor for some of Massachusetts' smaller municipalities who don't mail large numbers of ballots to voters, said Michelle Tassinari, who leads Massachusetts' elections division.

"To require these municipalities to purchase equipment capable of applying an Intelligent Mail barcode would likely deplete their municipal budgets," she said in a filing.

In Colorado, 14 of its 64 counties do not use the barcodes required by the Postal Service on ballot mail, and most of its counties do not include those markings on return envelopes.

Adopting the unique barcodes depends in part on population size, Rudy, the deputy state elections director said: 71% of the counties that do not use the barcodes have a population of less than 10,000 active registered voters.

"These counties typically employ a single individual to administer elections and often manually print ballots, stuff envelopes, and mail ballots by hand," she wrote. "These counties likely would be unable to comply with the IMb requirement, and by extension, Colorado's requirement that they mail a ballot to every active voter."

In Maryland, voters can opt to access their ballot online through a secure email link, and the state expects roughly 72,000 ballots will be delivered by email and returned through the mail. Those voters either print the return envelope or hand address it using a state-provided template. But these return envelopes don't have unique barcodes, and the Maryland State Board of Elections "has not identified a technical or manual way to do this," said Melissia Dorsey, the state's assistant deputy administrator for election policy.

"As a result, this rule potentially disenfranchises all mail-in voters who are signed up to receive mail-in ballots via secure email link," she said in a declaration.

The mail ballot portal

The Postal Service's new regulations require state or local elections officials to submit specific data to the "Federal Ballot Mail Portal" before mail ballots can be sent to voters. Initial lists of voters who will receive mail ballots must be entered at least 30 days before the election, though states can add, change or remove data from the portal to account for new voters, new requests for mail ballots or other changes.

But state officials warned that the process of enrolling their voters into the portal will be time intensive.

Don Millis, a Republican who chairs the Wisconsin Election Commission, said the Postal Service has not issued instructions on how to use the portal or how to authorize users. He warned in a filing that it would be "virtually impossible" to ensure that each mail voter in Wisconsin is enrolled through the portal.

"As a practical matter it's not feasible given the decentralized nature of this. It's going to be a very challenging environment if the stay is lifted," he told CBS News, referring to the judge's order temporarily blocking the rule.

Wisconsin's elections are administered by 1,850 municipal clerks, and more than 2,500 employees can make changes to voter records on the state's voter registration system, he said. As a result, those 2,500 workers would need to be trained on how to use the portal, be granted access to it and then enter voters' data before Sept. 17, when clerks are required under state law to send out mail ballots.

"I think it's good to do what you can to prevent noncitizens from voting, but I think many people at the national level have this incorrect view of mail-in ballots," he said. "It's not the first time that Republicans at the national level have shot themselves in the foot."

New York's co-executive director of the state Board of Elections, Kristen Zebrowski Stavisky, estimated that it will take roughly an additional minute per voter to include them on the Postal Service's list and address any issues. Across the state's 58 local boards of elections, she said that amounts to 20,000 additional hours of effort, or 533 work weeks.

Paul Linnell, Minnesota's elections director, said it will take roughly 8,500 hours for elections staff to become authorized users of the portal and enroll voters. Linnell said barcode information is not included in the state's voter registration system and will need to be added manually to the new federal portal.

"Even assuming the data verification, entry, and submission process takes only 1 minute per voter, this adds up to a significant amount of staff time that must be diverted from other critical activities," he said.

On its end, the Postal Service has estimated it should take mail workers less than a minute to scan a ballot's barcode, so the verification process for large mailings should take "no more than a few hours."

But the states said that under that time frame, it would take the Postal Service 43 years to scan mail ballots from all of California's 23 million registered voters, if they all cast their ballots by mail. For the 2024 general election, 16 million mail ballots were cast, according to data from the secretary of state.
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Federal judge extends block on new USPS mail ballot rules
DEVIN DWYER
Sat, September 5, 2026




The federal judge handling the legal battle over new U.S. Postal Service mail ballot rules extended her block of the rules for the November midterm elections in an order issued on Friday, again finding them likely unlawful.

Judge Indira Talwani's temporary order, which had been set to expire on Sept. 10, is now in place indefinitely unless a higher court allows the Trump administration to put the rules into effect.

