The company is run by the husband of Noem’s chief DHS spokesperson and has personal and business ties to Noem and her aides. DHS invoked the “emergency” at the border to skirt competitive bidding rules for the taxpayer-funded campaign.

On Oct. 2, the second day of the government shutdown, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem arrived at Mount Rushmore to shoot a television ad. Sitting on horseback in chaps and a cowboy hat, Noem addressed the camera with a stern message for immigrants: “Break our laws, we’ll punish you.”

Noem has hailed the more than $200 million, taxpayer-funded ad campaign as a crucial tool to stem illegal immigration. Her agency invoked the “national emergency” at the border as it awarded contracts for the campaign, bypassing the normal competitive bidding process designed to prevent waste and corruption.

The Department of Homeland Security has kept at least one beneficiary of the nine-figure ad deal a secret, records and interviews show: a Republican consulting firm with longstanding personal and business ties to Noem and her senior aides at DHS. The company running the Mount Rushmore shoot, called the Strategy Group, does not appear on public documents about the contract. The main recipient listed on the contracts is a mysterious Delaware company, which was created days before the deal was finalized.

No firm has closer ties to Noem’s political operation than the Strategy Group. It played a central role in her 2022 South Dakota gubernatorial campaign. Corey Lewandowski, her top adviser at DHS, has worked extensively with the firm. And the company’s CEO is married to Noem’s chief spokesperson at DHS, Tricia McLaughlin.

The Strategy Group’s ad work is the first known example of money flowing from Noem’s agency to businesses controlled by her allies and friends.

Government contracting experts said the depth of the ties between DHS leadership and the Strategy Group suggested major potential violations of ethics rules.

“It’s corrupt, is the word,” said Charles Tiefer, a leading authority on federal contract law and former member of the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan. He said that the Strategy Group’s role should prompt investigations by both the DHS inspector general and the House Oversight Committee.

“Hiding your friends as subcontractors is like playing hide the salami with the taxpayer,” Tiefer added.

Federal regulations forbid conflicts of interest in contracting and require that the process be conducted “with complete impartiality and with preferential treatment for none.”

“It’s worthy of an investigation to ferret out how these decisions were made, and whether they were made legally and without bias,” said Scott Amey, a contracting expert and general counsel at the watchdog group Project on Government Oversight.

The revelations come as the amount of money at Noem’s disposal has skyrocketed. The so-called Big Beautiful Bill granted DHS more than $150 billion, and Noem has given herself an unusual degree of control over how that money is spent. This summer, she began requiring that she personally approve any payment over $100,000.

Asked about the Strategy Group’s work for DHS, McLaughlin, the agency spokesperson, said in an interview, “We don’t have visibility into why they were chosen.”

“I don’t know who they’re a subcontractor with, but I don’t work with them because I have a conflict of interest and I fully recused myself,” she said. “My marriage is one thing and work is another. I don’t combine them.” Her husband, Strategy Group CEO Ben Yoho, didn’t respond to questions.

In a written statement, DHS said, “DHS has no involvement with the selection of subcontractors.” They added that the Strategy Group does not have a direct contract with the agency, saying “DHS cannot and does not determine, control, or weigh in on who contractors hire.”

Contracting experts said that agencies can and do sometimes require that subcontractors be approved by officials. It’s not clear how much the Strategy Group has been paid.

This is not the first time that the Strategy Group has gotten public money through a Noem contract. As governor of South Dakota in 2023, her administration set off a scandal by hiring the Ohio-based company to do a different ad campaign, paying it $8.5 million in state funds. While the state said the contract was done by the book, a former Noem administration official told ProPublica that Noem quietly intervened to ensure the Strategy Group got the deal. ProPublica granted some people anonymity to discuss the deals because of their sensitivity.

The firm also paid up to $25,000 to one of Noem’s closest advisers in South Dakota, previously unreported records show. (The adviser, 28-year-old Madison Sheahan, now serves at DHS as the second-in-command of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Sheahan didn’t respond to questions about why she was paid.)

The DHS ad that the company filmed at Mount Rushmore has aired during “Fox & Friends” in recent days. Executives from the Strategy Group traveled to the shoot and hired subcontractors to fill out the film crew, according to records and a person involved in the campaign. The ad’s aesthetic sits somewhere between a political campaign ad and a Jeep commercial as Noem tells would-be immigrants to “come here the right way.”

