Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – October 18, 2026
by Tony Wikrent
Coup-Proofing: Inside the Pentagon’s MAGA-to-Military-to-ICE Pipeline
Christopher Armitage, Oct 11, 2026 [The Existentialist Republic]
On May 28, 2025, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth signed a memo ordering every branch of the military to “prioritize and broadly advertise” Department of Homeland Security jobs to troops leaving the service. The memo told commanders to approve requests from departing troops to spend their final months interning with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection “to the maximum extent possible.” Michael Miller, who directs the Pentagon’s office for troops transitioning to civilian life, said the department typically does not recommend any specific career to separating service members. This time the department picked one.
That memo is the last step in a process called “coup proofing.” The first step is who the military is trying to recruit….
James Quinlivan, a RAND Corporation analyst, described militaries built for loyalty in a 1999 study in the journal International Security. He called the practice “coup-proofing.” The regimes he studied chose their commanders by family, tribe, sect and ethnicity before competence. They also built a second armed force outside the regular military, recruited it for loyalty, funded it separately, and gave it the missions the army might refuse. Saddam Hussein built the Republican Guard. Hafez al-Assad gave his brother a private army. In the United States the regular military is bound by the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which bars it from civilian policing. ICE sits outside that law.
The regular army is being emptied of the officers who would refuse an unlawful order, and the removals have landed hardest on Black and female officers. On the night of Feb. 21, 2025, Trump fired Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Hegseth fired Adm. Lisa Franchetti, the chief of naval operations, the same night, along with the judge advocates general of three services, the uniformed lawyers who tell commanders whether an order is legal. Days later he called such lawyers “roadblocks to orders that are given” by a commander in chief. In August 2025 Hegseth fired Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, two months after Kruse’s analysts drafted an assessment that contradicted Trump’s claim that U.S. strikes had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear sites.
In April 2026 Hegseth fired Gen. Randy George, the Army chief of staff, after George and Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll refused to strike four names from a list of 33 officers recommended for promotion to one-star general. Two of the four are Black men and the other two are women. By September 2026, The New York Times counted more than 80 generals and admirals fired or blocked from promotion, more than half of them Black or female, and military officials told the Times that the purge “does not appear to be driven by job performance.”….
The budget law Trump signed on July 4, 2025, funded the second facet of the coup-proofing process. It gave ICE roughly $75 billion over four years. By January 2026 the agency had hired 12,000 new officers and agents, more than doubling its officer corps to 22,000.
ICE’s minimum hiring age dropped to 18, and training was cut from 22 weeks to as little as 42 days. For 2026 the agency budgeted $100 million for what its own planning document calls “wartime recruitment,” with ads aimed at people who have attended UFC fights or listened to “patriotic podcasts,” The Washington Post reported….
Do they want to control what the troops hear? In October 2025, nearly every outlet in the Pentagon press corps, Fox News included, surrendered its credentials over new rules against gathering unapproved information. The Pentagon replaced them with more than 60 “new media” reporters, including Turning Point USA’s own outlet and far right activist Laura Loomer.
Do they want veterans with the extremism screen off? Maryland researchers found that about 85 percent of extremist offenders with military ties are veterans. Trump pardoned the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys convicted for Jan. 6. ICE’s 2026 plan pushes its ads to phones that pass through military bases, NASCAR races, college campuses and gun shows.
Do they want a force the courts cannot constrain? On Sept. 2, 2025, U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer in San Francisco ruled that the Los Angeles troop deployment violated the Posse Comitatus Act and warned of a “national police force.” In December, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in Trump v. Illinois that the administration had no authority to deploy the Guard in Chicago. Neither ruling touches ICE. A soldier who joins ICE keeps the training and leaves the legal limit behind.
So the process as outlined looks like this: recruit political zealots, remove the officers and lawyers who object to unlawful conduct, turn off the extremism screens, and send the graduates to a rapidly growing ICE that the law has not effectively constrained….
War on voting
Exclusive: How the Military Will Hack the Election
Ken Klippenstein [via Naked Capitalism 10-14-2026]
DOJ gives California 48 hours to act on alleged noncitizen voter list or face legal action
[Drop Site Daily, October 14, 2026]
In a Tuesday letter to California Secretary of State Shirley Weber, reviewed by Reuters, acting Deputy Attorney General R. Trent McCotter demanded the state take a series of actions related to a list of voters until their citizenship is confirmed, including segregating any returned ballots, or face legal action.
