#Chuck Cox

[unbreakablemouserat]

I don't know if this archetype meme is accurate for all of them please correct me if it isn't.

Made this because Scrubs, Psych and Chuck are very recent hyperfixations.

[skullislandproductions]

Bugs Bunny and Clark Kent get down to business in this Looney Tunes variant cover by Neil Edwards, Jay Leisten and Jeromy Cox for “Action Comics” issue 46, 2015. I provided the drawing of Bugs to be included in the cover art.

[mrmousetolliver]

Jason Cox by John Lally

[cauldronofmorning]

The only problem I have with “actors aren’t word of god with what their character does” is sometimes the actor opinion is so much more juicy than what fanon comes up with.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Mike Luckovich

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

February 21, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

The centerpiece of Republicans’ case for impeaching Democratic president Joe Biden is the allegation that he and his son Hunter each accepted a $5 million bribe from Ukrainian oil and gas company Burisma when Biden Sr. was vice president. But in the last week, that accusation has revealed quite a different problem, one that implicates Republicans. 

The accusation that the Bidens accepted bribes broke into public channels on May 3, 2023, when Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Representative James Comer (R-KY), chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, wrote to Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray saying they had received “highly credible…whistleblower disclosures” that said the Department of Justice and the FBI appeared to have “valuable, verifiable information that you have failed to disclose to the American people.” 

Grassley and Comer claimed there was “growing concern about the DOJ and the FBI’s track record of allowing political bias to infect their decision-making process,” and so Congress would be conducting its own “independent and objective review of this matter.” 

Comer then issued a subpoena for the document containing the information, a so-called FD-1023, which is the form used by FBI agents to record “raw, unverified” information from confidential informants. In it, informant Alexander Smirnov made a number of allegations about the Bidens, including that they had accepted bribes. 

In July, Grassley and Comer got the document and showed it to others in a secure facility. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) saw it there, took pictures of it, and posted them on social media. She claimed that “Joe Biden is a criminal and is compromised” and that he was backing Ukraine in its fight against Russia’s invasion because Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky “has proof of more Biden crimes.” “IMPEACH BIDEN,” she wrote.

Grassley also released it, suggesting that the Justice Department and the FBI were trying to cover up a “criminal bribery scheme” implicating the Bidens. Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) jumped in, saying: “Every day, the evidence keeps mounting and the evidence that is coming in is number one, of a widespread bribery scheme of Joe Biden and Hunter Biden and the entire Biden family, to extract bribes from foreign nationals.” 

The idea that Biden had accepted bribes was central to the House impeachment effort that then–House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) announced in September 2023.

That story fell apart a week ago, on February 14, 2024, when a federal grand jury indicted Smirnov for lying and “creating a false and fictitious record.” 

And the story became even more troubling yesterday, when Trump-appointed Special Counsel David Weiss of the Justice Department filed a document establishing that the informant, Alexander Smirnov, has “extensive and extremely recent” ties with “Russian intelligence agencies.” 

The filing revealed other, more recent, false allegations Smirnov had made, and concluded that “Smirnov’s efforts to spread misinformation about a candidate of one of the two major parties in the United States continues…. What this shows is that the misinformation he is spreading is not confined to 2020. He is actively peddling new lies that could impact U.S. elections after meeting with Russian intelligence officials in November.” 

Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD), the top Democrat on the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, told reporters today that “the impeachment investigation essentially ended yesterday, in substance if not in form, with the explosive revelation that Mr. Smirnov’s allegations about Ukrainian Burisma payments to Joe Biden were concocted along with Russian intelligence agents. And it appears like the whole thing was not only obviously false and fraudulent but a product of Russian disinformation and propaganda. And that’s been the motor force behind this investigation for more than a year.”

The Republican release of Smirnov’s allegations in July 2023 did not happen in a vacuum: they came right after the Republican-led House censured Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA) for “misleading the American public and for conduct unbecoming of an elected Member of the House of Representatives,” including “spread[ing] false accusations that the [2016] Trump campaign colluded with Russia.”

But the Mueller Report concluded that “[t]he Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion” and that “the Campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts.” The Senate Intelligence Committee Report found that “the Russian government engaged in an aggressive, multifaceted effort to influence…the outcome of the 2016 presidential election” and that Trump campaign advisor Paul Manafort worked directly with Konstantin Kilimnik, “a Russian intelligence officer.”  