The judge found that immediate implementation of the rules this close to the November election, prompted by President Donald Trump's executive order aimed at tightening access to mail ballots, "threatens disenfranchisement of millions of United States citizens who seek to vote by mail."

Talwani concluded that the rules, which mandate nationwide mail ballot design and review requirements and state submission of a voter information database to USPS, are "unconstitutional where it intrudes not only on Congress's Elections Clause powers but also that power left to the States."

The decision ups the ante for the U.S. Supreme Court, which had already been asked to weigh in on Talwani's preliminary injunction. A decision is expected as soon as next week.

Time is of the essence since some states have already begun mailing ballots for the fall election.

Hannah Beier/Reuters, FILE - PHOTO: A mail-in ballot, during the Pennsylvania primary election, is displayed in Philadelphia, May 19, 2026.

Trump, who has pushed unfounded claims of widespread mail ballot fraud, wants states to report to USPS basic voter information, such as a voter's name and home address, attached to a unique barcode on every mail-in ballot distributed. Postal workers would then only deliver ballots addressed to voters who appear on the state-provided list.

Following the publication of the regulations last month, dozens of Democratic state attorneys general sued the Trump administration after an earlier lawsuit was blocked by the Supreme Court, which said at the time that the challenge was premature since the regulations hadn't been finalized.

Judge Talwani wrote in her opinion Friday that the dispute was now ripe for judicial intervention. "Nothing is hypothetical," she said of the alleged harm to states, voters and voter advocacy groups ahead of the November election.

In its latest appeal to the justices, the Trump administration insisted the rules impose only "modest" ballot design and review requirements on states and that a requirement to submit name, address, and barcode information of intended recipients is not onerous or intrusive.

The states challenging the USPS rule have until Tuesday, Sept. 8, at 10 a.m. to formally respond before the Supreme Court makes a decision.

The states and voter advocacy groups have argued that the new USPS regulations are an attempt by the Trump administration to federalize elections, which are historically and constitutionally managed by each state, and make it harder to vote by mail for everyday citizens.
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Legal veterans lead fightback against Trump’s ‘full-out assault on democracy’
Peter Stone in Washington
Mon, September 7, 2026 

A cluster of advocacy groups that boast veteran lawyers, voting experts and ex-judges have expanded legal challenges to Donald Trump's authoritarian executive orders on voting and other presidential actions they see as a "war" on the rule of law in the US.

Heavy legal opposition to Trump's two executive orders on elections to curb voting rights and supplant the authority of states on election matters has come from the Democracy Defenders Fund, the Campaign Legal Center, the American Civil Liberties Union and kindred groups.

These legal outfits and like-minded allies have won key lawsuits on election issues, plus litigation thwarting Trump's moves to end birthright citizenship and a $1.8bn slush fund that could have paid money to allies including January 6 rioters he deemed were unjustly charged.

Since Trump returned to power, for instance, Democracy Defenders Fund and the Campaign Legal Center have jointly filed lawsuits against Trump's 2025 and 2026 executive orders on voting, challenging their constitutionality to set new voting rules that by law are run by the states.

Key legal briefs they filed together include an August one on behalf of several voting rights groups and local officials in two states to block Trump's March 2026 executive order that would restrict voting by mail and authorize the US Postal Service to implement rules to that end.

Other groups that have accelerated their legal challenges to Trump's moves to thwart voting rights and expand his executive powers in other ways, include the Brennan Center for Justice, Democracy Forward, the Democratic Attorneys General Association and the Washington Litigation Group.

Last month, for instance, 24 Democratic attorney generals and other plaintiffs filed suit to block USPS from moving forward with rules to curb mail voting and in late August won a temporary 14-day restraining order from federal judge Indira Talwani in Massachusetts.

In response, the DoJ's solicitor general John Sauer on Thursday appealed to the supreme court to lift the injunction, arguing in heated words that the freeze would create "serious, irreparable harm on the federal government, the states themselves, and the voting public".

On 4 September Talwani made her injunction permanent, writing that implementing Trump's order so close to the election "threatens disenfranchisement of millions of United States citizens who seek to vote by mail." She also stressed that "the record includes no evidence relating to fraudulent mail voting to support the rushed implementation."

Sauer on 6 September responded with another emergency appeal to the high court urging it permit the new USPS rules to go into effect, claiming that it "does not seize control of states' administration of elections — it simply imposes reasonable preparation requirements for certain election-related mail."

