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Republicans passed their bill of nightmares and things are going to get so much worse which means we’re all going to get so much angrier. And louder. And there is going to be so many more of us in the streets.

Stephen Miller thinks he has his army of Nazis now? America knows how to deal with Nazis. That story ends with a lot of body bags filled with “the Master Race.”

Lots to catch up on this week, so grab your history books and let’s review how it all ended the LAST time for the Nazi regime…

Monday: Republicans passed their bill of horrors, but for a party claiming elections don’t matter anymore, they sure aren’t acting like it…

Tuesday: ICE agents are making a choice to be lawless and violent. There’s a light at the end of that tunnel and it shines through a rope.

Wednesday: Mr. Trump, I PROMISE that publicly humiliating the world’s richest man who is also an unstable junkie with delusions of grandeur and follows an insane religion will not have negative consequences for you. Honest!!!

Thursday: The Republicans on the Supreme Court push America further down the road of fascism.

Also Thursday! The June jobs report came out and it was…suspicious. We had thoughts about that.

Friday: July 4th - Took the day off. Did I celebrate? Nope because fuck fascism. Took my girls to buy manga and CDs instead.

5 Things I Found Interesting This Week

1. Trump is Bringing Back Enslavement - WTF did he mean by "owners?" He meant exactly what you're afraid he did by Tia Levings at What The Fundamentalist?!

2. 2026 looks apocalyptic for Republicans - While it's very early, Republicans look doomed during the midterms. by The Fascism Heckler at A mocking a day, keeps the Fascism away

3. Taking away your citizenship by Joyce Vance at Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance

4. When Does the Fucking Winning Start, MAGA? - Hating Everything Instead of Thriving Has to Be Damn Exhausting by The Mouthy Renegade Writer at You Have the Right to Remain Mouthy

5. CBS becomes a quisling of journalism - The network folds to Trump, joining other outlets betraying the free press. by Mark Jacobs at Stop The Presses

"Unleash market forces" has been a rallying cry of both the right and some nominally on the left for the past twenty-some years. The free market and private operators do everything better! Competition drives improvement! 

It's an okay argument for toasters. It's a terrible argument for education.

The free market does not foster superior quality; the free market fosters superior marketing. And as we've learned in the more recent past, the free market also fosters enshittification-- the business of trying to make more money by actively making the product worse (see: Google, Facebook, and any new product that requires you to subscribe to get the use of basic features). 

We know what competition drives in an education market-- a competition to capture the students who give you the most marketable "success" for the lowest cost. The most successful school is not one that has some great new pedagogical miracle, but the one that does the best job of keeping high-testing students ("Look at our numbers! We must be great!") and getting rid of the high-cost, low-scoring students. Or, if that's your jam, the success is the one that keeps away all those terrible LGBTQ and heathen non-believer students. The kind of school that lets parents select a school in tune with their 19th century values.

The market, we are repeatedly told, distinguishes between good schools and bad ones. But what does the free market do really, really well?

The free market distinguished between people who have money and people who don't.

This is what school choice is about, particularly the brand being pushed by the current regime.

"You know what I like about the free market," says Pat Gotbucks. "I can buy a Lexus. In fact, not only can I buy a Lexus, but if you can't, that's not my problem. I can buy really nice clothes, and if you can't, that's not my problem. Why can't everything work like that? Including health care and education?"

It's an ideology that believes in a layered society, in a world in which some people are better and some people are lesser. Betters are supposed to be in charge and enjoy wealth and the fruits of society's labor. Lessers are supposed to serve, make do with society's crumbs, and be happy about it. To try to mess with that by making the Betters give the Lessers help, by trying to elevate the Lessers with social safety nets or DEI programs-- that's an offense against God and man.

Why do so many voters ignore major issues in favor of tiny issues that barely affect anyone? Because the rich getting richer is part of the natural order of things, and trans girls playing girls sports is not.

What will the free market do for education? It will restore the natural order. It will mean that Pat Gotbucks can put their own kids in the very best schools and assert that what happens to poor kids or brown kids of Black kids or anybody else's kids is not Pat's problem. If Pat wants a benevolent tax dodge, Pat can contribute to a voucher program, confident that thanks to restrictive and discriminatory private school policies, Pat's dollars will not help educate Those People's Children. 

Pat's kids get to sit around a Harkness table at Philips Exeter, and the children of meat widgets get a micro-school, or some half-bakes AI tutor, and that's as it should be, because after all, it's their destiny to do society's grunt work and support their Betters. 