That effort continued in 2020, with the U.S. intelligence community assessing in March 2021 that “Russian President Putin authorized, and a range of Russian government organizations conducted, influence operations aimed at denigrating President Biden’s candidacy and the Democratic Party, supporting former President Trump, undermining public confidence in the electoral process, and exacerbating sociopolitical divisions in the US.”

That foreign countries try to influence elections is far less a surprise than that one of the two major U.S. political parties now appears to be, wittingly or not, working on their behalf.

That willingness to do anything to win—even working with a foreign dictator—seems a logical outgrowth of the process begun during the administration of President Richard Nixon, when his people deliberately appealed to voters’ emotions with a picture of traditional America under siege by antiwar student activists, people of color, and feminist women. 

To rally voters to their party in the 1970s midterms, Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew engaged in what they called “positive polarization.” Nixon’s speechwriter Pat Buchanan wrote a memo to Nixon warning: “We are in a contest over the soul of the country now and the decision will not be some middle compromise…. It will be their kind of society or ours.” 

The theme that the Republicans' opponents were dangerous socialists out to destroy the country became the centerpiece of Republican rhetoric. From President Ronald Reagan’s welfare queen, who was scamming the system and thus taxpayers, through talk radio host Rush Limbaugh’s “feminazis,” to Trump’s claim that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” the party has defined itself as “true America” standing against enemies.

And if you believe you are fighting for the right, it only makes sense to do whatever it takes to win.

Meanwhile, that belief has now overlapped with the evangelical base that supports what it considers traditional values so that, as Alexander Ward and Heidi Przybyla outlined in Politico yesterday, the party is now advancing plans to impose Christian nationalism on the country. Leaders of the Christian nationalist movement incorrectly believe that the United States was founded as a Christian nation, so they intend to rest the government and public life on what they consider to be Christian values. 

In December, Trump promised: “Upon taking office, I will create a new federal task force on fighting anti-Christian bias to be led by a fully reformed Department of Justice.” 

What that might look like became clear this week when the Alabama Supreme Court decided in a wrongful death suit resulting from the accidental destruction of embryos that were part of an in vitro fertilization (IVF) process, in which doctors artificially fertilize eggs outside the womb and then transfer them into a person, that fertilized human eggs have the same status as children. Chief Justice Tom Parker declared in a concurring opinion that the people of Alabama have adopted the “theologically based view” that “life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God.”

About 2% of U.S. births are a product of IVF. Today the largest healthcare system in Alabama has announced it is halting its IVF program out of fear of prosecution. 

Reworking the nation to impose Christian nationalism requires minority rule, which aligns with the ideology of authoritarianism, enabling Trump and those who share his views to praise someone like Vladimir Putin. And, it seems, to accept his help winning elections.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[sentinelleblr]

"In 1958, in a speech to the American Jewish Congress, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “My people were brought to America in chains. Your people were driven here to escape the chains fashioned for them in Europe. Our unity is born of our common struggle for centuries, not only to rid ourselves of bondage, but to make oppression of any people by others an impossibility.” 

Schumer begged the American people “of all creeds and backgrounds” to defend the “pluralistic, multiethnic democracy” that has enabled Jewish people in the United States “to flourish alongside so many other immigrant groups.” 

He asked them to “learn the history of the Jewish people, who have been abandoned repeatedly by their fellow countrymen—left isolated and alone to combat antisemitism—with disastrous results,” and to “reject the illogical and antisemitic double standard that is once again being applied to the plight of Jewish victims and hostages, to some of the actions of the Israeli government"

[oneofusnet]

Highly Suspect Reviews: The Life of Chuck THE LIFE OF CHUCK MOVIE REVIEW The latest Stephen King adaptation isn’t a horror movie, although there is an apocalypse underway and a LOT of existential dread in the first (or third, as marked) act. No, it’s a feel-good, tear-jerker, ‘enjoy your life because it doesn’t last forever’ inspirational film. It’s also told in reverse order and is filled with internal easter eggs and puzzles to decipher. Sound confusing? It’s directed and the screenplay written by Mike Flanagan, and if you’re familiar with his work (Doctor Sleep, The Haunting of Hill House) you probably can sorta kinda get an idea […] read more on

[lenbryant]

Context is Queen.

[fclocalyokel]

The final countdown of 2023!