In a related twist, a detailed whistleblower complaint that Democratic senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut released last week alleged that the USPS has been proceeding with a "secretive, rushed" effort to implement Trump's order that could lead to "catastrophic failure" with this year's mail-in voting.

About 50 million Americans, the majority of whom are Democrats, vote by mail, according to reports.

With the elections about two months away, the legal groups are stepping up efforts to thwart "self-serving attempts to take over the midterms", said a former DoJ lawyer, which experts fear may create chaos and disenfranchise millions of voters.

Anna Baldwin, director of voting rights litigation at the Campaign Legal Center, told the Guardian: "The CLC and the DDF have worked closely together on two ongoing lawsuits challenging the president's unlawful voting executive orders that attempt to dictate election rules. We've teamed up in the supreme court on a brief filed by former state and federal judges, including noted conservative judges, that emphasized just how unlawful and dangerous the president's efforts to dictate election rules are."

Baldwin, who spent 14 years in the justice department's civil rights division, said the CLC and the DDF have also "worked together in federal cases filed in Oregon and California to make sure that the DoJ isn't able to seize voters' sensitive data by making false claims about non-citizen voting. In cases around the country, the Campaign Legal Center is pushing back on the DoJ's lawless efforts to vacuum up and aggregate sensitive data to create a national voter file of some sort."

Further, former ambassador Norm Eisen, the executive chair of the Democracy Defenders Fund, which he co-founded in 2023, told the Guardian that since its inception the DDF has been involved in more than 300 legal cases and matters in three primary areas: elections, the rule of law and anti-corruption.

Eisen said the group, whose board boasts former federal judge and conservative stalwart J Michael Luttig and liberal-leaning ex-federal judge Nancy Gertner, likes to work in conjunction on cases with other ideologically diverse and nonpartisan groups like the CLC and the WLG because "they both have strong bipartisan credibility. It's a big-tent approach we've taken with our election work."

Eisen said Luttig and Gertner were instrumental in helping recruit dozens of former judges with bipartisan credentials to file amicus briefs on multiple matters including an August one to the supreme court opposing Trump's 2026 executive order to curb mail voting.

For its part, the WLG this summer hired about half a dozen new lawyers to handle election-related litigation. "As the midterms approach with growing concerns about potential federal interference in elections, we've brought on more attorneys to be even more prepared to litigate sensitive matters under acute time pressure," said James Pearce, a principal with the WLG.

Elsewhere, Sophia Lin Lakin, who leads the ACLU Voting Rights Project, said the group had been "pushing back" on administration efforts to seize personal voting data from states, and said the ACLU has been involved in 26 of 30 legal challenges to the administration on the issue. To date, the administration has lost 23 cases where rulings have been made.

Critics say Trump, the DoJ, the USPS and the Department of Homeland Security seem to be laying the groundwork for further attacks on the nation's election rules, citing Trump's false claims about election fraud and his radical plans to change voting rules.

In July in a televised speech, Trump falsely portrayed the nation's voting system as riddled with fraud and condemned voting by mail and non-citizen voting. "Mail-in ballots are inherently corrupt," Trump claimed without evidence, even though he voted twice by mail this year.

Trump, who continues to blame voting fraud for his 2020 loss to Joe Biden, also charged that non-citizen voting, which is illegal and historically minuscule, poses a "crisis of election security". Trump's fixation on noncitizen voting is belied by a database from the rightwing Heritage Foundation that only cites 100 cases over a quarter-century.

But according to documents reviewed by the New York Times, hundreds of DHS agents have been engaged in a hunt to find noncitizens among registered voters. The chief of the DHS has said ICE agents could be sent to polling places "if there is a threat to that polling place or we're serving a warrant".

The DoJ has helped to amplify Trump's bogus election claims with legal threats and actions.

In July, Harmeet Dhillon, who runs the department's civil rights division, wrote to officials in 50 states warning that "any election officer, including the chief election officer of the state, who knowingly retains noncitizens on the state's [voter list] or facilitates noncitizens in receiving and casting ballots could be subject to criminal liability".

In August, the DoJ announced plans to send a larger-than-usual contingent of 1,000 lawyers to monitor voting nationwide, raising concerns that such large efforts could lead to voter intimidation.

And in a harbinger of coming legal fights, Trump announced on his Truth Social platform last month that the DoJ's Ed Martin, a key election denialist in charge of pardons, was leaving to handle election-related litigation.

