SECRECY OR ACCOUNTABILITY?

Allen Dulles & John F. Kennedy ask a difficult question:

How much power should secret institutions possess in a democracy?

What is he talking about?

This quote reflects debates surrounding intelligence agencies, covert operations, and democratic oversight. During the Cold War, intelligence institutions expanded their global influence, leading critics to question whether secrecy can eventually outgrow public accountability.

The second quote also echoes long-standing conspiracy theories surrounding the assassination of John F. Kennedy, which remain unproven and heavily debated.

The deeper question is:

Can a democracy remain democratic if parts of the state operate beyond meaningful public scrutiny?

History repeatedly shows that intelligence agencies can gather information, prevent threats, and protect national interests…

…but critics have also argued that secrecy can weaken transparency and concentrate enormous power in institutions that citizens rarely see.

And perhaps the lasting lesson is this:

The strength of a democracy is not measured by how powerful its secret institutions become…

…but by whether those institutions remain accountable to the people they are meant to serve.

Because secrecy may protect a state…

…but accountability protects a democracy.

#AllenDulles #JohnFKennedy #PoliticalPhilosophy #Democracy #StatePower

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Over half of Project 2025 is already law, and this week the people who wrote it admitted it in writing. Fifty-three percent. Fifty-three percent. That's the figure the Heritage Foundation mailed its donors this week, claiming credit by name for the year you've been living through.

USAID gutted, diversity protections stripped out of the federal government, civil service shields pulled off thousands of workers, federal unions broken, one agency after another bent to heel.

"That is a big deal," they wrote, before asking supporters to fund the other half.

Remember the pitch from 2024. The 900-page plan polled so badly that everyone attached to it sprinted for the exits. Trump told the country he'd never heard of it.

Heritage's own project director resigned under the heat. The whole operation swore it was a left-wing smear, a fever dream, a document no serious person would ever own.

It is now the only governing plan in Washington, and Heritage is the one bragging about it.

The man turning the blueprint into policy is Russ Vought, who helped write it and now runs the Office of Management and Budget, the desk that decides which agencies get cut and which federal workers lose their paychecks.

The plan that was too radioactive to admit to is being carried out by one of its own authors from inside the building.

An outside watchdog ran the math from the opposite direction and got the same answer. The Center for Progressive Reform counted 283 of the 532 action items already in motion. Heritage's brag and the watchdog's audit are describing the identical machine, and they agree on how far it has gotten.

A leak you could dismiss. A theory you could wave off. This is the architects themselves, in writing, on letterhead, tallying up the wreckage as an accomplishment and charging admission for the sequel.

They are not nervous about any of it. They signed off promising supporters "another 250 years of American greatness," as if the half of the government they have already rewired were a warm-up act.

They spent the campaign swearing none of this was real. Now it's signed, dated, and half finished.

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The most dangerous political operations in America rarely announce themselves honestly. They hide behind words like liberty, faith, family, efficiency, and reform. They publish reports, host conferences, flatter donors, and pretend to be guardians of constitutional order while quietly building the machinery to bend government toward their own ideology.

That is what makes the Heritage Foundation so dangerous. It is not just another conservative think tank. It is one of the slyest and most destructive forces hovering beneath our government, close enough to power to shape it, but far enough away to deny responsibility when ordinary people start paying the price.

That was the sleight of hand around Project 2025.

During the campaign, Donald Trump and his allies treated it like some liberal fever dream. Trump claimed, “I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it.” His people ran from it when the public saw what was inside. Even Heritage seemed to understand that if Americans fully grasped the scope of the plan, they would recoil from it.

Now the denial has become a victory lap.

Heritage has reportedly told supporters that the Trump administration has already implemented 53 percent of the Project 2025 agenda. Outside policy trackers, including the Center for Progressive Reform and Governing for Impact, reached a similar conclusion, finding that hundreds of the domestic actions tied to Project 2025 have already been initiated or completed.

So this was never a hoax. It was never a smear. It was a blueprint.

The lie was the denial.

And one of the men helping turn that blueprint into policy is Russ Vought, a key Project 2025 figure now running the Office of Management and Budget. That matters because OMB is where ideology becomes money, staffing, enforcement, grants, rules, cuts, and consequences.