Another tradition at the Yokel is a recap of our top 10 posts of the year. If you haven’t checked out our In and Out list ,be sure to take a gander at that as well. Let us begin…. 10. Indicted sheriff, bored retirees, and attempted book bannings! What a summer we are having in Olde Fredericktowne! At #10 is our summer lament about the High Sheriff claiming he got tricked, horrible…

[shu-of-the-wind]

my favorite celebrity fun fact is that charlie cox, who plays matt murdock in netflix's daredevil, has spent so long/sunk so deep into matt as a character that he struggles with making eye contact with other people while acting. like he's bombed auditions because he's doing the entire audition....WITHOUT looking at the other person in the scene at all

and all that is to say. the fact that he seems to have completely KILLED his voice acting work in clair obscur says to me:

charlie. chuck. my man. you have an opportunity here to keep acting without EVER HAVING TO LOOK AT ANOTHER HUMAN BEING EVER AGAIN

[salemoleander]

lost in the dark (Hunger AU) webweave

Created as a tribute to the absolutely incredible fic @definitelynotshouting is writing, up to the current plot beat!

// Sources under readmore //

What is a webweave? Previous art: Third Life | Void Falling | Attempt 33 | Martyn | Limited Life | Nightingale Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | singing songs to the secrets behind my eye | A Hundred Things We Had Not Dreamed Of | solving counting sheep

Pt. 1: Flutter / Valerie Hammond ◆ Sanssouci Palace + The Black Ice Cream Song edit / @mountainqoats ◆ Excerpt from The Average Fourth Grader is a Better Poet Than You (And Me Too) / Hannah Gamble via @blackberryjambaby ◆ of course i bite textpost / @valtsv ◆ Lie Down / Ellen Jenkins ◆ 27 / Daniil Kharms trans. Matvei Yankelevich ◆ Embrace my Soul / Sergio Borga ◆ Color Changing Magic Potion / DirksenCraft ◆ Fragile Bird / @cocoabats ◆ Holding Onto Black Metal / Debra Baxter ◆ Excerpt from III. The Child / Quinn Newell via @voicedwords ◆ Crawler Pot / Rose Schmits ◆ Metamorph / Gunnel Watkins ◆ Untitled eye / Henrik Aa Uldalen ◆ tumblr guide for chad twitter users (real) / @arahir ◆ the best way to solve problems tweet / @wolfpupy

Pt. 2: Reoccurring Nightmare comic / @deep-dark-fears ◆ Knotted Serpentine / Hannah Russell ◆ Garden + Blues in Dallas edit / @mountainqoats ◆ The Watching Moth / Cady Shaye Poorman ◆ NOCTURNAL Series 11 of 20 / Santiago Caruso ◆ Watching Moth / Cady Shaye Poorman ◆ Afterglow / Pei Wang ◆ Sun in an Empty Room + The Young Thousands edit / @mountainqoats ◆ Study for "Mathematics," "The Sciences" / Kenyon Cox ◆ Hard to Swallow / Debra Baxter ◆ Molly Brodak / Molly Brodak via @kafk-a ◆ 02112022, S.T. / @ryebreadgf ◆ Woman with Red Hood / Alice Pike Barney ◆ Come On, Motherfucker, You Survived! / @selfhealingmoments ◆ Excerpt from The Blind Assassin / Margaret Atwood via @flowerytale ◆ Heirloom II / Cindy Rizza

Pt. 3: Excerpt from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock / T.S. Eliot ◆ i love you. i can't tell you / @/tturing (OP altered, original contents linked) ◆ Hope is the Thing - Sunset Flight / Erica Wagner ◆ Poppies + Nova Scotia edit / @mountainqoats ◆ Untitled (open/end) / Debra Baxter ◆ Excerpt from Alive at the End of the World / Saeed Jones via @geryone ◆ Weeping (Lamentacia) / Dezider Toth via @amare-habeo ◆ NOCTURNAL Series 7 of 20 / Santiago Caruso ◆ Fridge Funerary Epitaph / @catilinas ◆ Untitled (Trail of eyes) / @julialepetit ◆ Stained Glass Hellebore, California Poppy, + Poppy / Jessica Saunders ◆ 世界の声が聞こえるとき (When the voice of the world is heard) / Tomohiro Inaba ◆ Still from Don't make me do this again gif / @cibastion ◆ Excerpt from So I Locked Myself Inside a Star for Twenty Years / Jeremy Radin ◆ Excerpt from Invisible Monsters / Chuck Palahniuk via @quotespile ◆ Potion Bottles / Edited from Panel 1 Source

[unbreakablemouserat]

A small follow-up from the meme the I created earlier this January (that in hindsight I should've made it better ngl) but you people on Tumblr are telling me these dork main characters have sexual tension with the respective tough guy they share their screentime with?