One of the huge challenges in this country has always been, since the first day a European set foot on the North American continent, that many folks simply don't believe that it is self-evident that all people are created equal. They believe that some people are better than others--more valuable, more important, more deserving of wealth, more entitled to rule. Consequently, they don't particularly believe in democracy, either, (and if they do, it's in some modified form in which only certain Real Americans should have a vote).

The argument for the many layers of status may be "merit" or achievement or race or "culture" or, God help us, genetics. But the bottom line is that some folks really are better than others, and that's an important and real part of life and trying to fix it or compensate for it is just wrong. For these folks, an education system designed to elevate certain people is just wrong, and a system that gives lots of educational opportunities to people whose proper destiny is flipping burgers or tightening bolts is just wasteful. 

For these folks, what the free market in education means is that people get the kind of education that is appropriate for their place in life, and that the system should be a multi-tiered system in which families get the education appropriate to their status in society. And it is not an incidental feature of such a system that the wealthy do not have to help finance education for Other Peoples' Children.  

It's an ideology that exists in opposition to what we say we are about as a nation and in fact announces itself with convoluted attempts to explain away the foundational ideas of this country. Public education is just one piece of the foundation, but it's an important one. 

This week, schools across the country were supposed to receive billions of dollars in aid. It was approved and designated by Congress. 

But the day before the money was supposed to go out, the Education Department, in one of its special unsigned emails, told states, "Nah, we don't want to."

The five targeted programs:

Title I-C for migrant education ($375 million)
Title II-A for professional development ($2.2 billion)
Title III-A for English-learner services ($890 million)
Title IV-A for academic enrichment ($1.3 billion)
Title IV-B for before- and after-school programs ($1.4 billion)

I was five years old when I came to understand my family’s close connection to the 4^th of July. My brother Frank and I were visiting my great grandmother, Mary Walker Randolph, and my great aunts Agnes and Mary Walker, at Wild Acres, the place they had bought in Charlottesville for my great grandmother to live out her last years. It was a little house on a creek in the woods just outside of town, with a long, straight drive off one of the local blacktops that ran out of town into the countryside.

At night, you could carry a folding lawn chair and walk to the end of their gravel drive and sit and watch a drive-in movie that showed on a screen across a field. The image on the screen was tiny in the distance – you could see the characters moving in the picture, but you couldn’t make out their faces, and of course, you couldn’t hear what they were saying. But for Frank and me, it was a thrill. We felt like we were stealing a ticket to the movie, while around us fireflies blinked and tree branches swayed and whispered in the darkness.

My great grandmother’s room was at the back of the house, overlooking a small field that ran down to the creek. Robert, their handyman, had dammed up the creek to create a hog wallow for the three or four pigs they kept in a pen outside a little outbuilding behind the house. Robert would let the pigs out during the day, and they would wander down to the creek to cool off from the stifling heat of a Virginia July, the month my grandparents drove us down from their house in Washington D.C. to visit my grandmother’s sisters and mother at Wild Acres. When the pigs had finished wallowing in the creek and the water had run clear, Frank and I would put on our swimming suits and play in the dammed-up area, turning over rocks looking for crayfish and watching minnows flash their silvery sides in the sun as we chased them.

When we walked back up the hill to the house, my great aunt Mary Walker, who we called Miss Moo, would run a tub, make sure we washed ourselves clean, and then dress us in Bermuda shorts and white collared shirts and take us to the back bedroom to visit Gran, as our great grandmother was called. She was born in 1866 at Edgehill, the Randolph family plantation that was at the bottom of the Monticello mountain, less than a mile up Louisa Road from Shadwell, the birthplace of Thomas Jefferson, to whom most of the Randolphs who populated Edgehill after Jefferson died were related. Gran was the great-great granddaughter of Thomas Jefferson Randolph, Jefferson’s first grandson, born to his daughter Martha and Thomas Mann Randolph, governor of Virginia from 1819 to 1822. Their eldest son, Thomas, inherited Edgehill from his father and mother. Born in 1792, Thomas and his mother, Martha, lived at Monticello and took care of Jefferson and ran the house and plantation during the last years of his life.

So, when Frank and I walked into the back bedroom in our clean shorts and our pressed shirts and shined shoes, we were visiting a woman who had spent the first nine years of her life living in the house at Edgehill with a man who had spent his early adulthood living at Monticello and caring for his grandfather, the man who wrote the Declaration of Independence. In fact, when my brother and I were in that room with our great grandmother, there was only one dead person, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, between Gran and us and Jefferson himself. Our country begins its 250^th year today, but as a nation, and especially as a democracy, we are in our infancy.