It is where abstract talk about “limited government” becomes a lost paycheck, a canceled program, a closed clinic, a gutted agency, or a family left without help.

Project 2025 is not just a document. It is a method.

It is a plan to take power away from public institutions and concentrate it in the hands of political loyalists. It weakens civil service protections so expertise can be replaced with obedience. It turns agencies designed to serve the public into weapons for one ideological movement.

It is dressed up as reform, but it is really an effort to make government more ruthless, more partisan, less accountable, and less humane.

The people hurt most by this are not the billionaires, donors, lobbyists, or ideological architects who write these plans from comfortable offices. It is the lower and middle class. It is the 95 percent of Americans who are not living inside the protection of extreme wealth.

It is the people who depend on Medicare, Medicaid, public schools, food assistance, veterans’ services, worker protections, disaster relief, clean water enforcement, public health programs, and the broader safety-net infrastructure — including Social Security — that makes life even remotely manageable in this country.

That is the obscenity of it.

These people talk about freedom while targeting the very things that keep ordinary Americans from falling through the floor. They talk about fiscal responsibility while protecting wealth and power. They talk about family while making it harder for families to survive. They talk about faith while gutting programs that feed, heal, house, and protect people.

This is not a government of compassion or even basic decency. It is organized destruction carried out by people who will never feel the consequences of the wreckage they create.

The damage is already visible. Federal workers have been treated like enemies. Agencies have been destabilized. Diversity protections have been stripped away. Public health work has been interrupted.

Education, labor protections, civil rights enforcement, immigrant services, environmental oversight, food programs, and humanitarian aid have all been targeted by the same basic philosophy: if a program protects vulnerable people, restrains corporate power, advances equality, or treats government as a public good, it goes on the chopping block.

And then there is USAID, where the cruelty becomes global.

These cuts are not abstractions in a Washington budget office. They mean HIV patients losing treatment, malaria programs interrupted, food assistance delayed, clinics closing, refugee camps going without support, and maternal health programs collapsing.

Public-health experts say people have already died because of these disruptions, and researchers warn millions more could die if the defunding continues.

That is not efficiency. That is moral obscenity with a spreadsheet.

Here at home, everyday Americans are being hurt by the same ideology. When agencies are gutted, people wait longer for services. When worker protections are weakened, employers gain more power. When education programs are cut, children and families lose support.

When health and safety enforcement is hollowed out, communities pay the price. When public servants are replaced by loyalists, government stops serving the country and starts serving the ruler.

That is why Heritage’s role is so obscene.

These people do not have to face the voters whose lives they are disrupting. They do not have to sit with the federal worker who lost a job, the veteran waiting for help, the family whose food assistance is threatened, the farmer caught in the chaos, the patient cut off from treatment, or the child overseas who dies because a clinic lost funding.

They write the blueprint, hand it to politicians, collect donor money, and call the wreckage “freedom.”

It is one of the oldest tricks in American politics: use patriotic language to disguise cruelty, use religious language to excuse domination, use bureaucratic language to hide violence, and use “efficiency” to justify abandoning people without enough power to fight back.

The Heritage Foundation and the Project 2025 crowd are not simply offering policy ideas. They are building an operating system for authoritarian government, one that gives maximum power to the president, minimum protection to the public, and almost no regard for the human beings crushed in the process.

They knew exactly what they were doing.

That is why they denied it when it was politically inconvenient and bragged about it once they thought they could get away with it. Trump said he knew nothing about Project 2025 and had “no idea who is behind it.” Now the people behind it are telling their supporters how much of it has already been put into motion.

That should tell us everything.

This is not conservatism in any honest sense of the word. This is organized cruelty dressed in a flag pin. It is government by sleight of hand, written by ideologues, executed by loyalists, financed by donors, and paid for by ordinary people here and around the world.

And the bill is coming due.

#Project2025 #HeritageFoundation #TrumpAdministration #RussVought #DemocracyInDanger #Authoritarianism #USAID #PublicHealth #Medicare #SocialSecurity #FederalWorkers #ProtectDemocracy #HumanRights #AmericanPolitics #DM

 

In my opinion, this is Steve Schmidt’s best essay ever.

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“Donald Trump tried to put his name on the Kennedy Center.