[skullislandproductions]

Bugs Bunny suits up with one of his super friends!

[0kurakura0]

In case we ever lose our spark together w/ Cod Men (GN!Reader)

Gaz

the two of you are just relaxing in bed when all of a sudden you turn over to him and press your taser making a loud noise

"BLOODY HELL"

He says as he jumps out of bed you just look at him.

"It's just in case we lose our spark"

you say as you look at him innocently.

"ARE YOU MAD" "WERE IN HELL DID YOU EVEN GET THAT"

"ghost gave it to me"

After an hour of coxing the taser out of your hand, Gaz, as if you were holding a bomb, you finally hand it over, but both of you lay back in bed before going back to sleep. Well, for the most part, Gaz stays awake, fearing being tased at night.

Soap

Soap was just helping cook dinner for the night when he heard shuffling behind him, and before he could turn around he felt a sudden shock at his side.

"FUCK"

he shouts as he turns around to see you holding a taser as you simply say.

"just wanted to make sure we never lose our spark"

with a devilish smile, you tase him again.

Soap screams again as he jumps away a picks up a chair to guard himself from you.

"YER AFF YER HEID, STAY AWAY FROM ME!"

"O come on Soap fell my sparks of love"

you press the taser again, and it gives off a scary electric noise. The rest of the night just consisted of you chasing Soap around the house. Hopefully, the neighbors don't call the police from all the screams.

Ghost

"GHOST! GHOST! LOOK WHAT I FOUND!"

you run up to the soldier as you have a hand up, waving something above your head. Ghost turns around to look at you.

"Looks at this thing LT if we ever those our spark I can just use this on ya."

You say smiling before turning the military-level taser on in your hand as it gives off a loud and violent zapping sound.

Ghost just stares at you in both disapproval and annoyance before saying

"let me see that real quick"

you smile, giving it over to him.

"cool right Soap found it in the crate with the new equipme-"

before you can finish your sentence, Ghost chucks the taser out the window immediately as he has a hold of it.

"LT WHAT NOOOO!!! MY SPARKS OF LOVE GONE TOSED OUT LIKE NOTHING HOW COULD YOU!"

"shut your trap already"

Price

the both of you are just relaxing till you look over at John

"John you need to let me know if you ever feel like our spark is fading between us okay"

"what the hell are you yapping about you know that wouldn't happen"

"I know but just in case..."

you all of a sudden pull out a small taser and press the button on the side causing it to go off.

"BLOODY HELL, WHY DO YOU HAVE THAT"

"IN CASE WE EVER LOSE OUR SPARK"

John gets up and snatches the taser out of your hand.

"bloody hell, love, you're going to give me a heartache one of these days"

EXTRA (because I hate Graves)

"you know what you did there wasn't very cash money of you Graves, I think you need to feel my sparks of love"

"what in gods name are you talking abo-"

He is cut off by his own screams as you tase him with 50,000 volts of "love"

[gnatsunemiku]

they are trying to steal an eliot. he does not find this amusing (he does)

i finally found a live action tv show where my favorite characters aren’t the most impossible people in the cast to draw [wilson, house md / lassie, psych / dr cox, scrubs / casey, chuck] everyone cheer!!! i still need to work on parker a bit but i think shes recognizable enough.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

February 4, 2025

Heather Cox Richardson

Feb 05, 2025

Shortly after 1:00 this morning, Vittoria Elliott, Dhruv Mehrotra, Leah Feiger, and Tim Marchman of Wired reported that, according to three of their sources, “[a] 25-year-old engineer named Marko Elez, who previously worked for two Elon Musk companies [SpaceX and X], has direct access to Treasury Department systems responsible for nearly all payments made by the US government.”

According to the reporters, Elez apparently has the privileges to write code on the programs at the Bureau of Fiscal Service that control more than 20% of the U.S. economy, including government payments of veterans’ benefits, Social Security benefits, and veterans’ pay. The admin privileges he has typically permit a user “to log in to servers through secure shell access, navigate the entire file system, change user permissions, and delete or modify critical files. That could allow someone to bypass the security measures of, and potentially cause irreversible changes to, the very systems they have access to.”