Former DoJ lawyers say administration threats to voting rights make opposition from legal advocates crucial.

Stacey Young, a lawyer who left the department at the start of 2025 after 18 years to found Justice Connection, a group of more than 3,000 ex-DoJ lawyers and other alumni, denounced Trump's moves "to interfere" with elections.

"The constitution makes clear that the president has no authority over the administration of our elections, but that hasn't stopped this president, or those he put in power at the justice department, from trying to interfere," Young said in a statement. "We're taking these threats seriously and leveraging our collective strengths to protect election integrity, which is key to maintaining a functioning democracy."

Justice Connection is working with experts in its alumni network to engage with the media, Congress and the public to highlight the justice department's traditional role in election security and ensuring compliance with federal voting laws.

Other DoJ alumni agree that opposition to Trump's election agenda is critical.

"These organizations are doing critical work in protecting the ability of people to vote and make their voices heard – a cornerstone of democracy," said Michael Bromwich, a former DoJ inspector general. "The full-out assault on democracy must be addressed through the courts because Congress has proven itself unwilling and unable to check the undemocratic steps taken by the administration."

Barbara McQuade, a former US attorney for eastern Michigan who now teaches law at the University of Michigan, said: "Large law firms sent armies of young attorneys to our nation's airports to represent individuals caught up in Trump's travel ban. That is not happening any more because of the 'deals' they negotiated with the Trump administration in his second term to support his pet causes.

"Thank goodness for groups like the Democracy Defenders Fund, which are attracting top legal talent and challenging some of Trump's lawless activities. Their work is protecting the rights of all Americans."

Further, Nick Brown, Washington state's attorney general, who chairs an election protection group for the Democratic Attorneys General Association, said it has teamed up with some legal advocacy groups such as the Brennan Center, States United and the DDF to hold "strategy sessions" to prepare for potential disruptive moves by the Trump administration in the November elections.

Brown also attacked the administration's appeal to the supreme court to move forward with Trump's executive order on voting by mail, despite Judge Talwani's strong concerns and Daga's litigation against it.

He said: "As the court said, states' compliance with this illegal order would be 'practically impossible' before the November elections given the unprecedented demands it would put on state and local elections officials. The chaos that would cause is exactly what Trump wants. That's why we continue to fight for a fair and properly administered election."

Baldwin too raised strong concerns about the DoJ's push to get the supreme court to issue a ruling that would expedite Trump's executive order on voting by mail.

She said: "The DoJ's slapdash effort at getting the supreme court's blessing to turn the USPS into a gatekeeper for mail would be a farce, if it didn't put our fundamental right to vote in the crosshairs. Given the importance of what is at stake, the DoJ's continued efforts are nothing more than an attempt to foist chaos on the electoral process. But they will fail."

Other lawyers engaged in key election legal battles and other litigation voice optimism they will prevail.

Tianna Mays, the legal director of the DDF, said: "The Trump administration has declared war on the rule of law, yet our democratic guardrails are still holding. We refuse to stand by idly while this administration flouts the constitution and attempts to eviscerate our institutions."

Under Trump, the $100 Bill Has Become the New $20 Bill: Something is Wrong!

... Meanwhile the criminal idiot is having his disgusting face etched on a new $1 coin.

His skyrocketing inflation aside, the rich jerk deregulated the economy and deported all the migrant workers, which means companies are now under less pressure to produce quality products and are cutting corners and sacrificing quality, leading to numerous recalls of ill-made, low quality food items.

That is what happens under a conservative, crude capitalist economic system: It's the law of the jungle, and you are on your own to survive in a dog-eat-dog Darwinian, but somehow "Christian", American world.

Is it time to tell the morons who elected this billionaire thief that they made a huge mistake? All the right-wing drivel about liberty and less government is a nothing but a mask to protect chaos, anarchy, corruption, bad management, lower standards and getting Trump's billionaire buddies off the hook .... You can choose to believe it, but that is why your $100 bill is now the new $20 and why Americans are now lining up at food pantries, buying items past their expiration dates... Trump is causing the pauperization of those imbeciles who voted for him believing his campaign lies.
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'That's all I got': $95 grocery haul has US shoppers comparing receipts
Kim LaCapria
Fri, September 4, 2026


Photo Credit: iStock

A TikTok video about a modest grocery haul with a staggering $96 receipt struck a nerve with shoppers running into the same problem at checkout: fewer items, higher totals, and a growing sense that something is fundamentally wrong.