The letter escalates the administration’s pressure on states and suggests DOJ may challenge ballots before the Nov. 3 election. DOJ has repeatedly claimed noncitizen voting is widespread despite studies showing it is rare. DOJ’s Civil Rights Division has sued 30 states that refused to hand over voter data and has lost 26 cases without a win.
War
Christopher Armitage, Oct 11, 2026 [The Existentialist Republic]
… Yandex is the Kremlin’s information machine. It answers about 70% of search queries in Russia, according to the Centre for East European and International Studies in Berlin, which titled its 2024 report on the company “From Independent Tech Startup to Kremlin Propaganda Tool.” …. Cloudflare, the internet security company that fronts a large share of the world’s websites, measured automated requests from Yandex’s network at 0.4% of their two-week peak after the Vladimir strike. That count covers every automated program on Yandex’s servers that sends requests to websites, its search crawler among them, and nobody outside Yandex can see which of them went dark….
On September 18 The New York Times reported that United States intelligence found the Kremlin had authorized a covert online campaign for the midterm, and that every example researchers had attributed to Russia attacked a Democratic Senate candidate…. The United States government dismantled its own defenses against that campaign in 2025. Attorney General Pam Bondi dissolved the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force in February 2025. Congress let the State Department’s Global Engagement Center expire in December 2024, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio closed its successor office in April 2025. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard shrank the Foreign Malign Influence Center, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency pushed out more than a dozen officials who had monitored foreign election influence. I laid this out in my August Watchdog Report on the midterms….
Iran war costing average U.S. household $2K, economist estimates
[Seeking Alpha, via Naked Capitalism 10-13-2026]
Trump not violating any law
‘He who saves his Country does not violate any Law’
Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025 [Mediaite]
Chris Hedges, Oct 14, 2026
Investigative journalist Daniel Boguslaw uncovers collusion between law enforcement, Corporate America and academics to create new targets for the expanding US security state….
Hedges and Boguslaw begin by discussing the newest threat category, ‘anti-technology extremism,’ “a direct response to widespread protests over the building of these massive data centers and the increasing intrusion into our lives as well as their destructive power of artificial intelligence.” Then Boguslaw speaks about the long rise of fusion centers where Corporate America has partnered with local and federal law enforcement to use the “cloak of the state to give them more powers to persecute dissent.” ….
Brian Beutler, Oct 16, 2026 [Off Message]
… one of the most infuriating facts about the Trump era is that, for much of the past decade, he’s managed to neutralize corruption as a political liability. There’s truth and there’s what you can prove in the court of public opinion. While as a factual matter, Trump is far and away the most corrupt political figure in the history of the country—the people who believe Trump is dangerously corrupt have been well grounded in their belief—the general public has been split on the question of which of the country’s major political parties is more corrupt.
Indeed, voters frequently identify the Democratic Party as the more corrupt of the two. Trump loyalists won’t admit Trump is corrupt, or any more corrupt than a typical politician; Republican lifers won’t accept their party’s complicity. But they are all happy to believe or claim that the Democratic Party and its leadership are shot through with fraud.
This is simultaneously a triumph of propaganda and an artifact of institutional failure. Republicans built echo chambers designed to deliver received wisdom to a huge swath of the country, and they know corruption is a political liability. They’ve thus spent the entire decade assassinating the character of prominent Democrats, leveling false or exaggerated accusations of fraud and criminality against all factions of liberal society, while ignoring or denying Trump’s relentless crime spree.
This effort was easier than it should have been, though, because most Democratic leaders and the leaders of liberal institutions convinced themselves most citizens did not care about political corruption ….
Trump’s Sick Plan for Ilhan Omar Exposed
Hafiz Rashid, October 15, 2026 [The New Republic]
… The investigation ostensibly centers on whether Omar’s father put her age as 17 rather than 18 on her citizenship application to allow her to qualify immediately for citizenship alongside his own application. Omar became a citizen in 2000.