“From the cowboys who tamed the West to the titans who built our cities,” Noem says, as images of Trump Tower in Chicago and Trump raising his fist after the assassination attempt last year flash on the screen, “America has always rewarded vision and grit.” Noem continues: “You cross the border illegally, we’ll find you.”

The ad is the latest in a campaign that Noem debuted in February, just a few weeks after she took charge of DHS. “Any delay in providing these critical communications to the public will increase the spread of misinformation, especially misinformation by smugglers,” the agency wrote, explaining why it was skipping the competitive bidding process normally required for government contracts. The initial ads featured Noem thanking Trump for securing the border.

The contracts total $220 million so far, leading the DHS ad budget to triple in the most recent fiscal year, according to Bloomberg. The lion’s share of ad contracts is typically used to buy TV airtime or spots on social media. Advertising firms make money by taking an often-hefty commission. Federal records show the contracts have gone to two firms. One is a Republican ad company in Louisiana called People Who Think, which has been awarded $77 million.

But the majority of the money — $143 million — has gone to a mysterious LLC in Delaware. The company was created just days before it was awarded the deal.

Little is known about the Delaware company, which is called Safe America Media and lists its address as the Virginia home of a veteran Republican operative, Michael McElwain. McElwain has long had his own advertising company (separate from the Delaware one), but there’s little evidence that firm could handle a nine-figure federal contract on its own: It reported just five employees when it received COVID-19 relief money a few years ago.

How, where and to whom Safe America Media doled out the $143 million is unknown. Any subcontractors hired to do work on the DHS ads are not disclosed in federal contracting databases.

The office funding the ad contracts is listed as the DHS Office of Public Affairs, which is run by McLaughlin, contract records show. McLaughlin married Yoho, the Strategy Group CEO, earlier this year.

In its statement, DHS said the agency does its contracting “by the book” and the process is run by career officials. “It is very sad that Pro Publica would seek to defame these public servants,” DHS added.

Asked about why the agency chose Safe America Media, DHS said, “The results speak for themselves: the most secure border in American history and over 2 million illegal aliens exiting the United States.” McElwain and People Who Think didn’t respond to questions.

Yoho was still in college when he first served as campaign manager for a U.S. congressman. Now, at 38 years old, he’s a national player in the cutthroat industry of political advertising. Federal election records show tens of millions in payments to his firm during the 2024 election cycle, coming from dozens of Republican congressional candidates. And Noem has proved a particularly lucrative client.

Lewandowski brought Yoho into Noem’s inner circle back in South Dakota, according to two people familiar with the matter, putting the young consultant in charge of the ad side of her 2022 gubernatorial reelection campaign. Noem had a more than $5 million advertising budget for the race, records show. After she won in a landslide, Yoho, who has called Noem a friend, came to South Dakota to attend her inauguration ceremony. He sat off to the side of the stage, next to Lewandowski. (Lewandowski didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

By then, Yoho’s next big project with Noem was already in the works. In late 2022, Noem was quietly preparing to launch another sprawling ad campaign — only this time, the money would come from state coffers. The stated goal was to encourage workers to move to South Dakota. The upcoming contract opportunity wasn’t public yet, but Yoho was already involved in planning the campaign, according to records first reported by Sioux Falls Live.

Then on Jan. 12, 2023, Yoho’s company registered to do business in South Dakota under the name Go West Media. The next day, the contract opportunity went live.

Seven companies submitted proposals for the project. Then the pressure from above set in, according to a former Noem administration official involved in the process.

The former official said a top Noem aide told them the governor would be angry if Yoho’s company didn’t win the contract. “He was very direct: ‘She wants to do it,’” they said. Contemporaneous text messages reviewed by ProPublica corroborate that senior Noem administration officials pushed for Yoho to get the contract. Eventually, he did. (In its statement, DHS denied that Noem influenced the process.)

Noem starred in Yoho’s ads herself, dressing up as a dentist, a plumber and a state trooper as she touted her state’s growing economy. Exactly how much Yoho and the Strategy Group made off the $8.5 million deal is unclear. Some of the money was used to purchase spots on Fox News, including one during a Republican presidential debate. Some of the money appears to have gone back to South Dakota — into the bank account of another of Noem’s top advisers.

Sheahan, now the second-in-command at ICE, was paid up to $25,000 by Go West in 2023 for “consulting,” according to a financial disclosure document Sheahan later filed. At the time, Sheahan was serving as both the operations director for Noem as governor and the political director for Noem’s campaign work, according to a copy of her 2023 resume obtained by ProPublica. Her responsibilities included coordinating “daily logistics and operations” for Noem and her team, the resume said. She also managed the “relationship with high level donors” to American Resolve, Noem’s network of outside political groups.