“If you would have asked me a week ago” if an outsider could’ve been given access to a government server, one federal IT worker told the Wired reporters, “I'd have told you that this kind of thing would never in a million years happen. But now, who the f*ck knows."

The reporters note that control of the Bureau of Fiscal Service computers could enable someone to cut off monies to specific agencies or even individuals. “Will DOGE cut funding to programs approved by Congress that Donald Trump decides he doesn’t like?” asked Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) yesterday. “What about cancer research? Food banks? School lunches? Veterans aid? Literacy programs? Small business loans?”

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo reported that his sources said that Elez and possibly others got full admin access to the Treasury computers on Friday, January 31, and that he—or they—have “already made extensive changes to the code base for the payment system.” They are leaning on existing staff in the agency for help, which those workers have provided reluctantly in hopes of keeping the entire system from crashing. Marshall reports those staffers are “freaking out.” The system is due to undergo a migration to another system this weekend; how the changes will interact with that long-planned migration is unclear.

The changes, Marshall’s sources tell him, “all seem to relate to creating new paths to block payments and possibly leave less visibility into what has been blocked.”

Both Wired and the New York Times reported yesterday that Musk’s team intends to cut government workers and to use artificial intelligence, or AI, to make budget cuts and to find waste and abuse in the federal government.

Today Jason Koebler, Joseph Cox, and Emanuel Maiberg of 404 Media reported that they had obtained the audio of a meeting held Monday by Thomas Shedd for government technology workers. Shedd is a former Musk employee at Tesla who is now leading the General Services Administration’s Technology Transformation Services (TTS), the team that is recoding the government programs.

At the meeting, Shedd told government workers that “things are going to get intense” as his team creates “AI coding agents” to write software that would, for example, change the way logging into the government systems works. Currently, that software cannot access any information about individuals; as the reporters note, login.gov currently assures users that it “does not affect or have any information related to the specific agency you are trying to access.”

But Shedd said they were working through how to change that login “to further identify individuals and detect and prevent fraud.”

When a government employee pointed out that the Privacy Act makes it illegal for agencies to share personal information without consent, Shedd appeared unfazed by the idea they were trying something illegal. “The idea would be that folks would give consent to help with the login flow, but again, that's an example of something that we have a vision, that needs [to be] worked on, and needs clarified. And if we hit a roadblock, then we hit a roadblock. But we still should push forward and see what we can do.”

A government employee told Koebler, Cox, and Maiberg that using AI coding agents is a major security risk. “Government software is concerned with things like foreign adversaries attempting to insert backdoors into government code. With code generated by AI, it seems possible that security vulnerabilities could be introduced unintentionally. Or could be introduced intentionally via an AI-related exploit that creates obfuscated code that includes vulnerabilities that might expose the data of American citizens or of national security importance.”

A blizzard of lawsuits has greeted Musk’s campaign and other Trump administration efforts to undermine Congress. Today, Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Representative Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), the minority leaders in their respective chambers, announced they were introducing legislation to stop Musk’s unlawful actions in the Treasury’s payment systems and to protect Americans, calling it “Stop the Steal,” a play on Trump’s false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.

This evening, Democratic lawmakers and hundreds of protesters rallied at the Treasury Department to take a stand against Musk’s hostile takeover of the U.S. Treasury payment system. “Nobody Elected Elon,” their signs read. “He has access to all our information, our Social Security numbers, the federal payment system,” Representative Maxwell Frost (D-FL) said. “What’s going to stop him from stealing taxpayer money?”

Tonight, the Washington Post noted that Musk’s actions “appear to violate federal law.” David Super of Georgetown Law School told journalists Jeff Stein, Dan Diamond, Faiz Siddiqui, Cat Zakrzewski, Hannah Natanson, and Jacqueline Alemany: “So many of these things are so wildly illegal that I think they’re playing a quantity game and assuming the system can’t react to all this illegality at once.”

Musk’s takeover of the U.S. government to override Congress and dictate what programs he considers worthwhile is a logical outcome of forty years of Republican rhetoric. After World War II, members of both political parties agreed that the government should regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, promote infrastructure, and protect civil rights. The idea was to use tax dollars to create national wealth. The government would hold the economic playing field level by protecting every American’s access to education, healthcare, transportation and communication, employment, and resources so that anyone could work hard and rise to prosperity.

Businessmen who opposed regulation and taxes tried to convince voters to abandon this system but had no luck. The liberal consensus—“liberal” because it used the government to protect individual freedom, and “consensus” because it enjoyed wide support—won the votes of members of both major political parties.