For many viewers, the clip was less about one person's grocery trip and more about what it now costs to buy basic food and household essentials.

On TikTok, user Professor Noir (@professornoir007) described a scenario that most American shoppers know well: coming home with a small batch of groceries totaling $95.95.

"That's it. That's all I got today," the user stated, gesturing to a scant few items in their cart.

"$95.95, it's all too expensive," he added. Users made it clear the frustration was near-universal.

Rather than treating the bill as something that could be solved by shopping less, the creator argued that advice to simply "cut back" ignored the reality of buying necessities.

"You're telling me on basic food goods, the healthy food goods, cooking at home food goods, I got, I have to somehow cut back on that," he remarked.

The complaint also extended to criticism of elected officials, with the creator citing comments by Mike Johnson, Speaker of the House of Representatives, about congressional pay as an example of a broader disconnect.

"It's [a] complete, complete sign of how out of touch some of the older people and the politicians really are," the creator lamented.

The comment section turned into a comparison of grocery costs among households, with viewers sharing their own totals.

"I'm making my meal plan and doing my groceries list right now. Adding it all up I'm at $207 right now and that's just for this week," one commenter wrote.

"I tell people all the time $100 is the new $20," another replied.

More background

Part of the haul, the creator explained, included yogurt for a family member with dietary restrictions, along with other items many shoppers would consider basic essentials.

Price was not the only concern raised in the video.

The creator also talked about eggs, fresh produce, and meat as examples of staples that are now not just far too costly but also subject to constant food safety warnings and recalls — a frustration that commenters echoed.

"Cutting back in this economy? Half the stuff in the grocery stores is getting recalled by the day," a commenter griped.

What can be done?

At the individual level, there is no easy fix for grocery inflation, but a few strategies may help.

Comparing unit prices rather than shelf prices, planning meals around flexible staples, and freezing extras before they spoil can help stretch a budget a bit further.

For households managing special diets, it may also help to prioritize a short list of must-have items first and then build around them with lower-cost basics.

Community resources such as food pantries, mutual-aid groups, school meal programs, and benefits like SNAP or WIC can also make a meaningful difference for families who qualify.

One follower captured the mood in the comments section and the country.

"Crazy how it add up. The math don't be mathing." The creator ended the video on a similar note.

"It's getting wild and, um, I don't know where we go from here," he admitted.

Where can I learn more?

The frustration in the comments exemplified a broader scramble to afford grocery bills, whether that means using discount apps or rethinking which staples were worth the cost.

The stories below show how shoppers are scrutinizing every purchase when checkout totals feel wildly out of line with what's in the cart.

• Shoppers using Flashfood are finding surprisingly cheap grocery deals on food nearing its sell-by date.

• In Canada, some shoppers say the amount of red meat they can afford keeps shrinking.

• Too Good To Go users can save even more money when surplus bags appear.

• At Aldi, plastic-wrapped peppers prompted shoppers to ask what they were paying for.

That helps explain why so many households feel squeezed, even when they plan carefully and shop with a list.

It also underscores the trade-offs people are making just to keep basic groceries within reach.

Jesus-Saved Drunkard Womanizer Def Secy Hegseth: Inept, Blithering Incompetence

Trump often complains that "smart people don't like me", which is an admission of his own mediocrity and which explains why he surrounds himself with morons whose Moron IQ is always below his: Talk show hosts, real estate crooks as foreign envoys, nepo appointments, former crooked business partners, etc. 

For example, Mossad Boulos, Trump's daughter's Tiffany's father-in-law is a typical suspiciously corrupt Lebanese businessman who used to run a trucking company in Nigeria: Trump appointed him, in an electioneering bread crumb thrown to Lebanese and Arab-American voters, as his Senior Advisor on Arab and Middle Eastern Affairs. Yet Boulos is like a ghost adviser, nowhere to be seen dealing with Iran and the raging wars in the Middle East. Why is that? Because he is comfortably incompetent for Trump on foreign policy.
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Why Trump’s Hegseth Problem Exposes His Fatal Flaw: Author
Erkki Forster
Fri, September 4, 2026

Pete Hegseth's Pentagon train wreck exposes one of Donald Trump's most self-destructive impulses, the president's biographer says.