During our visits to Wild Acres, our great aunts would drive us up to Monticello in the morning to play, picking us up later in the afternoon. We spent the day free to explore the upstairs rooms in the house and play in the underground former slave quarters behind the house which were called “the Dependencies.” One summer on the 4^th of July, the day of Jefferson’s death in 1826, we were dressed once again in our shorts and little suit jackets and driven up to the graveyard where we lay a wreath on the grave of the man who by now we understood was our sixth great grandfather.

I have written about some of this before, and I’m telling these stories again to illustrate the kind of privilege Frank and I were born into just because we were Truscotts descended through the Randolphs from the third President of the United States. That day we laid the wreath on Jefferson’s grave is the only 4^th of July I can remember that our family treated as a special day. Our grandfather the famous general, our grandmother and great aunts and great uncles, all of whom had old Virginia accents that sounded British with a southern lilt, our connection to Monticello, the fact that we buried our great aunts and uncles in the Monticello graveyard, and then we buried our parents and our aunt Mary, and then we buried our brother Frank and our Uncle James – all of this was taken for granted. It was just who we were, the family we came from, the legacy we inherited by birth. That our legacy and we ourselves were thus part of American history was not lost on us. It just was what it was.

I have tried to use our family’s legacy for good. I invited our cousins from the Hemings family to the Monticello reunion for four years, trying to get the white side of the Jefferson family to accept our cousins descended from the union of Jefferson and his slave, Sally Hemings. It didn’t work. My brother and sisters and I and just one of our white cousins were the only ones to accept our Hemings cousins into the family when it came to a vote in 2002. We tried. Now it’s up to our children, and their children, to carry on the legacy of our family’s connection to the descendants of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. I don’t know if the two sides of the Jefferson family will ever come together, but I know that Truscott descendants will hold true to the legacy we laid down in the early part of this century.

My son, Lucian V, and my youngest daughter, Violet, spent two weeks at Monticello during the summers of 2017 and 2018, Lucian as an intern working in the gardens and Violet attending the Monticello day camp. In 2018, we were at Monticello on the 4^th of July, and they both worked at the naturalization ceremony that is held on the West lawn every year, handing out bottled water and seating families who had come to witness their relatives being sworn in as U.S. citizens. Monticello felt like a world apart on that 4^th of July. The ugliness of anti-immigrant sentiment and gangs of masked thugs were not yet running amok in towns and cities and factories and even schools and churches, rounding up immigrants and putting them in cages.

Another yearly naturalization ceremony was held at Monticello today, far away at the top of the mountain amongst the flowers and trees and beauty of that place and its history. But I will not celebrate this 4^th of July, commemorating the Declaration of Independence. I will not be proud of our history until the legacy of hate Donald Trump is attempting to force upon this country has been defeated and cast into ignominy.

I am proud of who I am, but I hate what this country has become. I swear I will endeavor to make good of the name and history I was bequeathed by my birth.

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You want to know how they’re going to do it? How they will hire a new bunch of unvetted, untrained, undisciplined, unidentified thugs in camo and masks, carrying handcuffs and armed with submachineguns? They’re going to pick up the phone and call some pimply-faced little DOGEoid they deposited in the Department of the Treasury, and they’re going to say, “can you type in this payment code, and send a few billion over here to DHS?”

A few billion – a partial payment, just to get things started, you understand -- will be sitting in the U.S. Treasury because the House and Senate just passed Trump’s Big Beautiful Bullshit Bill that is stuffed with either $110 billion or $130 billion, depending on who you talk to, earmarked for chasing down and detaining immigrants who are here in this country without proper immigration or naturalization documents. $30 billion or more is set aside in the bill for hiring, retention and paying bonuses – that’s right, bonuses – for new Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, as many as 10,000 of them. $10 billion is in the bill to pay for deputizing state and local police forces to aid ICE in arresting, interrogating, temporarily detaining, housing, and helping to deport immigrants. $45 billion is for the construction of new detention facilities like the Alligator Alcatraz concentration camp currently under construction in the Florida Everglades. The American Immigration Council says there is enough money in the bill for up to 116,000 new detention beds. Another $25 billion is dedicated to finishing the building of Trump’s wall on the Southern border, a project that has constructed a barrier of steel posts that those eager to cross the border can bend open with a common automobile tire jack.

Stephen Miller called Trump’s bill “the most essential piece of legislation in the entire Western World, in generations. The BBB will increase by orders of magnitude the scope, scale and speed of removing illegal and criminal aliens.” Today, the pinched-face little Eichmann of ICE posted, “This is our one chance to reverse decades of illicit mass migration.”