“They cheat on everything,” Trump said to an Ohio audience at a rally Monday about Somali Americans. “We’re not going to stand for it.”
Trump DHS Is Building Deranged Case Against Ilhan Omar
Edith Olmsted, October 16, 2026 [The New Republic]
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin revealed Friday that the Trump administration is hoping to bring a criminal conspiracy case against Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar….
“If someone comes in and claims—that fills out their paperwork illegally, and they claim that they are this person, and this is their background, and then underneath that individual, a lot of other people come in … then that can be considered a RICO case,” Mullin said.
“There was a conspiracy to deceive the American government, and therefore everything else that came in with it could then for be looked at as the same case,” the secretary said.
“Good thing about something like a case like that, is when it is a RICO case, that the statue of limitations on things, they don’t, they don’t apply. A few cases they do, but in most cases they don’t,” he added….
Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act
[Wikipedia]
… Under RICO, a person who has committed “at least two acts of racketeering activity” drawn from a list of 35 crimes (27 federal crimes and eight state crimes) within a 10-year period can be charged with racketeering if such acts are related in one of four specified ways to an enterprise.[6]
Those found guilty of racketeering can be fined up to $25,000 and sentenced to 20 years in prison per racketeering count.[7]
In addition, the racketeer must forfeit all ill-gotten gains and interest in any business gained through a pattern of racketeering activity.[8]
A US Attorney who indicts someone under RICO has the option of seeking a pre-trial restraining order or an injunction to temporarily seize a defendant’s assets and prevent the transfer of potentially forfeitable property as well as to require the defendant to put up a performance bond. An injunction or performance bond ensures that there is something to seize in the event of a guilty verdict.
This provision prevented the owners of Mafia-related shell corporations from absconding with assets. In many cases, the threat of a RICO indictment can force defendants to plead guilty to lesser charges, in part because the seizure of assets would make it difficult to pay a defense attorney.
Despite its harsh provisions, a RICO-related charge is considered easy to prove in court because it focuses on patterns of behavior as opposed to criminal acts….
There must be one of four specified relationships between the defendants and the enterprise. Either the defendants:
- invested the proceeds of the pattern of racketeering activity into the enterprise (18 U.S.C. § 1962(a)); or
- acquired or maintained an interest in, or control of, the enterprise through the pattern of racketeering activity (subsection (b)); or
- conducted or participated in the affairs of the enterprise “through” the pattern of racketeering activity (subsection (c)); or
- conspired to do one of the above (subsection (d))….
[TW: Looks like Trump and Mullin are going to stretch RICO beyond its original legislative intent. On the other hand, Trump and the (anti)Republicans have repeatedly claimed that the Somali community in Minnesota engages in widespread fraud. Which suggests premeditation — which in turn suggests something like the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025. ]
Judge orders cancellation of Trump’s government-funded ads
[The Hill, via Naked Capitalism 10-12-2026]
Jared Kushner’s Middle East Financial Ties Draw Scrutiny as US Funds Gaza Force
[Military.com, via Naked Capitalism 10-12-2026]
[International Business Times, via Naked Capitalism 10-14-2026]
ICE Planning $100 Million ‘Nightmare’ Domestic Spy Program
by Whitney Curry Wimbish, October 14, 2026 [The American Prospect]
Under ERO ONE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement plans to hire 142 intelligence contractors with top secret clearances and deploy them in cities across the country.
Spencer Ackerman, 13 Oct 2026 [FOREVER WARS]
DOGE
Michael Lewis on the Lone Security Guard Who Resisted DOGE
[Wall Street Journal, via The Big Picture, October 13, 2026]
In an exclusive excerpt from ‘Blockers,’ the inside story of the high-stakes D.C. standoff where security chief Colin O’Brien fought off DOGE operatives.
Supreme Court takes on public access to DOGE records
[Courthouse News Service, via Naked Capitalism 10-14-2026]
The Supreme Court agreed on Tuesday to review how much information the Trump administration can be forced to reveal about the now-defunct Department of Government Efficiency under public records requests.
Earlier this year, an appeals court ordered discovery into the structure and work of the U.S. DOGE Service under a Freedom of Information Act request from an ethics watchdog. The Trump administration pushed the justices to review the decision, arguing it intruded on the autonomy and confidentiality of presidential advisers….