Hegseth, the 46-year-old Fox News host-turned-defense secretary, has transformed the Pentagon into a pressure cooker of leak crackdowns and culture war crusades while steering the nation deeper into Trump's quagmire war with Iran.

After Hegseth, who wants everyone to call him "Secretary of War," forced out Army Secretary Dan Driscoll in his latest ego-driven overhaul of top Pentagon leadership last week, even a Republican senator called on Trump to fire him.

“Pete Hegseth is in this job because Donald Trump is intimidated by competence,” Michael Wolff says. / Evelyn Hockstein / REUTERS 

"I have never witnessed more inept management of the brave men and women who serve our country," North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis fumed on X. "He is intimidated by competence and retreats to ginning up culture wars instead of soberly attending to the vital work of our national defense and the health and well-being of our fighting force."

Speaking on the Inside Trump's Head podcast, Trump biographer Michael Wolff said, "This is not a secret."

"Pete Hegseth is a... blithering incompetent... yes-man, a suck-up, a man who... knows nothing, and no logic would say he would know enough to run the military-industrial complex," the author told co-host Joanna Coles.

Hegseth was threatened by Driscoll’s presence in the Pentagon and paranoid about his own status within the administration, according to a report. / Kevin Lamarque / REUTERS

"His primary qualification is that he was... a weekend television co-host," he continued. "So what in the name of God would he know about running... the United States military... at a moment... in which we are in the middle of a, basically, a revolution in terms of munitions, logistics, and supply."

Wolff, who has written four best-selling tell-alls on Trump, noted that Tillis' characterization of Hegseth as being "intimidated by competence" ought to be "extended" to the 80-year-old president himself.

"Pete Hegseth is in this job because Donald Trump is intimidated by competence," he said.

"It's not just that he doesn't want to be bossed around by people; it's that he can't deal with people who know things because—for the obvious reason—because he doesn't know things."

Wolff pointed to Trump's notoriously high turnover during his first term, when the president repeatedly butted heads with his own officials, including James Mattis, who resigned in 2019 after frequently clashing with Trump and amid public attacks from the president.

"Trump came to loathe him... because Mattis... had a high degree of expertise and the willingness to correct Donald Trump. No, that's wrong, he would say," Wolff recounted.

He argued that the insecurity that drives Trump to bristle at expertise has found a mirror in Hegseth, who was reportedly threatened by Driscoll's presence in the Pentagon and paranoid about his own status within the administration.

The Army secretary's departure comes soon after The Washington Post reported that several top generals have expressed concerns about continuing military action in Iran and issued "non-concurs" to Hegseth's orders.

"This is a problem in almost any... executive capacity unless you have a temperament in which you can listen to advice, in which you appreciate advice, in which you get along with people who report to you, which neither of these guys do," Wolff said of the commander-in-chief and his defense secretary.

When reached for comment, White House spokesperson Anna Kelly told the Daily Beast, "After Joe Biden's Pentagon prioritized DEI and woke ideology, President Trump and Secretary Hegseth quickly reversed course and restored a Department of War that is focused on readiness, lethality, and supporting our warfighters. The President has complete trust in Secretary Hegseth, who is doing an incredible job leading the Pentagon. The results of Operations Midnight Hammer, Absolute Resolve, Southern Spear, and Epic Fury speak for themselves."

The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Thursday, September 3, 2026

Want Proof of American Religious Dumbness? Listen to JD Vance

JD Vance has changed his religion several times, including going through an "atheist" phase. This fact alone reveals the absolute mediocrity of America's intellectual landscape. Religion for Americans is more of a compulsory weekend hobby that changes with the seasons but is always there. Americans change their religions like they change their underwear. I've met many such illuminated individuals who could not conceive of their existence if it lacked membership in a cult. So, many spend their lives jumping from one cult to another, idiotically hoping that the next cult and its leader or hero will somehow bring them the happiness they seek. 

The dunce JD Vance is the prototypical American in this endless and futile search for someone or something to help them find solace from the knowledge of our mortality and the purposelessness of our existence. The real world in America, along with its multitudes of so-called "faiths" and cultures, all intertwined and converging on the sordid concept of money as the foundation of happiness, is not sufficient to inculcate in these ignorant peasant-stock immigrants the fact that one carries one's happiness inside oneself, regardless of wealth and regardless of which swindler prophet is promising them happiness. 