As his firm received millions from the South Dakota state government, Yoho separately continued to work for Noem in other capacities. He worked under Lewandowski on the publicity campaign for Noem’s 2024 memoir, according to a person familiar with the matter. (The book became famous for including an anecdote about Noem shooting her dog.)

The Strategy Group also received a stream of payments for social media consulting and media production work over the last few years from Noem’s American Resolve PAC. Federal election records show the PAC made its last payment to Yoho’s company this February, a couple weeks after Noem took her post as the head of DHS.

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The post Firm Tied to Kristi Noem Secretly Got Money From $220 Million DHS Ad Contracts appeared first on DCReport.org.

The Opinionated Ogre is a Stay-at-Home parent first, foul-mouthed hater of fascist Republicans second. He’s been making the most horrible people in the country miserable for 15 years and the hate he feels for American Nazis is eternal and without limits. He plans to stop torturing right-wing trash the day the last fascist dies. So, you know, never. Please help support this potty-mouthed newsletter for just $5/month or $50/year (Almost 17% less!)

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There’s a cataclysmic event in both World of Warcraft (online computer game) and the Forgotten Realms (tabletop RPG) known as “The Sundering.” Eons ago, dark forces tore the world apart and shattered entire continents, forever changing the landscape. The damage was irreparable, and the fallout took generations to recover from.

Fun! In a game setting, at least. Less so in the real world. Actually, that’s not true. I, for one, am having a GREAT time watching the early stages of a real-life MAGA Sundering over these perverted shitheels:

Despite truckloads of bribes, threats of violence, and probably offers of Pam Bondi performing oral sex daily for a year, the regime was unable to prevent four House Republicans from voting with every Democrat to demand the release of the Epstein files.

The regime is furious that the Epstein story won’t go away and MAGAland is openly revolting against the cover-up:

Now that the discharge petition has gone through, the vote in the House will happen, allegedly, next week. Trump has already threatened House Republicans and expect to hear more reporting on the regime calling representatives and demanding loyalty…or else.

After the bill passes, because every Democrat will vote for it and only four Republicans need to, presumably at the very least the same four on the discharge petition,1 it will go to the Senate. There, it will be filibustered anonymously2 so it will need 67 votes. That means 20 Republicans will have to vote with all 47 in the Democratic Caucus. I have to believe even that piece of dog shit John Fetterman won’t vote against this.3

Will the Senate GOP throw themselves on that grenade for Trump? Will they protect a pedophile? Some certainly will. But enough to keep the filibuster in place? I don’t know. That’s a public vote and they’ll have to answer why they’re protecting the pedophiles in the Epstein files. And it won’t be us asking. It will be their own MAGA voters.

And this, ultimately, is the problem. The Republican base has been trained to view pedophilia as worthy of murder above and beyond the normal revulsion most of us feel towards child rapists. The idea was that this hatred would be wielded as a cudgel against the left. After all, we were all part of a global pedophile ring bla bla fucking bla. Buuuuuuut, for once, it turns out that the tinfoil hat crew was right. Just not about WHO was in the global cabal of pedos. Whoops.

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Right-wing influencers and the GOP have spent YEARS whipping the base into a frenzy of rage over pedophiles. The Epstein files are their Holy Grail. Everyone has to be exposed and destroyed. Pedophiles must pay!

Reprogramming that level of vitriol will be impossible. Here’s Megyn Kelly trying anyway:

It’s really REALLY important to understand a few things here:

1. 15 is not “barely legal.” It’s fucking illegal. There is no place in the United States where a grown man can legally have sex with a 15-year-old girl unless a judge and child marriage are involved. And even then? It’s still fucking rape. I don’t give a shit if they’re “married.”

2. This is, quite literally, the argument pedophiles in the manosphere make in their ongoing attempt to move the Overton window on sex with children. Age is just a number mannnnnnn.

3. Megyn Kelly is making this argument because she knows Donald Trump raped little girls. If Trump were not in the Epstein files and video of Bill Clinton raping a 15-year-old girl were, Kelly would spend the next ten years demanding he be burned at the stake. She still might. But not Trump because the little girl HE raped…what?, looked old enough to be legal? Please enjoy your eternity in hell, you wretched stain on the soul of humanity.

