I’m mad as hell. This is the record of why. (Would you like to know more?)
The Government Has a New Word for Protesters
WIRED obtained more than 1,000 pages of internal, unpublished reports from DHS, the FBI, and fusion centers around the country. What they describe is a coordinated national shift — using the domestic surveillance apparatus to monitor a threat category the government invented itself. They’re calling it “anti-tech violent extremism.” The term appears nowhere in any publicly available DHS or FBI extremism framework. No public rulemaking created it. A New York Intelligence and Counterterrorism Bureau report obtained by WIRED warns that AI adoption may fuel “large-scale protests that devolve into civil unrest and anti-tech violent extremist activity” — and that this threat is already emerging. People who show up at town halls and budget meetings to object to data centers in their neighborhoods are being surveilled under this label. ...
Taxpayers Are Gilding Trump's Horses
The National Park Service just handed a $5 million no-bid contract to a Maryland gilding studio. The job: coat four bronze horse statues near the Lincoln Memorial in 23.75-karat gold leaf. Deadline: July 4th. That’s not a restoration. The horses were last restored in the 1970s and are showing their age — but there’s a reason you don’t rush a $5 million gilding job through without competitive bidding. The reason is usually that you’re not trying to get the best value. You’re trying to get it done fast, for someone who wants it done. ...
Trump's face on the $250 bill
Federal law bars putting a living person’s image on U.S. currency. That law exists for a reason. Trump wants an exception. His allies in Congress have introduced legislation to carve one out, and the Treasury Department isn’t waiting for it to pass. It’s already “conducting appropriate planning and due diligence” on a new $250 bill — featuring Trump’s portrait. The $250 is framed as honoring the country’s 250th anniversary. That’s the packaging. What’s inside is a president who has spent two terms putting his name and face on airports, schools, military bases, and now money — and rewriting whatever laws get in the way. ...
They bulldozed a 1,000-year-old sacred site. Then called it a mistake.
On April 23, a federal contractor building Trump’s border wall bulldozed the Las Playas Intaglio — a roughly 200-foot fish-shaped geoglyph etched into the floor of the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge in Arizona. It’s approximately 1,000 years old. It’s sacred to the Tohono O’odham Nation. And it had been flagged by a cultural protection monitor as a site contractors were supposed to avoid. About 60 to 70 feet of it are just gone. ...
They pepper-sprayed a U.S. Senator. Here's what they didn't want him to see.
On Memorial Day, federal agents outside the Delaney Hall immigration detention facility in Newark pepper-sprayed U.S. Senator Andy Kim. He’d been trying to ensure that detainees engaged in a hunger strike weren’t being mistreated. ICE also fired rubber bullets into the crowd. Let that register: a sitting United States Senator, exercising congressional oversight, got pepper-sprayed by federal agents. Inside Delaney Hall — a privately run, 1,000-bed facility currently holding around 300 detainees — people have been on a hunger strike for days. Their complaints: medical care they can’t access, food that’s inedible, water problems. Detainees were seen flickering lights and waving from windows in response to protesters chanting outside. ICE’s official position is that there is no hunger strike. ...