You have by now seen dozens of photos and videos of arrests of immigrants – and sometimes, American citizens – by these “squads” of camo-uniformed combat wannabees. That’s how the Department of Homeland Security refers to them, squads, because they don’t have anything else to call them. They’re not the FBI, a highly trained department of law enforcement professionals. They’re not U.S. Marshalls, another official force that is trained to track down and arrest people who have committed a specific set of federal crimes. They’re not agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, a federal department involved in enforcing laws regarding illegal trafficking in each of those areas.

ICE agents are supposed to be trained at the Homeland Security Investigations Academy at GLYNCO, the acronym for Glynn County Naval Air Station, a former naval military facility just outside Brunswick, Georgia. Class sizes at the academy average 24 to 48 students, and the training program lasts about 25 weeks. The first 12 weeks involve “foundational training and methodology concepts, which combines engaging classroom lectures, practical exercises, firearms, fitness and physical techniques,” according to the ICE website. The next 13 weeks are for the Homeland Security Special Agents Investigations program, including “extensive instruction on customs, immigration and other statutory legal authorities, as well as approximately 16 programmatic areas including, but not limited to, transnational gangs, cybercrime, financial investigations, child exploitation, weapons trafficking, strategic technology proliferation, narcotics trafficking and human trafficking.”

The application process involves an entrance exam, background check, medical exam including a drug test, a physical fitness test, and a polygraph exam. According to a website specializing in applying to become Border Patrol and ICE agents, the application process typically takes nine months.

Do you think these armed thugs wearing camo outfits and masks currently roaming the country arresting people have been through 25 weeks of training, and passed all the entrance requirements that take nine months to process?

Not a chance in hell.

They’re hiring brownshirts off the street, some of them probably out of militias like the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys and other wannabees who got turned down when they applied to become a cop of a fireman. You can look at their “uniforms” and see that they weren’t issued by ICE or any other federal agency. They’re wearing their own costumes, slapping a Velcro badge with “POLICE” on the back, getting into rented SUVs, driving where they’re told to go, getting out and making arrests that aren’t even real arrests because they don’t have warrants or any kind of official authority other than Kristi Noem and “Border Czar” Tom Homan, who in a recent speech to a right-wing Christian group, the Faith and Freedom Coalition, said “We need 100,000 beds. So I can fill 100,000 beds. We should be coming to work every day saying, Get everybody you can get. And we got the bed waitin’.” Homan told his crowd of followers of evangelical political powerbroker Ralph Reed, “If I offend anybody today, I don’t give a shit.” Then he went on to talk about his own version of the so-called “Great Replacement” theory, accusing the Biden administration of “opening the border on purpose” in order to build a power base of immigrants. “They knew exactly what they’re doing,” Homan bellowed. “They saw future political benefit on doing it. They thought millions of people coming into the country are going to be future Democratic voters. They sold this country out for future political power. And to me, that’s treasonous.”

That’s what the hundred billion in Trump’s big bill is about: Republican demographic panic about the future. They are in a campaign to round up, jail, and deport whoever they can find who doesn’t look or sound like white males. The way they’re doing it is with a new Gestapo of white, male camo-wearing thugs who have no official status, no legal authority except what they receive verbally from Homeland Security “leaders” like Noem and Homan and West Wing hall-worms like Stephen Miller.

Trump doesn’t need to declare martial law. The Congress of the United States just passed a law that gives him over $100 billion to put thugs on the street who mask themselves and hide their identities and use guns and camo costumes to intimidate their way into cities, neighborhoods, businesses, and homes and kidnap people whose skin color and native language is different than that of the likes of Stephen Miller and Donald Trump.

The Republican Party just raised their right hands in a Nazi salute and said, “Ja vol, mein Herr” to the dictator who is taking our tax dollars and using them to run roughshod over our Constitution and laws in the name of white supremacy. That’s what is going on in this country right now outside your door. It’s ugly, it’s dangerous, and people are already being beaten and killed because their skin is brown and they don’t have the same papers Elon Musk bought for himself with political connections and white skin when he crossed into the United States from South Africa to pretend he is an American.

With a Supreme Court that just allowed the deportation of eight immigrants to South Sudan – South Sudan, a war zone – and invalidated the orders of lower federal court judges who have displeased Donald Trump, we have ceased being a nation of laws. We are now a nation that has unloosed an unofficial, unaccountable, untrained, unvetted, undisciplined, unidentifiable Gestapo.