I promise you, you’re going to see more of this. The Republican Party is already infested with pedophiles and sexual deviants. I have been writing about this for YEARS. The fringe is consumed by subhuman things, desperate to make sex with children legitimate. And if you weren’t already aware of it, the fringe of the right never stays the fringe for long.

Republicans find all kinds of excuses. It’s biblical. It’s historical. It’s biological. It’s freedom. My personal favorite is that it prevents abortion. That one is really fucking twisted. Raping little girls is good because it protects the unborn. Good fucking lord. The depravity of the “pro-life” Christian has no bottom.

But MAGAland sees the Epstein files as a central piece of their identity. Exposing pedophiles is foundational to everything they believe. To walk away from that to protect even Donald Trump is to accept that they are the very thing they have been waging war on for almost a decade. Some can do that because Trump has been sent by god himself to deliver us from yadayadayada.

Many will not be able to make this pivot.

Not out of principle or humanity or decency. MAGA has none of these. But the programming is embedded, and that kind of reversal takes time. It took years to turn the Republican base from Reagan’s party of anti-Russia into the mob of Putin-loving morons they are today. This is a far more dramatic flip and far harder to justify.

Not for nothing, all of MAGA still swears they despise communism while openly groveling at the feet of a Russian oligarch whose singular goal is to reestablish the Soviet Union. But there is no squaring the circle here. You cannot bravely stand against pedophiles, willing to hold public executions and burn it all down to expose the elite cabal of child rapists (the stated purpose of QAnon) while carving out a special exception for Donald Trump, who was the best friend of the very man who fed children to that elite cabal you’ve been hunting. Oh, and here’s all that proof Trump was an integral part of that cabal you’ve dedicated your life to destroying.

I don’t think there’s a word for that level of cognitive dissonance. This is the party that just spent the last year loudly denouncing antisemitism and is now at war with itself because Republicans JUST discovered the Republican Party is lousy with literal Nazis. Whatever is a girl to do?!

This is why Trump and his regime of filthpigs have been fighting tooth and nail to hide the Epstein files. It’s not that it’s embarrassing for Trump. Trump cannot BE embarrassed. It’s not that he would be exposed to legal jeopardy. Trump has been granted complete immunity for all crimes by the most corrupt Supreme Court in history, and if you don’t think that includes sex crimes, you’re deluding yourself.

Trump and his cadre of bootlicking traitors know that a very VERY large portion of his supporters will reject him on the spot if they see him raping a 14-year-old girl. No amount of spin from Fox News will bring them back into the fold because, unlike Trump, they CAN be shamed. Every MAGA hat, every Trump flag, every fawning MAGA t-shirt becomes a sign saying, “I support a pedophile.”

How large will this revolt be? 20%? 30%? 50%? It’s hard to say, but it will be a killing blow. This all comes back to the midterms and the 2028 election. Republican voters vote for Trump, not for Republicans. This is why the GOP did not win in 2024, Trump did, no matter what the legacy press says. This is why they just got stomped into the mud last week. This is why Republicans live in mortal fear of the midterms. This is why they’re frantically trying to figure out how to run Trump on the top of the ticket in 2028.

No Trump, no MAGA voters.

But none of their machinations will amount to a pile of spit if Trump is exposed as the filthy pedophile we all know he is. If “just” 25% of the GOP’s base refuses to vote for a party led by a child-raping cretin, they lose everything, everywhere. No amount of election rigging will save them. Remember, the single most important ingredient for a rigged election in an ailing/failing democracy is plausibility. If 25% of your voters stay home and all of ours show up, it is no longer plausible you weren’t slaughtered up and down the ballot in every nook and cranny of the country.

And if the stolen election is not plausible, bad things happen after that. All of them directed at the regime. I keep saying this, and I will continue saying it. This is a country with over 400 million guns whose most treasured founding mythology is killing tyrants. Only a suicidal idiot wants to be on the “tyrant” end of that equation.

So here we are. At the “height” of his power, Trump has never been weaker or more vulnerable. Like any trapped animal, he’s going to lash out violently because that’s all he knows how to do. None of it will stop what’s coming. The Epstein files will come out one way or another. The public will see pictures and/or video of Trump being a sleazy, depraved rapist and screaming “fake news! AI-generated!” every minute of every day on Twitter won’t work.

The Sundering is here, and the damage is just getting started. Wear a hard hat and safety goggles, but also stock up on that popcorn…

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The Blue Wave is here! No matter what a handful of scumbag Democrats try to do to dissuade us, it cannot be stopped. There are 353 days until the most important midterm election in American history. The regime is afraid, and they should be. We are legion, and they are weak. Stay strong. You are never alone.

