Let’s be precise about what happened on January 6th, 2021, before we talk about the money, because the money only makes sense once you understand what these people actually did.

There was a deal on the table yesterday.Senate Majority Leader John Thune — a Republican, Trump’s own Senate majority leader — walked a bipartisan compromise to the president on Sunday. Fund everything in the Department of Homeland Security except ICE. Handle ICE separately through reconciliation, where Republicans can pass it with 51 votes and Democrats can’t touch it. Get the airports running. Get the TSA agents paid. Both sides had agreed. White House aides had blessed the idea before it got to Trump. Thune told the president directly: Democrats will take this.

This is what the end of a free press looks like. Not a single dramatic midnight raid on a printing press, not one big headline moment you can point to and say: there. It happens in pieces. A layoff here. An arrest there. A billionaire owner quietly strangling the opinion pages of a Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper. An algorithm choking the signal. A defense secretary at a Pentagon podium telling you that journalists who cover dead soldiers are just trying to make the president look bad — and his press secretary stepping up to confirm: yes, that is the official position of the United States government.It happens in pieces, and then one day you look up and the pieces are everywhere.Let us name them, one by one.

The bombs started falling and the search results stopped climbing. That’s not a coincidence. That’s a magic trick — and a transparent one at that. While American warplanes were making their way toward Iranian airspace, Google searches for the Epstein files collapsed. The most powerful office in the world had a motive, a method, and a news cycle to hide behind. What it doesn’t have is the ability to make the files disappear. They’re still here. So are we.Let’s talk about what happened while you were looking at the smoke.

There is a thing that happens in mob movies, right before things go very wrong for everybody. Someone does a favor for someone they shouldn’t trust. Someone looks the other way when they should be looking directly. And then the favor gets returned, and the cycle deepens, and by the time anyone says the word “complicit” out loud, it’s already too late to mean anything.We are living in that scene right now.

There are no fishing boats anymore.That’s not an inference or an interpretation. That’s the President of the United States, speaking to the Canadian Prime Minister, describing what his military has accomplished in the Caribbean. “We’ve taken a very hard stand on drugs,” he said. “There are no boats anymore, frankly there are no fishing boats, there’s no boats out there period.”

The Department of Justice dropped what it’s calling its sixth release of Epstein files last week — because apparently when Pedophile Protecting Pam Bondi told us in January that the release was complete and the DOJ had met its legal obligations, she meant mostly complete, in the same way a contractor might tell you a house is mostly built and then hand you the keys to a structure missing its roof, windows and doors. Again. For the third time under this administration, the DOJ managed to leave the names and identifying information of trafficking victims — women and girls who were abused as children — sitting right there in the publicly searchable database, while the names of powerful men who appear in those same files remained neatly blacked out.

There is a specific kind of accountability that happens not in a courtroom, not in a newsroom, not in the streets — but in a congressional hearing room, under oath, with C-SPAN rolling and nowhere to hide. It is not justice. It is not sufficient. But it is, on occasion, spectacular. And what happened to KKKristi Noem this week across two days of congressional testimony was the most comprehensive public unraveling of a cabinet secretary in recent memory — so thorough, so damning, so operatically self-inflicted that by Wednesday night, Dimwitted Don was quietly calling Republican senators to ask if he should fire her.

Let’s say you’re about to go to war. Not metaphorically. Actual bombs, actual strikes, actual regional conflagration. Let’s say the country you’re going to war with has a documented, decades-long history of sending operatives to American soil to murder your officials in retaliation for exactly the kind of military action you’re about to take. Let’s say those operatives have used biker gang members, drug traffickers, burner phones, and cryptocurrency — and that the FBI has thwarted plot after plot to assassinate everyone from a sitting president to his Secretary of State to his National Security Advisor.

KKKristi Noem walked into the Dirksen Senate Office Building today in a dark suit and heels, flanked by supporters holding photos of crime victims, and proceeded to demonstrate — for approximately five uninterrupted hours — exactly why she should not be running the second-largest federal department in the United States of America.

Mark it. Put it in your phone. Tell your neighbors. Saturday, March 28, 2026 is the next No Kings nationwide day of action — and if the trajectory of this movement holds, we’re looking at what organizers are already calling the largest nonviolent protest in American history. That’s not hyperbole. That’s a math problem. And the numbers are not subtle.

We need to start with a correction, and we are going to make it without flinching because that is what we do here. In our last update, we held the line on Khamenei’s death. We said we would not call it confirmed based on the word of a man who spews demonstrable bullshit like Old Faithful spews water — on schedule, under pressure, and regardless of what’s actually true. We said we would not call it confirmed simply because a compound was reduced to rubble. After all, the East Wing of the Very White House is a pile of rubble — not from enemy fire, but because everything Dicktater Don touches eventually turns to trumpshit, and because his pathological need to slap his name on every institution he can get his tiny hands on tends to leave things structurally unsound. The Trump White House renovation project is its own special category of destruction. And yet somehow, Dicktater Don and Melanomia remain very much alive and presumably still surrounded by shrimp cocktail and sycophants in Mar-a-Lardo. Rubble, it turns out, is not a death certificate.