But those opposed to the liberal consensus gained traction after the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, decision declared segregation in the public schools unconstitutional. Three years later, in 1957, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a Republican, sent troops to help desegregate Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. Those trying to tear apart the liberal consensus used the crisis to warn voters that the programs in place to help all Americans build the nation as they rose to prosperity were really an attempt to redistribute cash from white taxpayers to undeserving racial minorities, especially Black Americans. Such programs were, opponents insisted, a form of socialism, or even communism.

That argument worked to undermine white support for the liberal consensus. Over the years, Republican voters increasingly abandoned the idea of using tax money to help Americans build wealth.

When majorities continued to support the liberal consensus, Republicans responded by suppressing the vote, rigging the system through gerrymandering, and flooding our political system with dark money and using right-wing media to push propaganda. Republicans came to believe that they were the only legitimate lawmakers in the nation; when Democrats won, the election must have been rigged. Even so, they were unable to destroy the post–World War II government completely because policies like the destruction of Social Security and Medicaid, or the elimination of the Department of Education, remained unpopular.

Now, MAGA Republicans in charge of the government have made it clear they intend to get rid of that government once and for all. Trump’s nominee to direct the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, was a key architect of Project 2025, which called for dramatically reducing the power of Congress and the United States civil service. Vought has referred to career civil servants as “villains” and called for ending funding for most government programs. “The stark reality in America is that we are in the late stages of a complete Marxist takeover of the country,” he said recently.

In the name of combatting diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, the Trump administration is taking down websites of information paid for with tax dollars, slashing programs that advance health and science, ending investments in infrastructure, trying to end foreign aid, working to eliminate the Department of Education, and so on. Today the administration offered buyouts to all the people who work at the Central Intelligence Agency, saying that anyone who opposes Trump’s policies should leave. Today, Musk’s people entered the headquarters of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which provides daily weather and wind predictions; cutting NOAA and privatizing its services is listed as a priority in Project 2025.

Stunningly, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced today that the U.S. has made a deal with El Salvador to send deportees of any nationality—including U.S. citizens, which would be wildly unconstitutional—for imprisonment in that nation’s 40,000-person Terrorism Confinement Center, for a fee that would pay for El Salvador’s prison system.

Tonight the Senate confirmed Trump loyalist Pam Bondi as attorney general. Bondi is an election denier who refuses to say that Trump lost the 2020 presidential election. As Matt Cohen of Democracy Docket noted, a coalition of more than 300 civil rights groups urged senators to vote against her confirmation because of her opposition to LGBTQ rights, immigrants’ rights, and reproductive rights, and her record of anti-voting activities. The vote was along party lines except for Senator John Fetterman (D-PA), who crossed over to vote in favor.

Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency is the logical outcome of the mentality that the government should not enable Americans to create wealth but rather should put cash in the pockets of a few elites. Far from representing a majority, Musk is unelected, and he is slashing through the government programs he opposes. With full control of both chambers of Congress, Republicans could cut those parts themselves, but such cuts would be too unpopular ever to pass. So, instead, Musk is single-handedly slashing through the government Americans have built over the past 90 years.

Now, MAGA voters are about to discover that the wide-ranging cuts he claims to be making to end diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs skewer them as well as their neighbors. Attracting white voters with racism was always a tool to end the liberal consensus that worked for everyone, and if Musk’s cuts stand, the U.S. is about to learn that lesson the hard way.

In yet another bombshell, after meeting with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump told reporters tonight that the U.S. “will take over the Gaza Strip,” and suggested sending troops to make that happen. “We’ll own it,” he said. “We’re going to take over that piece, develop it and create thousands and thousands of jobs, and it will be something the entire Middle East can be proud of.” It could become “the Riviera of the Middle East,” he said.

Reaction has been swift and incredulous. Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA), who sits on the Foreign Relations Committee, called the plan “deranged” and “nuts.” Another Foreign Relations Committee member, Senator Chris Coons (D-DE), said he was “speechless,” adding: “That’s insane.” While MAGA representative Nancy Mace (R-SC) posted in support, “Let’s turn Gaza into Mar-a-Lago,” Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) told NBC News reporters Frank Thorp V and Raquel Coronell Uribe that there were “a few kinks in that slinky,” a reference to a spring toy that fails if it gets bent.

Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) suggested that Trump was trying to distract people from “the real story—the billionaires seizing government to steal from regular people.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON