VIDEO OF THE DAY: Trump makes humiliating mistake in late-night meltdown
Brian Tyler Cohen rips President Trump for a ridiculous tirade accusing the Biden administration of trying to rig the 2020 election...while Trump was still president, in an administration full of his hand-picked goons. Oops!
Take Action: Demand the GOP stop covering for Trump and release the Epstein files!
Trump is actually failing fast—and the rabid MAGA bigwigs know it
Virginia Heffernan, The New Republic: "Trump, like other autocrats, most fears democracy. It’s that anxiety that puts torque on everything he does. Indeed, this presidential phobia makes headlines every day. Trump spends so much time and treasure prosecuting his fear of democracy—trying to crush dissent, flex as a massively incontinent monarch, fix elections, and disable rivals, including anyone who might open the Epstein files—that he neglects his stated goals. He hasn’t, after all, occupied Canada or Greenland. He hasn’t even wrapped Project 2025. Which brings us to Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget and the architect of Project 2025, the administration’s blueprint for dismantling the federal government. As keeper of the administration’s Christian nationalist agenda, Vought, whom the media reliably describes as a 'wrecking ball,' preens like he’s Blue Öyster Cult in 1975. But he’s afraid. It’s Q4, and 2025 was supposed to be his year. What he fears most is delays. As the year has worn on, Trump’s neurotic preoccupations have slowed Vought’s agenda. Having kicked off the shutdown vowing at last to slash jobs with abandon, Vought has gotten bogged down once again by judges who keep halting the layoffs in response to union lawsuits. Vought has also been busy catering to the big-spending president who insists Vought scramble to find funding for his pet projects, including the popular nutrition program WIC, which would hurt Trump politically if it were cut. All of this maneuvering is so unconstitutional and demanding for Vought that it’s distracting from—and working against—his efforts to end programs like WIC as too woke. Into the vacuum has indeed poured MAGA’s opposition. The delays in Vought’s project have opened up avenues of attack by the administration’s opponents, whose numbers are now huge: Democrats, progressives, mass mobilizations of protesters, and rank-and-file Trump disapprovers, meaning at least 50 percent of us. More surprisingly, GOP showfolk are now gunning for the administration. Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene won’t stop hammering the Republican Party. On Tuesday, Asawin Suebsaeng reported in Zeteo that, last year, Trump talked obsessively about getting Vought laid at Mar-a-Lago. According to Suebsaeng’s source, 'Trump spoke to Vought … about the ‘gorgeous’ and ‘beautiful ladies’ who roam Trump’s club, Mar-a-Lago, so often that it ‘weirded out’ some of his advisers.' So Vought, the Christian nationalist, was entertaining sex-coaching by the onetime best friend of Jeffrey Epstein? These would-be revolutionaries keep getting distracted."
Take Action: Demand the Senate protect our access to abortion pills!
California strikes back against unprecedented mid-decade gerrymander plot
Vote Forward: There’s a plot underway to ensure 2026 House control before a single vote has been cast. Several states have already redrawn their maps to make the majority unwinnable for pro-democracy voices. California is responding with Prop 50, the Election Rigging Response Act, which would counterbalance the “election rigging.” But these special elections have notoriously low voter turnout, and we need to make sure that every California Democrat knows that this is happening and the stakes of failing to show up. Please join Vote Forward in sending letters to California Democrats to ensure they vote in this all important election!
ICE will use AI to surveil social media
Katya Schwenk, Jacobin: "Immigration and Customs Enforcement has inked a new $5.7 million contract for AI-driven social media surveillance software, according to federal procurement records reviewed by The Lever. It’s the latest move in the agency’s ongoing quest to build out a social media surveillance dragnet. The five-year contract with government technology middleman Carahsoft Technology, made public in September, provides Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) licenses for a product called Zignal Labs, a social media monitoring platform used by the Israeli military and the Pentagon. An informational pamphlet marked confidential but publicly available online advertises that Zignal Labs 'leverages artificial intelligence and machine learning' to analyze over eight billion social media posts per day, providing 'curated detection feeds' for its clients. The information, the company says, allows law enforcement to 'detect and respond to threats with greater clarity and speed.' Zignal joins ICE’s growing arsenal of social media surveillance tools, many of which employ artificial intelligence to generate leads and identify 'threats' from vast quantities of online data. These tools pose a particular threat as ICE, under the Trump administration, appears to be increasingly using social media to direct its immigration enforcement strategy. Several pro-Palestinian activists, including Mahmoud Khalil, were targeted and jailed by immigration authorities after being doxed online by right-wing, pro-Israel blacklist websites like Canary Mission. Just this week, immigration agents raided street vendors in New York City after a right-wing influencer posted a video of the block online, demanding action by authorities. 'The government’s utilization of AI and automated tools for viewpoint-driven online surveillance gives teeth to its threat to surveil ‘everyone’ online for disfavored expression,' attorneys with the civil liberties group the Electronic Freedom Foundation and Yale Law School’s Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic wrote in the complaint, saying that such tools 'exacerbate the chilling impact of that surveillance.'