Strategic Political Economy
The Grain Is There. The World’s Hungry Can’t Reach It. And El Niño Won’t Wait.
Mark Roberts [4Hunger.org, via Naked Capitalism 10-14-2026]
The world is not running out of grain this year. It is running out of grain that poor countries can reach at a price they can pay. Wheat is trapped behind closed ports by war, the world’s spare rice sits largely in one country, India, which may need it for its own people, and the world is eating into its maize reserves. Whether this becomes hunger and famine in 2027 now turns on two things: 1) whether this super El Niño spares India, Australia and South Africa, which hold much of the world’s spare grain and which previous strong El Niños pushed into drought; and 2) whether world leaders get humanitarian aid to the countries with no grain reserves before their harvests fail. The second is a choice, and the time to make it is now….
Africa: 800 Million Young People Face a Future Without Jobs
[allAfrica, via Naked Capitalism 10-14-2026]
Global power shift
Trump Is Gutting America’s Core Geopolitical Advantage
[Foreign Affairs, via The Big Picture, October 11, 2026]
Robert B. Zoellick, former US Trade Representative, deputy secretary of state and World Bank president, on the strategic cost of antagonizing Canada and Mexico.
America Didn’t Lose Its Rare Earth Industry. It Sold It.
[Lawfare, via The Big Picture, October 17, 2026]
Markets price for cost. China prices for control. The risk of a rare earths cutoff is asymmetric, and the financing to rebuild American supply should be too. Kirsten Asdal: Beijing’s rare-earth export controls have been suspended one short reprieve at a time since October 2025, the latest until Nov. 10. How the US ended up this dependent.
Gaza / Palestine / Israel
Israel’s New – and Terrifying – Security Doctrine
Trita Parsi [via Naked Capitalism 10-14-2026]
In a stunning piece published by the head of one of Israel’s most prominent think tanks, Maj. Gen. Tamir Hayman describes the reality of Israel’s new security doctrine:
A few crucial principles he describes:
1. The United States is a “declining power” and, given its ongoing social and political shifts, will soon abandon Israel in any event. This is compelling Israel to move toward greater self-reliance in order to avoid “excessive dependence” on the US since it “exposes Israel to the influence of a progressive American value system that is incompatible with Israel’s Jewish character.”
Then he concludes: “Severing ties with the United States is therefore not only inevitable, but essential to Israel’s independence and the resilience of its Jewish national identity.”
2. Primacy of Jewish Identity over Democracy: The state’s Jewish identity takes precedence over its democratic system of government.
3. Peace as a Means Rather Than an End….
4. “Rejection of the Independent Existence of Arab States….
5. “War as a Foundational State: War is essential to national security and cannot be replaced by a state of peace, which, as noted, is merely a means rather than an end…. War is necessary, and preventive war is preferable because it secures a significant achievement at the outset.” ….
Oligarchy
Veronica Riccobene, Oct 15, 2026 [The Lever]
[Hermes of the Threshold, via Naked Capitalism 10-13-2026]
GRAPH – The Global Public-Private Partnership
Inside Elon Musk’s $276 Million Midterm Rescue Mission for Republicans
[New York Times, Oct 13, 2026]
The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics
[Wolf Street, via Naked Capitalism 10-14-2026]
Car payments just hit a record $787 a month—and 1 in 4 new-car buyers is now signing a 7-year loan
[Fortune, via Naked Capitalism 10-16-2026]
How Expedia Rigs Travel Markets and Raises Your Hotel Prices
Lee Hepner, Oct 14, 2026 [BIG]
Health care crisis
[More Perfect Union, Oct 13, 2026]
The Trump administration is using AI to analyze Medicare prior authorizations, and companies get 25 percent of the “savings” the system generates.
We found two private equity firms, Carlyle Group and Patient Square Capital, backing this process….