Very, VERY, VERY bad day for Donald J. Trump. The House is back in session, which means that Democrat Adelita Grijalva will be sworn in, seven weeks after she was overwhelming elected to represent her district in Arizona. Why did Speaker of the House Mike Johnson refuse Grijalva her membership for so long? Because she is the 218^th vote on the discharge petition that will force the release of the FBI files on Jeffrey Epstein, something Trump has done everything in his power to prevent, including appointing the likes of Kash Patel to hold the line for him at the FBI.

That’s going to be bad for Donald, for sure, and he had another Epsteinian nightmare this morning when 23,000 pages of emails were released by the Epstein estate.

There is a passel of damaging stuff in the emails, including a quote from Epstein referring to Trump that “of course he knew about the girls, as he asked Ghislaine to stop.”

Stop what, pray tell? What was Maxwell’s job for Jeffrey? Setting up his friends with underage girls, so it’s obvious what Trump was asking her to stop doing.

In another email released today, Epstein told Maxwell that Trump “spent hours” with someone the Democrats on the House Oversight Committee have identified as a “victim.” Anyone identified as a “victim” in the context of Jeffrey Epstein was clearly an underage girl. He was charged with trafficking underage girls, not golf equipment or scuba gear, so it’s pretty clear that the unnamed victim was one of Epstein and Maxell’s girls. What Trump spent “hours” doing with the “victim” is left to our imagination, but the White House is sufficiently disturbed about the release of today’s emails that Karoline Leavitt has been issuing denials and media attacks all morning.

According to NBC News, “The emails contain multiple references to a victim, whose name is redacted in the release. But the White House and Republicans on the committee said that the redacted name was Virginia Guiffre, a prominent Epstein survivor who died in April.”

The thing that jumped out at me in the stories about the emails wasn’t even the juicy new quote about Trump and the victim who turns out to have been Virginia Guiffre. Instead, it was something Trump said last July when he accused Epstein of “taking people who worked for me.”

It wasn’t just “people.” It was Virginia Guiffre. Trump slipped up in July when referring to Guiffre and told the press that Epstein “stole her from me.”

That’s the single guiltiest statement Trump has ever made. Was Guiffre a slave, owned by Donald Trump? We fought a Civil War to end slavery, so that couldn’t be it.

Guiffre could only have been “stolen” from Donald Trump if he felt ownership because of a special relationship between them. Virginia Guiffre was 17 years old. What kind of a relationship could an adult man have with a 17-year-old girl? Only one that was illegal, and Donald Trump’s quote about her amounts to an admission of that illegal relationship.

For the entire time I have been working on this column in my Long Beach hotel room, MSNBC has been on in the background, and the only thing they have been covering is the Epstein email story.

This is a very, very big deal. It’s Trump’s soft white underbelly. He can’t shake his relationship with Epstein, and today we are learning that he can’t shake his connection to Virginia Guiffre, the double-victim who was first abused by these men, including Trump, and then in the depths of despair, killed herself.

Virginia Guiffre and Epstein form a noose around Trump’s neck, and he’s about to drop through the door in the floor of his gallows.

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Few issues have inflamed the MAGA right and the Qanon conspiracy theorists quite as intensely as the theory that there is a vast and powerful cabal of politicians and business leaders who traffic children for systematic sexual abuse and enjoy the protection of the police, prosecutors, the media, and the Deep State. For the entirety of Donald Trump’s first presidency, outlandish claims circulated around the fringe right: That children were being sold in Wayfair armoires; that the Clintons were getting their gnarled hands on trafficked children in the basement of a DC pizza parlor. None of this was true, let alone remotely plausible. But it dovetailed with the paranoia that got Trump elected in the first place: That American politicians were not just woefully corrupt but almost unimaginably evil, and it would take a fearless outsider to expose and vanquish them.

As more emails and documents from Jeffrey Epstein’s estate are released to the public, the “powerful cabal of child sex abusers” part of the theory — a conspiracy I frankly thought was insane — is looking more plausible by the day. It just didn’t play out like it would on a television show. There were no armoires or pizza shop basements. There were instead private planes, wealthy men, underage girls, and a culture of male power and impunity that created a sense not just of consequence-free abuse, but a kind of naughty normalcy.