Take Action: Stop predatory surveillance pricing!
The U.S. isn’t even bothering with its usual lies to sell its regime change war in Venezuela
Séamus Malekafzali, The Intercept: "On October 16, an unusual warning went out on Trinidadian airwaves. 'Fishermen are being warned to slow down and stay close to shore amid fears of being bombed by the United States military,' the anchor on CNC3 began, 'which continues its anti-narcotics operations in the Caribbean Sea.' Two Trinidadian fishermen, Chad Joseph and Richie Samaroo, had been killed in a U.S. Navy airstrike targeting their boat as they left Venezuela for Trinidad, a short 6-mile trip that Joseph had told his family about. President Donald Trump had claimed the boat was a 'vessel affiliated with a Designated Terrorist Organization,' without naming the drug cartel it was supposedly affiliated with, and that 'intelligence confirmed the vessel was trafficking narcotics' along a known 'DTO route.' The killing of a friendly country’s nationals, in America’s backyard, in a targeted American airstrike, should have been news alone. But it has been only a brick in the wall of a war that is being constructed in the southern Caribbean, one that is being built up in ways both overt and disturbingly covert. As of the time of this writing, eight American warships, manned by more than 4,500 Marines and sailors, have been placed just outside of Venezuelan waters. The New York Times has identified guided-missile cruisers moving close to Venezuelan shores, as well as Reaper drones stationed nearby in Puerto Rico, alongside a number of stealth fighter jets. On Wednesday, War Secretary Pete Hegseth confirmed on X that the military escalated this campaign by conducting a lethal airstrike on a vessel in the Pacific Ocean for the first time, off of Colombia’s waters, just days after Trump accused its president, Gustavo Petro, of being an ;illegal drug dealer; after he criticized the American campaign in the Caribbean. The target is clear: Nicolás Maduro, president of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. But the United States government is not saying that, at least outright. Maduro’s name, and the spurious accusation that he is a drug kingpin, have been mentioned by the Department of Justice (joining with the State Department to put a $50 million bounty on his head), and Venezuela has been on the president’s lips whenever asked, even saying outright that he had greenlit covert CIA action in Venezuela and potentially even strikes on land inside the country. But news about the growing air of potential war with Venezuela has taken a backseat to the news of occasional strikes on boats in the Caribbean, which have now become so routine over the past two months that they barely register as noise. Still surprising, sure, but on the road to being as unworthy of note as individual strikes would be in Yemen earlier this year, their legal implications becoming as un-noteworthy as the strikes in the 2010s that killed young American citizens under the justification that their parent was a terrorist, so spilling their blood was permissible. Mainstream media organizations are covering the strikes and the massive military buildup outside of Venezuela’s borders, but the gravity of the situation, with the dubiousness of the accusations levied and a potential major invasion of a country with the world’s largest oil reserves looming, is strangely unfelt, especially by the government that is spearheading it. Venezuela has for years been demonized in the media, becoming a favorite bogeyman of American political thrillers and rousing people’s interest whenever anti-government protests rock the country. But Venezuela threatens no American interests militarily, has no ballistic missile program with which to strike the American heartland, no weapons of mass destruction program, nor even accusations of such a program. There are barely any leakers, zero claims of a global threat, no media laundering of intelligence. The narrative, however, has been set in stone from the beginning — and without strong opposition to it, there was no need to justify it. We already know a potential invasion of Venezuela would be a disaster. But the potential risks of intervention are no longer an object to the government, just as state-building, stabilization, and producing a functioning democracy are no longer the stated priorities they may have been to past presidents. Trump’s military doctrine has focused squarely on death, destruction, terror, and destabilization as the aim — unconcerned by consequences, uncaring of justification, and desperate to create failed states where there had been functioning ones. When asked by a reporter on October 15 if the CIA will be authorized to 'take out' Maduro, Trump gave an answer that inadvertently summed up the absurdity of the war the United States is being slow-walked into against its will: 'That’s a ridiculous question. Not really a ridiculous question, but wouldn’t it be a ridiculous question for me to answer?'
Food for thought
The Sunday wrap-up
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