Q3 2026: UnitedHealth’s Profits Soar as it Covers Fewer People, Pays Less for Care
[HEALTH CARE un-covered, via Naked Capitalism 10-14-2026]
Predatory finance
Frenzied Stock-Options Trading Shows Individual Investors Are Still Hungry for Risk
[Wall Street Journal, via The Big Picture, October 15, 2026]
Daily single-stock options volume is running near $700 billion, close to 2021 meme-mania levels, as retail traders look past rising rates, $100 oil and war. Trading in single-stock options contracts is near levels reached in 2021, when a new generation of amateur investors shook up Wall Street
[TW: US GDP in 2026 is estimated at $32.38 trillion, or $89.0 billion a day. In 1980, options trading was $45.8 billion for the entire year, compared to US annual GDP of $17.8 trillion.
[According to CBOE, the average daily value of stocks traded on the New York Stock Exchange is $176,990,302,863 and on NASDAQ $167,576,703,483. But these two exchanges now account for only 40 percent of daily stock trading. A slightly larger share of daily trading are off-exchange equity trades which are now reported through a Trade Reporting Facility (TRF) operated by one of three FINRA (Financial Industry Regulatory Authority Inc.) systems.]
How the Fed Is Quietly Inflating the AI Bubble While Hiking Your Electric Bill
Matt Stoller, Oct 17, 2026 [BIG]
When the Fed raises the price of money, it hikes electric bills, property taxes, mortgage and auto costs, and the price of working capital. It’s time to drop our illusions about the central bank.
They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals
Our economy is literally criminal
Robin McAlpine, 14 Oct 2026 [Common Weal, via Naked Capitalism 10-17-2026]
The Many Ways Trump Is Kneecapping White-Collar Crime Enforcement
Hannah Levintova, October 16, 2026 [Mother Jones]
Burying the Horrors of Epstein Island
[The Epstein Files by Julie K. Brown, via Naked Capitalism 10-12-2026]
Ken Paxton Partied in Dubai With Fugitives Ahead of High-Stakes Texas Senate Race
[Wall Street Journal, via Naked Capitalism 10-14-2026]
Scammers Are Stealing Millions From Food Stamp Recipients. Congress Could Fix It — but Won’t.
[ProPublica, via Naked Capitalism 10-14-2026]
Bank of America fined $1.2 billion over customer money laundering
[Drop Site Daily, October 14, 2026]
Bank of America has been fined a near-record $1.2 billion over its failures to monitor and report billions of dollars of suspicious transactions, the Treasury Department and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency announced on Tuesday.
The OCC’s civil penalty of $750 million, a significant portion of the $1.2 billion total, is the largest it has imposed. The Treasury Department separately announced an $11.6 million sanctions settlement. The Bank of America admitted that it willfully violated the Bank Secrecy Act, failing to maintain an adequate anti-money-laundering program, conduct due diligence on foreign-correspondent accounts, and file suspicious-activity reports.
Restoring balance to the economy
Christopher Armitage, Oct 13, 2026 [The Existentialist Republic]
One formula, 49 states, each figure built from the state’s own treasury records. The profit a state bank would’ve earned in 2025: California $2.26 billion, Texas $1.78 billion, New York $1.04 billion
Disrupting mainstream economics
Of Mathematics, mathiness, mythematics, and mathemagics
Steve Keen
Information age dystopia / surveillance state
Character.ai’s Bankruptcy Documents Show the Economics of AI Don’t Work
[404 Media, via thejackpot.blog/node/TodaysWaterCooler20261014]
“Character.ai’s bankruptcy is the one of the first dominos to fall in the long-foreseen AI bubble. The circumstances of its bankruptcy are exactly what critics of AI have been saying would happen: Character.ai lit a huge amount of money on fire running its product, did not bring in a lot of revenue, and faced enormous legal fees after causing harm to its users. Enshittifying its product to try to make its expenses cheaper did not work, according to a narrative filed in bankruptcy court Tuesday.” And: “Disney has reportedly offered Character.ai $20 million to license some of its intellectual property; Last year, Disney sent Character.ai a cease and desist letter demanding it stop using its copyrighted characters without permission. In 2023, it was valued at $1 billion after raising $150 million in a round led by a16z. ”
Whoopsie. Commentary:
The junk AI firms are crashing. Last week it was Firmus, then CharacterAI, now CoreWeave.
Firmus and CoreWeave are backed by Nvidia. These are the stocks that would be the first ones to crater in an AI bubble pop. https://t.co/WVwVSGURzX
— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) October 14, 2026
“Anthropic admits Houthis used Claude AI instead of weapons engineers to make rockets and ballistic missiles that correct themselves after missing targets” [Daily Mail]. • “Admits,” forsooth. Given that AI executives have no ethics or conscience, this is a sales pitch to the Pentagon.
Matt Stoller, Oct 11, 2026 [BIG]
A failed initial public offering from an Nvidia-backed “neocloud” called Firmus, run by a man with a criminal record, suggests the AI bubble is getting ready to burst.
How Meta Muse Profiles People Who Never Used It
Ken Macon, October 14, 2026 [reclaimthenet.org]
… Meta’s new personal agent, Muse, was built to learn the people in its users’ lives. That includes friends, exes, colleagues and siblings who have never opened it….
Israeli ad-tech company was a delivery system for “mercenary spyware”
Cory Doctorow, October 17, 2026 [Pluralistic]
… This allowed an Israeli spyware company called Discover-Tech (which masquerades as an ad-tech company) to sell totalitarian governments and sleazy corporate mercenaries the ability to pluck individual internet users out of the billions who log in every day and then serve “malicious ads” (that is, blobs of arbitrary code) to those targeted users. These malicious ads contained “no-click, zero-day” attacks, which meant that they exploited previously unknown vulnerabilities to take over devices without any user interaction. The mere act of loading a web-page or opening an app that relied on one of these gigantic ad-tech companies to serve ads was enough to compromise your device. No clicks needed, and no warning.
Among the targets of this attack campaign were the computers of workers at Al Jazeera. They were attacked with malware from the mercenary spyware company Candiru (which now calls itself “Integrity Labs” because irony is not dead). Beyond Candiru, Discover-Tech also facilitates attacks by numerous criminal mercenary spyware companies, serving ads on hundreds of thousands of sites and apps….
AI’s Supercharging a Scam Economy Bigger Than the Cocaine Trade
[Bloomberg, via Naked Capitalism 10-12-2026]
Google-CNN Deal to Integrate Generative AI Into News Platforms
[TeleSur, via Naked Capitalism 10-16-2026]
David Moore and Donald Shaw, Oct 15, 2026 [The Nation]
Climate and environmental crises
Solar Panels That Plug Into Your Wall Are About to Be Everywhere
(National Geographic, via The Big Picture, October 12, 2026]
California is the latest state to pass a law making it easier to install balcony-friendly solar panels. Renewable energy experts think the new technology is about to take off.
Driving Plug-in Solar Legislation State by State
[Brightsaver, via The Big Picture, October 12, 2026]
Plug-in solar, small panels that plug into the wall let renters and homeowners generate their own electricity, is being legalized state by state. The map below tracks legislation across all 50 U.S. states: Where bills have passed, where they’re advancing, and what’s next.
[Chatham House, via Naked Capitalism 10-17-2026]
Democrats’ political malpractice
Newsom Endorses Ballot Measure That Would Cancel Out Billionaire Tax—and Ban Future Wealth Taxes
Jake Johnson, Oct 11, 2026 [CommonDreams]
J Street Is Trying To Rescue Zionism In The Battle Over Israel’s Future In The Democratic Party
[Scheerpost, via Naked Capitalism 10-11-2026]
Resistance
Jason Linkins, October 18, 2026 [The New Republic]
… as TNR contributor Nacona Nix explained at length, the liberal commitment to civility theater does a lot of real-world harm: It’s currently one of the primary vectors by which antisocial and undemocratic ideas get laundered into respectability….
When Democrats win the House, they must investigate Elon Musk and bar future government contracts!
Dean Obeidallah, Oct 17, 2026
First, we learned earlier this week from The NY Times that Musk is the GOP’s top donor by far this midterm. He has quietly funneled more than $276 million into Republican groups and his super PAC since the start of July. By doing so, Musk has been building below the radar “a huge turnout operation to help the party battle headwinds in the midterm elections.”
But it’s worse than that! On Friday, we learned from The Washington Post that Musk has poured in even more as documented in new campaign finance filings on Thursday. How much? Musk has donated as of now $369 million of his own money into this year’s midterm elections! (Below is image from Washington Post article on GOP megadonors in 2026.)….
But it’s not just money. The Washington Post reported this week that Musk is using his X/Twitter platform to help Republicans—and especially to help defeat Talarico. Musk elevated a false conspiracy theory about Talarico over the past weekend claiming he didn’t take a break from the campaign trail because he had the flu but because of Talarico’s mental health.
Musk began is his campaign of lies Sunday afternoon when he replied to a post alleging that Talarico had been checked into the Lindner Center of Hope, a mental health facility in suburban Cincinnati. That is when Musk wrote, “The Talarico campaign is hiding something big that voters ought to know about.” Given Musk’s massive following and that he controls the algorithm for the platform, his reply went wildly viral….
Musk’s top priority is ensuring he is not investigated by Democrats if they win the House. That is why he is spending $400 million plus. And given Musk’s desperation, there are valid questions if he would use his technology to impact/steal the elections?!
When Democrats win the House, for starters there must be oversight over the billions Musk receives in US tax dollars for various contracts. SpaceX alone holds around $22 billion in government contracts. And Musk currently has at least 52 active contracts across seven federal agencies were on track to pay Musk’s companies an additional $11.8 billion.
Musk must publicly answer questions under oath before Congress if there has been waste, fraud or abuse?! Plus did Musk directly use any of the government money to fund campaigns—which would be illegal. Did Musk engage in an illegal campaign contribution by using X to spread lies to help candidates?
And while we are at it, we should investigate how exactly Musk became a citizen—which is relevant since he receives billions in US tax dollars by way of contracts. As The Washington Post reported back in 2024, Musk came to the US in 1995 on a student visa for a graduate degree program at Stanford University. But he never enrolled in courses. Per The Post, “that left Musk without a legal basis to remain in the United States.” Yet he remained and started a business in apparent violation of US immigration law….
Brian Beutler, Oct 14, 2026 [Off Message]
… Hold at least one prominent Republican truly accountable for dirty tricks or election crimes before date X. Do something to change the incentive structure that encourages Republicans to lie and cheat all the time, even if it’s at the margin….
Too often, Democrats conflate the concepts of exposure and accountability.
Exposure is an element of accountability. And in some cases it can be the lone ingredient that leads to accountability. Where shame still prevails, people exposed as liars, frauds, cheats, perverts, and abusers sometimes choose to make themselves scarce forever.
That’s accountability of a sort, mostly self-imposed.
But where shame is absent, exposure is only step one. Enforceable consequences must follow.
Democrats made this mistake most fatefully when they concluded that the January 6 insurrection had discredited Trump for all time. He’d been “exposed” and exposure would do most or all of their civic and political work for them. It’s why the Biden administration slow-walked its investigations of Trump’s attempted coup and the classified documents he stole, which in turn allowed Trump to escape justice, mount a political comeback, and pardon everyone….
And it’s why they choose, repeatedly, to look forward, not backward: The bad guys were exposed, we won the election—that’s incentive enough for them to change their ways.
No it’s not….
… exposure is insufficient as a goal. Today, various conservatives and GOP operatives will pretend to be embarrassed by Nick Sortor—the degenerate who published the Talarico libels. But this is just part of the larger act, an attempt to run this story out of the news now that the lies have done their damage. They publicly feign contempt for people like Sortor and James O’Keefe and Benny Johnson whenever they’re caught lying or promoting slander—then, when people have moved on, they’ll fete those very same people at private black tie events and funnel money their way. They see liars and cheaters as valued members of their movement. We’ll know we’ve imposed enough accountability when shame is restored and that calculation changes.
Conservative / Libertarian / (anti)Republican Drive to Civil War
The MAGA Cult: Why “Feelings” Trump Facts
[Lucas Bean Daily, via The Big Picture, October 13, 2026]
There is a question that haunts every person who has ever tried to have an evidence-based conversation with a MAGA supporter. How can they believe something with zero evidence behind it?
How Does the Run Towards Fascism Occur?
[Why Weak Americans Run Towards Fascism, via The Big Picture, October 11, 2026]
Why did people let Hitler take power? Not the inner circle. Not the military leaders or the party functionaries or the industrialists who funded the operation. The ordinary people. The shopkeepers and teachers and factory workers and farmers who watched a democratic republic dismantle itself and did not just allow it to happen but cheered while it did.