Thus, once in a very frequent while, some religious or political imbecile, usually from the primitive southern states, decides to gain some fame and perhaps some money by declaring that God spoke to him and told him that the end of the world is near. 

The fact is that the "world" will never end. The world exits, has always existed, and will always exist. What I think will happen instead is that we, the human species, will cease to exist at some point. Over the course of several billions of years, life on earth has gone through many extinctions, and 99% of all species that have ever existed have vanished, and that is what will continue to occur. 

One day in the very distant future, whatever living organisms will be dominating earth will never know that there were humans before, just as dinosaurs who dominated earth long ago could not know that humans will replace them dozens of billion years later. Maybe our successors will find our fossilized remains and wonder. But our existence as a human species is nothing but a split-second in the history of life. We are not made, either as individuals or as a species, to last forever. 

Therefore, idiotic preachers who proclaim the end of the world will only fool those among us who are already fools, tricked by religious garbage from the Stone Age into believing religious magic. Religions have done nothing to change our human condition: We simply mask our innate nature under so-called "culture" and traditions, which include religions, because our cerebral cortex forces us to reject our mortality by inventing "solutions" to it: fame, dreams of being great, immortality, the afterlife, the transmutation of our souls into other forms of life... all of it is pure unadulterated bullshit that sedates us into imagining our non-existent immortality.

We are just like the Egyptian pharaohs who embarked on their journey to the afterlife with material objects. Now, we still embark on that same journey with promises of hovering like albatrosses somewhere above the clouds in a mythical place called heaven, or else be dispatched deep beneath the earth's crust to burn forever - a sort of eternal inexhaustible fuel that would make Donald Dumb more billions if he sends his 82nd airborne division to seize it. 

If the moron and Yale-DEI-admitted JD Vance is "speculating" that the Anti-Christ is walking among us, he should not be shocked. He is the Vice-President of the Anti-Christ himself. I think Vance would be more palatable if he had remained an atheist. His constant religious metamorphoses do cast serious doubt on his smarts and his sincerity.

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Recent remarks by US Vice-President JD Vance about the Antichrist and "the end times" are a "very, very common belief", one of his friends says.

Vance recently mused on his religious views while responding to a question on a Christian podcast. He said he would "not [be] shocked if the Antichrist was walking among us" and speculated on whether the end of the world was nigh.

His friend Rod Dreher, a conservative writer, rejected any suggestion that the comments would harm the vice-president. He told the BBC's Today programme: "Most Americans who are inclined to vote Republican already believe this stuff."

In his podcast comments, Vance also clarified that such thoughts did not preoccupy him.

In Christianity, the "end times" phrase refers to theories about what will happen at the end of the world. Many churches believe God has a divine plan for the end of everything.

Meanwhile, the Antichrist is seen as the enemy of God who appears during the final phase of the world's existence and takes it over.

Vance, who became a Catholic as an adult, reflected on these topics during a recent podcast discussion with Bryce Crawford, a US Christian podcaster.

"Do I think that we're in the end times? I don't know," he said in response to a Crawford question on the subject. "And I think that it's probably bad for me spiritually to focus too much on it, because there are, like, things you gotta do.

"I gotta be good to my wife. I gotta be good to my kids. I have to be as good of a leader as I can for the United States of America."

The vice-president continued by saying: "I think that there are, like, things about the world that make me feel, like, not shocked if the Antichrist was walking among us."

But Vance reiterated that he was preoccupied with being vice-president, explaining: "What I'm trying to focus on is doing as much of God's work as possible right now."

Reacting to Vance's comments about the Antichrist, Dreher said: "This might sound bonkers to someone who is outside the Christian religion, but it is a very, very common belief within Christianity."

He said his friend was simply reflecting that the world appeared to be going "crazy" through the rapid development of AI and ongoing conflicts.

Dreher, who was present when Vance was received into the Catholic Church, said Ronald Reagan had made similar comments when he was the US president, and that this was seen as "perfectly normal" by his voters.

Vance converted to Catholicism in 2019, then in his mid-30s, and has described how the Church resonated with his family and social values and his conservative politics.

Since becoming vice-president, he has occasionally tangled with Pope Leo and his papal predecessor Francis, on issues including the Trump administration's immigration policy.

Vance is due to appear behind the lectern on Thursday afternoon to deliver the first White House press briefing since the departure of Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt.