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Back from the border and straight into the Twilight Zone. Pour the coffee, we’ve got five things and zero patience.
Let’s start with the one that says it all:
1. When Heritage Lost Its Heritage
The think tank once known for Reagan’s conservatism is now debating whether to tolerate neo-Nazis. Yes, really.
I’ll start with a confession: as a young intern on the Hill, I attended Heritage Foundation programs both in college and immediately after graduation. Yeah, I know, some of you are probably wondering what the heck? But back then, Heritage still stood for conservative ideals grounded in principle, not grievance. This week, it stood for something else entirely.
Fast forward to today: the intellectual mothership of the American right just faced a full-blown staff revolt. Its president, Kevin Roberts, was forced to defend a video he posted standing up for Tucker Carlson after Carlson’s friendly sit-down with avowed neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes. The same Fuentes who called Hitler “awesome” and the Holocaust a hoax. The moment was raw: senior fellows accused Roberts of destroying Heritage’s reputation. One 40-year scholar said, “We’ve got the lunatics back.” But perhaps most revealing was a young staffer who defended Roberts, calling Christian Zionism “heresy.” That’s the post-Trump conservative movement in a nutshell, where antisemitism hides behind “faith,” cowardice is rebranded as free speech, and the line between intellectual conservatism and extremist nationalism is being erased in real time. This wasn’t just a personnel crisis. It was a moral one. Heritage isn’t fighting about policy anymore, it’s fighting for its soul. And right now, that soul is losing to Tucker Carlson’s podcast.
Robert Rector, who’s been at Heritage longer than some staffers have been alive, finally said the quiet part out loud:
“The issue here is Tucker Carlson…Tucker’s show is like stepping into a lunatic asylum.”
When even the old guard starts describing your flagship pundit as a psych ward, it’s not a debate club anymore. It’s a breakdown.
🧱 Heritage’s Moral Meltdown: The Dispatch [ [link removed] ]
2. The Firing of the Arts
While I was away on the border, traveling through El Paso and Ciudad Juárez, sharing those moments with you, this happened. And when I saw the footage of the East Wing of the White House being torn down, it hurt my heart. I remember walking those hallways—the portraits, the echoes of history—and now they’re gone, replaced by cranes, concrete, and gold-plated ambition. Here I am in the East Colonnade, which connected the East Wing to the White House. It’s now gone.
While the demolition was taking place, Donald Trump proceeded to fire every member of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, the independent federal board that for more than a century has helped safeguard the nation’s monuments, memorials, and the architectural integrity of Washington itself. Their crime? Not being “aligned” with his America First policies.
The purge clears the path for Trump’s pet projects: a $300 million White House ballroom and the so-called Arc de Trump, modeled after Paris’s Arc de Triomphe but topped with a golden Lady Liberty. The East Wing demolition was just the beginning. Oversight, expertise, and artistry have been replaced by sycophancy and spectacle. Loyalists who’ll rubber-stamp corruption disguised as construction.
As always with this administration, the greed runs deep, but the cover-up runs deeper.
🎨 Art Meets Autocracy: The Guardian [ [link removed] ]
Speaking of Autocracy…now let’s shift to…
3. The MAGA Aristocracy
Let’s step inside the secretive donor circle rewriting Trumpism for the next generation.
There’s a new kind of ruling class rising quietly in Trump’s Washington, one that calls itself an “aristocracy.” While most of America is distracted by daily chaos, Chris Buskirk, a once-obscure Arizona businessman, has built a network of billionaire donors, tech elites, and political operatives to re-engineer the MAGA movement for life after Trump. They call it the Rockbridge Network. Think Peter Thiel, Rebekah Mercer, Tucker Carlson, and J.D. Vance, all rolled into a single private club with its own data operation, media arm, and billion-dollar investment fund. Their goal? To turn populism into a permanent power structure.
Buskirk says every society needs an “aristocracy” to lead it forward. In his version, it’s an alliance of wealthy “patriotic capitalists” who claim to speak for working-class Americans while rewriting the rules to enrich their own.