The only thing they haven’t yet done is to break into the homes of American citizens and arrest them without showing a warrant or a badge.

With $100 billion in bright, new, crisp bills to play with, that could be next.

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Eliminating debt is one of the most important financial goals a person can have—but how you do it matters just as much as doing it at all. Many people charge ahead with the intention of becoming debt-free, only to discover they’ve unknowingly damaged their credit score along the way. That can be a serious setback, especially when good credit is essential for everything from renting an apartment to qualifying for a mortgage.

In states like California, where the cost of living is high and credit access plays a significant role in financial stability, maintaining a strong score while reducing debt is more than just smart—it’s essential. That’s why many consumers turn to resources like debt relief in California, which focus on helping individuals reduce or restructure debt without creating long-term damage to their credit reports.

The truth is, you can pay off what you owe without sabotaging your credit. But to do it right, you need a strategy that respects both your financial health and the way credit scores actually work. Here’s how.

Understand What Affects Your Credit Score

Before diving into repayment tactics, it’s important to understand what factors actually impact your credit score. The five major components are:

• Payment history (35%) – Whether you pay on time.
• Amounts owed (30%) – How much of your available credit you’re using.
• Length of credit history (15%) – How long your accounts have been open.
• Credit mix (10%) – A combination of credit types (credit cards, loans, etc.).
• New credit (10%) – Recent credit inquiries and new accounts.

Knowing this, it’s clear why certain debt reduction strategies can actually hurt your score—even when they reduce what you owe.

Mistake #1: Closing Credit Cards Too Soon

It might feel satisfying to pay off a credit card and immediately close the account. But doing so can actually lower your credit score by reducing your available credit and shortening your credit history.

A better approach is to pay the balance to zero, then keep the card open (as long as it has no annual fee). Use it occasionally for small purchases you can pay off right away. This keeps your credit utilization low and your account active—both positive factors for your score.

Mistake #2: Skipping Payments to Prioritize Other Debts

Trying to focus on one debt at a time is smart, but not if it means neglecting others. Skipping payments, even temporarily, can cause serious harm to your credit score—especially if the account is reported as 30 days late or more.

If you’re overwhelmed, consider contacting your lenders or looking into reputable debt relief programs, which may be able to negotiate lower payments, deferments, or other solutions without wrecking your payment history.

Mistake #3: Settling Accounts Without a Plan

Debt settlement—where a creditor agrees to accept less than the full amount owed—can be tempting, especially if you’re behind on payments. But this route usually results in a negative remark on your credit report and may hurt your score for years.

If settlement is your only option, work with a trusted professional who can guide you through the process and minimize damage. Some debt relief programs in California are designed to help consumers negotiate with creditors while still preserving as much of their credit standing as possible.

Smarter Strategies for Reducing Debt

If your goal is to become debt-free and keep your credit healthy, these strategies can help:

1. Snowball or Avalanche Methods

• Snowball: Pay off the smallest debts first to build momentum.
• Avalanche: Tackle debts with the highest interest rates first to save the most money.

Either method works—as long as you make minimum payments on all other accounts to stay in good standing.

2. Balance Transfers and Lower Interest Options

If you have good credit, consider transferring high-interest balances to a card with a 0% introductory rate. Just be sure to pay it off before the promotional period ends, and avoid running up new debt.

Personal loans can also be used to consolidate multiple debts into one payment—ideally at a lower rate—with predictable monthly payments.

3. Automatic Payments and Budgeting

Set up autopay on all credit accounts to ensure you never miss a due date. Combine this with a realistic monthly budget that includes debt payments as a top priority.

Even small, consistent payments on time do more for your credit score than sporadic large ones made inconsistently.

When to Consider Professional Help

If you’re making minimum payments and your balances still aren’t budging, or if you’re missing payments entirely, it may be time to talk to a professional, or seek access to debt management plans, financial counseling, or negotiation support.

These services may be able to lower your interest rates or monthly payments—without requiring you to declare bankruptcy or suffer unnecessary credit damage.

The Bottom Line: Think Long-Term, Not Just Short-Term

Getting out of debt is a huge accomplishment, but it’s only part of the equation. Keeping your credit score intact ensures you’ll still have access to the financial tools you need once you’re debt-free.

Be strategic, stay consistent, and don’t hesitate to seek guidance from reputable resources if you feel overwhelmed. The goal isn’t just to escape debt—it’s to come out the other side with a stronger, healthier financial future.

Photo: Mikhail Nilov via Pexels.

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