(anti)Republican clown car
An Ad Targeting Susan Collins’s Opponent Airs in the Wrong Portland
An executive with the Republican super PAC that paid for the ad attacking Troy Jackson, the Democratic Senate candidate in Maine, blamed its vendor for running the ad in Oregon.
By John Yoon [New York Times]
Why Conservative Men Can’t Spell
[Lucas Bean Daily, via The Big Picture, October 11, 2026]
Lucas Bean takes Richard Hofstadter’s 1963 definition of anti-intellectualism, resentment of the life of the mind rather than ignorance, and applies it to MAGA.
Civic republicanism
What’s at Stake in the Omar Case
John Ganz, Oct 15, 2026 [Unpopular Front]
Yesterday evening, The Wall Street Journal reported “Ilhan Omar Investigation Aims to Build Case for Stripping Her Citizenship.” The repeated failure of this regime to prosecute its enemies—its manifest incompetence in all of its endeavors, really—has perhaps muted the alarm with which the news about Omar’s denaturalization case ought to be greeted.
Consider the gravity of all this: the executive is attempting to cast an opponent out of the political community entirely; this attempted expulsion is undoubtedly driven by racial and religious animus—vicious hostility to Somali-Americans is a central part of MAGA politics. She is not merely a private citizen or even an outspoken critic of the administration: She is an elected representative of the American people. The executive is attempting to deprive a member of an equal branch of government of the status that entitles her to participate in the constitutional order: They are attacking not just her rights, but her very right to have rights.
One’s personal opinion of Omar’s character or her politics is immaterial. This is a serious assault on the constitutional order being carried out through the executive branch’s legal and bureaucratic machinery. Perhaps the reason that the public response is so tepid is that we have so long taken for granted—or simply no longer understand—just how fundamental the questions involved really are. This move strikes at some of the most elementary assumptions of a free and republican government, principles so basic that we scarcely imagined they would need defending: that political opposition is legitimate, that the executive cannot determine the composition of the legislature, and that citizenship is not a privilege held at the pleasure of those in power.
We often hear that we face creeping authoritarianism in this country, but it would be more precise to call this a case of creeping totalitarianism. Authoritarian governments suppress political opposition and deprive their subjects of particular rights. Totalitarian movements aspire to something much more radical: the destruction of independent political and juridical personhood. They attack not merely the liberties of particular citizens they seek to repress, but the concept of citizenship itself—and then, ultimately, the concept of shared humanity….
Since the beginning, it’s been my contention that the attack on citizenship itself is both the very essence of the Trump movement and its most dangerous feature. From birtherism to the stolen-election myth, Trumpism can be understood as the notion that some Americans are not really Americans, that their political rights are illegitimate, and that the nation must be purged of these interlopers….
Henry Giroux: America’s Descent Into Fascism—and the Struggle to Build a Different Future
Sharon Kyle, Dick Price and Henry A. Giroux, Oct 9, 2026 [LA Progressive]
What happens when cruelty becomes a governing philosophy? When political leaders celebrate violence, billionaires wield extraordinary influence over government, and institutions supposedly designed to defend democracy become instruments of repression?
These questions were at the center of our recent conversation with political theorist Henry Giroux, whose latest LA Progressive essay, “The Politics of the Abyss: MAGA, Moral Rot, and the Struggle for the Future,” examines what he considers the accelerating collapse of America’s democratic and moral foundations….
Giroux argued that decades of neoliberalism have encouraged Americans to understand themselves primarily as isolated individuals competing for personal advantage.
Under this ideology, self-interest becomes the organizing principle of society, empathy becomes a liability, and solidarity is displaced by competition.
“We live in a country that should be appropriately called gangster capitalism,” he declared.
And, in his formulation, gangster capitalism produces a population increasingly accustomed to its values.
The Powell Memo and the Counterrevolution Against the 1960s
One of the most revealing exchanges occurred when Sharon raised the 1971 Powell Memo, written by corporate attorney Lewis Powell shortly before his appointment to the Supreme Court.
Christopher Armitage, Oct 17, 2026 [The Existentialist Republic]