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And now there actually is a vast effort by elected officials and people at the highest levels of government — the FBI, the DOJ, Congress, the Oval Office — to cover up the web of influential men woven around serial child sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein. The coverup effort is happening right out in the open. And while some MAGA supporters do still seem to want to know what in the heck happened with Epstein, many decided to put the issue to bed the second it seemed Trump might be implicated. This is indeed the height of hypocrisy, and an important insight into the grotesque moral deformities endemic among those who strive to keep Trump in power. It’s also a continuation on a theme: This is an administration that has built its identity on white male power unfettered by “political correctness” or basic decency, unimpeded by the law or old norms, and unchallenged by the women or racial minorities who were increasingly competing with white men for power.

Most of us probably believed that child sex abuse — engaging in or covering for — was a red line for just about everyone. But why should Trump, whose appeal is that he doesn’t play by any rules, have to abide by this one?

The Epstein letters and emails show men (and some women) who understand that what they were doing, and what Epstein was facilitating, was wrong and could get them in trouble. But they also had a kind of cheeky in-group tone, like, “well aren’t we just bad little boys.” It was a culture of permission: There was a sense that they were all doing it, so sure it was wrong, but also kind of ok — because they were all doing it.

The latest Epstein emails are the most damning yet. Epstein writes to Ghislaine Maxwell, “I want you to realize the only dog that hasn’t barked is Trump. [Victim] spent hours at my house with him.” In another email, he tells journalist Michael Wolff that of course Trump “knew about the girls he asked Ghislaine to stop.”

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What Trump asked Ghislaine to stop is unclear. “Of course he knew about the girls” seems… clearer.

Republicans in Congress, led by Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, have fought mightily — even shutting down the government and refusing to seat a duly elected Democratic member of Congress — to prevent a vote that would require the FBI and DOJ to release a separate trove of Epstein documents. A small handful of Republican members of Congress, most of them women, have joined with Democrats to demand the release of the Epstein documents, and now that the government has been re-opened, the Trump administration is lobbying them to change their minds. Administration officials pulled Rep. Lauren Boebert into a meeting in the Situation Room — a space usually reserved for important national security discussions — reportedly to discourage her from pushing for the document release. Trump has also been calling Rep. Nancy Mace. In the meantime, the Trump administration had Ghislaine Maxwell transferred to a minimum-security prison where she is receiving “concierge-style” service, including puppy play time. She reportedly plans to ask Trump to commute her sentence.

Maxwell also told deputy attorney general Todd Blanche, in an interview that both of them understood was to clear the president of wrongdoing, that as far as she knew, Trump had never done anything untoward. “I never witnessed the President in any inappropriate setting in any way,” Maxwell said. “The President was never inappropriate with anybody. In the times that I was with him, he was a gentleman in all respects.”

The latest Epstein emails cast serious doubt on that claim.

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I’m not particularly interested in wild speculation here. Nothing in these emails proves that Trump had sex with underage girls (a side note, but can we please stop saying “underage women”? There’s no such thing). It is entirely plausible that Trump knew about Epstein’s crimes but didn’t commit any of his own. It is entirely plausible that there are national security concerns at play here (I am finding the Epstein-is-an-intelligence-source theory increasingly persuasive, but who knows). It is extremely weird that the administration is both claiming these emails are a “hoax” while also claiming that actually, they exonerate the president, while the president is giving extra-special treatment to Epstein’s convicted co-conspirator and lobbying his loyalists to block the release of any more documents. And there is something that turns my stomach about seeing a bunch of Democratic congressmen grandstanding about Epstein not because they care all that much about the sexual abuse of girls, but because they realize it’s a potentially effective political cudgel. Few people in this entire hideous display strike me as particularly principled or admirable.

And yet it has still been shocking and appalling to see how many conservatives, most of them men, wrapping Trump and by extension Epstein in a protective shield. “Trafficking underage girls for sex” should be the kind of principle that transcends politics, but here we are seeing that the rule on the right is more like “trafficking underage girls for sex is bad if Democrats do it” (and before anyone yells about the Clintons, I don’t see any collective effort on behalf of the Democratic Party to prevent the Epstein documents being released in order to protect Bill Clinton or any other Democrat, and if Clinton was involved then he deserves to be exposed and held accountable).