It’s the new Gilded Age in MAGA red, and this time, they’re not just funding the movement. They’re designing its future.
💸 The MAGA Aristocrats: WaPo Exclusive [ [link removed] ]
4. Justice, Signed and Delivered
This one really hit home. Time to spill some tea for context…
In 2020, when I served as Homeland Security & Counterterrorism Advisor to Vice President Pence and helped run the White House COVID-19 Task Force, I fought to include American Sign Language interpreters at our daily press briefings. It seemed like common sense: people deserved access to lifesaving information, regardless of their hearing ability. Every time I raised it, I was shut down. Pence’s press secretary, Katie Miller, laughed it off. When I escalated it, Marc Short, the chief of staff, scoffed and said it wasn’t happening. They were two peas in a pod back then, inseparable, and let’s be honest, whatever was told to Katie went straight to Stephen Miller and the Oval Office. I knew it was a no-go for Trump. He didn’t care. I never forgot that moment, watching a pandemic unfold and realizing that even accessibility had become political theater.
One month after I resigned, a federal judge ruled in 2020 [ [link removed] ] that the Trump administration had to include ASL interpreters in its COVID-19 briefings. It was a long-overdue victory that came too late for many, but it mattered. It proved that transparency, accessibility, and empathy are not partisan luxuries; they’re moral obligations.
And now, here we are again. A new federal ruling this week ordered the Trump 2.0 White House to restore real-time ASL interpretation at all press briefings. Judge Amir Ali found that ending ASL coverage “illegally excluded deaf Americans from crucial updates” on matters of “markets, medicine, and militaries.”
Different year, same fight. Same people. The same disregard for inclusion persists until the courts force it.
🤟 Justice, Signed: Politico [ [link removed] ]
5. The Pope vs. the President
When the Pope becomes the moral opposition, you know something’s broken.
This week, Pope Leo, the first American to lead the Catholic Church, called on the U.S. to “deeply reflect” on how it treats immigrants. His words landed like a thunderclap from Rome to the border. Bishops across the country, including El Paso’s own Mark Seitz, whom I recently met with while down on the border, are now planning to double down on their advocacy after Trump’s administration denied priests access to detained migrants—even refusing them Holy Communion.
For Catholics, this isn’t just political, it’s sacramental. When communion is blocked and compassion is criminalized, the line between faith and power becomes a battlefield. Pope Leo didn’t just criticize Trump; he reignited a moral movement.
Pope Leo to Trump: “How you treat the stranger reveals who you are.”
I want to be clear about something that’s stayed with me from my time as an intel officer focused on counterterrorism. Many years ago, I worked on detention operations at Guantánamo Bay. One of the initiatives I helped shape involved listening to the International Committee of the Red Cross and improving the humane treatment of detainees. We secured approval to provide prayer rugs and Qur’ans to men who were, in many cases, convicted terrorists.
And yet today, we’re treating migrants, many of them who are innocent people not “criminals”, far worse. I don’t say that lightly. I say it because I’ve seen both worlds up close, and I’m outraged by the contrast. A nation’s morality isn’t tested in comfort; it’s tested in how we treat those with no power, no voice, and nowhere else to turn.
🙏 Holy Rebellion: Reuters [ [link removed] ]
💛 One Thing for Your Soul
Speaking of leadership in the Catholic Church, many of you know I attended the Border Mass last weekend [ [link removed] ] at the border wall in El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. It was an amazing, deeply moving event that reminded me how faith and humanity can meet at the wall and still break through it.
I want to share this short video of Bishop Mark Seitz’s message from that day. His words lifted spirits and reminded everyone present that even in the darkest times, compassion still builds bridges. It’s a message of hope, courage, and community, one that transcends faith. You don’t have to be Catholic to feel it. If you have the time, watch until the end, it’s worth it.
Let Freedom Ring,
Olivia

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