Powerful men protecting other powerful men is certainly a bipartisan exercise, and Epstein had friends on both sides of the aisle. But at this moment, only one side is doing everything it can to keep Epstein’s secrets hidden and to protect whoever else may have been involved in his crimes. I actually don’t think this would fly in today’s Democratic Party, which is heavily female and at least marginally feminist. Today’s Republican Party, though, is avowedly misogynist; it is a party that has built itself into a temple of white male grievance, and that promises not just to help white men get good jobs back, but to get impunity back — the freedom to behave as abhorrently as they wish, to treat women however they wish, to take the jobs that women and people of color rightfully earned simply because there is a presumption of white male deservedness. Some of the highest-ranking members of the Trump administration not only attend churches where the pastors say women shouldn’t be allowed to vote and must submit to male authority, but share videos making those same arguments. The young people staffing Republican politicians and organizing young conservative groups are a notoriously noxious bunch, with racism, misogyny, and anti-Semitism simply part of the waters they’re all swimming in. Speaker Mike Johnson is a religious fundamentalist who worked to keep gay sex criminal, opposes no-fault divorce, and is himself in a “covenant marriage,” which Moira Donegan at the Guardian aptly describes as “a religious arrangement that formalizes men’s superiority and constricts women’s freedom to leave, designed for conservative straight couples who feel that no-fault divorce and gay marriage rights somehow degrade their own unions.” Men who see women as subservient, who believe that men have ultimate authority, and who intentionally set up systems of total male power and impunity — of course these are men who will cover for sexual predators. Of course some of these men are sexual predators.

You simply cannot create a culture or a party of wholesale male entitlement and not wind up with women and girls paying the price — being the ones who bodies, livelihoods, and lives those men feel entitled to. This is a MAGA-cult problem for sure, and the clearest test yet of whether there are any limits to what Trump can do and still maintain the support of his base. But it’s also a problem of the conservative He-Man Woman-Hater ideology this administration has embraced. Trump is a notorious moral reprobate, accused of sexually harassing and assaulting double-digit numbers of women, and using his current position to pardon violent criminals, do favors for “friends” he expects to repay him many times over, and enrich himself and his family. It is no surprise that his leadership has made a party that once boasted about their superior morality and “draining the swamp” into a pedophile protection racket.

Trump, Epstein wrote, was the only dog that hadn’t yet barked. Now he’s the leader of a whole cowed and silent pack.

xx Jill

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Here’s a new paper from Gary Lawson and me on presidential removal power.

SSRN link.

Our main point is to offer an originalist alternative to the maximal, absolute interpretation of presidential removal (i.e., an unconditional or “indefeasible” presidential power), based on Article I’s Necessary and Proper Clause, rather than a strained inference from Article II’s Executive Power Clause.

After many historians and legal scholars have debunked the unitary executive theorists’ interpretation of Article II, some legal scholars ask what the alternative is for limiting Congress. They are right to observe that Congress surely cannot create a completely independent Fourth Branch, no super-president or Czar or life-tenure Secretary of State with executive power beyond presidential control.

We think the part of the Constitution that gives Congress the power to create offices also provides limits on that power from its own text and original context. The Necessary and Proper Clause offers a limiting principle: Tenure protections and agency structures must be necessary and proper for executing federal power, meaning that they must be suitable means for pursuing proper ends. The debates and statutes in the First Congress reflect an analysis of means and ends in creating a small number of fully independent and mixed independent offices for specific complex tasks, often related to public debt and the public fisc. 

This alternative Necessary and Proper Clause basis offers originalist, doctrinal, and precedential space for Myers, Seila Law, and Free Enterprise, and also for the FTC, the Fed and other independent commissions.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5736

The Opinionated Ogre is a Stay-at-Home parent first, foul-mouthed hater of fascist Republicans second. He’s been making the most horrible people in the country miserable for 15 years and the hate he feels for American Nazis is eternal and without limits. He plans to stop torturing right-wing trash the day the last fascist dies. So, you know, never.

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I tend not to write entire articles about a single tweet because it feels clickbaity, and I don’t give a fuck HOW hard Substack is trying to turn into a social media site that rewards clickbait, that shit is not happening. Been there, done that. Never again.1

However, every now and then, along will come a tweet that speaks to a larger issue. In this case, the tweet was funny as fuck, too.

If you don’t know who Joyce Carol Oates is, she’s a famous writer. Like, really famous. She’s so famous, I know who she is, and I’ve never read or seen a single piece of work she’s produced in the 60+ years she’s been running around earning awards (so many awards). My reading list skews towards Star Trek, Star Wars, Stephen King, comics and manga and I STILL know Joyce Carol Oates. So, you know, famous famous.

So you can bet Elon Musk knew exactly who the fuck she was, too, when Oates dropped a tactical nuke on his drug-addled head:

Oooooooohhhh snap! Musk’s response was…not great.

I really enjoy Musk swinging from basic schoolyard insults to “Grok, I am high on ketamine, please write an intelligent-sounding insult of Joyce Carol Oates for me.”

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Musk really is the most miserable person on the face of the earth. For all his money, he’s sad and lonely and joyless. He has no friends. He’s not a father to his children.2 He can’t even enjoy video games, and I KNOW he used to enjoy them because he grew up playing video games in the 70s and 80s just like I did. Speaking from personal experience, you never forget your first love. But now? His need to be macho alpha won’t even allow him to enjoy THAT. He has to be “the best player ever,” or he won’t even really play.

I cannot think of anything sadder or more pathetic than denying yourself the joy of video games because your stupid fucking ego demands everyone worship you as a god. That’s why Oates’ tweet burned Musk to his core. Every word of it was true and it was like looking into his own personal portrait of Dorian Gray. Except it was on the social media site he owns, written by someone more beloved than he’ll ever be and who will be remembered long after Musk is dead and only a footnote in history books.3

Now, as much as I enjoyed watching Musk whimper, what really caught my attention is that Oates perfectly sums up the problem of the obscenely rich and powerful right-wing parasites killing our democracy, our world, and our very humanity. I touched on this back in June.

They are incapable of experiencing true joy or happiness or love anymore. Something fundamental is broken within them, and their way to process that damage is to destroy everything and everyone around them.

There is a gothic horror role-playing series called “World of Darkness.” Think Dungeons & Dragons, but it takes place in modern times, and you play as a vampire or a werewolf or a ghost. Something that was once human but isn’t anymore. The goal is to cling to your humanity as long as possible.

The story is whatever you want it to be, but as you progress and become more powerful, you lose touch with what made you human. The less human you become, by definition, the more inhuman you become. Eventually, you lose all connection with humanity, and your character is done, consumed by darkness (hence the name “World of Darkness”).

I think about that a lot when I think about Elon Musk and Marc Andreesen and Peter Thiel and Donald Trump and his regime of unfathomably rich and powerful monsters.

Their money and power have disconnected them so thoroughly from their own humanity, they don’t even understand what it means to be human anymore. Elon Musk calls people “NPCs,” the acronym for “Non-Player Characters.” Those are the people in video games controlled by the computer. He doesn’t even see us as real.

Peter Thiel and Bryan Johnson, another creepy billionaire, inject themselves with the blood of teenagers in a desperate bid to stay young. Nothing inhuman about that, right?

Trump and Musk and Russ Vought, the “good Christian,” have engineered the death of hundreds of thousands of people in Africa through starvation.

Silicon Valley is overrun with billionaires and millionaires who openly talk about genocide because humans are worthless.

These are not people who wake up in the morning and experience human joy or happiness in any way whatsoever. They cannot because they are no longer truly human. They’re whatever their money and power have refashioned them into.

They cannot enjoy the same movies and music we all do, so they seek to control and destroy mass media.

They cannot love the same way we do so they seek to control and destroy all forms of love except that which conforms to their narrow definitions.

They cannot celebrate life the same way we do, or at all, really, so they seek to grind all joy from the world.

They no longer understand the rest of us because they no longer understand what it means to BE us. To love, to laugh, to experience happiness, to feel joy in little things for little reasons. All of that is gone from their lives, replaced by rage that someone, somewhere, is doing something a white Christian Nationalist does not approve of.

When the rich and powerful do not understand something, they fear it. And to fear is to hate. In turn, that hate moves them to lash out in violence because violence is easy and one of the few things that makes them feel better about being miserable all the time. Hurting others is one of the few balms to make them forget the emptiness of their own bleak lives.

In other times, this would make them an object of pity. Feel sorrow for the person whose only outlet is mindless rage. Ignore them and maybe they’ll go away. But these are dark times, and the monsters are on a murderous rampage. The only proper response is to beat them back into the darkness they crawled out of. To cut out their cancer and save what we can before they kill too many. To cage the monsters and make them pay for what they’ve done. To ensure that no one can ever accumulate enough money and power to strip them of their humanity like this again.

Oates has clearly identified the problem. It’s up to us to solve it.

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The Blue Wave is here! No matter what a handful of scumbag Democrats try to do to dissuade us, it cannot be stopped. There are 356 days until the most important midterm election in American history. The regime is afraid, and they should be. We are legion, and they are weak. Stay strong. You are never alone.