Pause for a moment and contemplate the obscenity of that sentence.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy represented youth, sacrifice, intellect, courage and service to country. He was a war hero whose PT boat was cut in half in the black waters of the Pacific Ocean by a Japanese destroyer during a world war fought against fascism and tyranny.

Donald Trump is a draft-dodging vulgarian who insults dead American soldiers, mocks prisoners of war, sneers at Gold Star families, and turns every sacred institution he touches into a cheap casino covered in gold paint and self-worship.

Of course, he wanted to rename the Kennedy Center after himself.

There’s no limit to the narcissism of a man who believes the American presidency is a vehicle for personal glorification instead of constitutional duty.

The Kennedy Center isn’t merely a building. It’s a memorial to a vision of America that understood that culture and democracy are intertwined.

John Kennedy believed the arts mattered because civilization mattered.

He understood something Trump never will: that great nations aren’t measured only by military power or economic output, but by the depth of their culture, the vitality of their imagination, and the confidence they place in free expression.

Kennedy admired poets. Trump admires sycophants.

Kennedy invited Pablo Casals to perform at the White House after the great cellist had refused to play there for presidents he believed tolerated fascism in Spain. Kennedy understood the symbolism of art in a democracy.

You can listen to the magnificent performance here:

Trump stages UFC fights on the South Lawn.

Kennedy spoke about Robert Frost as a national treasure, and declared at Amherst College shortly before his death:

When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man’s concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of existence.

Meditate on that sentence for a moment.

“When power leads man toward arrogance…”

Could there be a more precise description of Donald Trump?

Kennedy understood that artists, writers, musicians and poets weren’t decorative figures orbiting power. They were essential critics of it. They were guardians against the corruption of the soul.

Trump sees culture differently.

He sees it as branding.

As loyalty theater.

As spectacle.

As another surface upon which to stamp his name.

Everything in his life is transactional because he lacks the capacity to feel reverence. There’s no awe in him. No humility. No sense of inheritance. No understanding that some things belong to history, and not to him.

This is the central truth about Donald Trump: he can’t distinguish between the United States of America and himself.

That’s the essence of authoritarianism.

The dictator, the strongman, the king — they all arrive at the same conclusion eventually: “I am the state.”

Trump’s desecration of the White House grounds with his vulgar ballroom project isn’t enough. His conversion of the South Lawn into a UFC spectacle isn’t enough. His endless monetization of the presidency isn’t enough because, in Trump’s mind, nothing in America can remain outside his shadow.

Not the military.

Not the courts.

Not the universities.

Not the Department of Justice.

Not the arts.

Not even the memory of John F. Kennedy.

What happened next, however, matters enormously.

A federal judge stopped him.

For one fleeting moment, the Constitution still functioned.

A judge somewhere in America looked at this absurd act of vanity and effectively said: “No. You aren’t king. You don’t own the country. You don’t inherit the monuments of dead presidents like a feudal lord seizing castles.”

The humiliation enraged him because humiliation is intolerable to weak men who survive on domination and spectacle.

Trump then threatened to abandon the Kennedy Center entirely.

That’s why authoritarians always attack artists eventually.

The Nazis called modern art “degenerate.”

The Soviets demanded “socialist realism.”

Mao unleashed the Cultural Revolution against intellectuals and artists.

Every authoritarian movement fears independent culture because culture teaches people how to think, how to question, and how to imagine a different world.

Trump doesn’t understand art because art requires empathy. It requires curiosity about other people. It requires emotional depth and introspection. These are alien concepts to a man whose inner life appears to consist entirely of appetite, grievance and ego maintenance.

He’s America’s most celebrated hollow man.

A void wrapped in makeup, hairspray and malignant narcissism.

And yet the greater scandal may not be Trump’s behavior.

It’s the silence.

Where are the Republicans who claim to revere Kennedy’s anti-communism, patriotism and love of country?

Where are the conservatives who once claimed to defend culture, history and American institutions?

Where are the elected officials willing to say the obvious — that this is grotesque, embarrassing, and un-American?

The answer, of course, is that they’re afraid.

They’re afraid of the mob they created.

Afraid of the base they radicalized.

Afraid of the social media lynching.

Afraid of the next primary.

Afraid of the man.

So they say nothing, while Trump marches through American history with a can of gasoline and a blowtorch.

Every institution becomes smaller after he touches it.

More degraded.

More vulgar.

More cynical.

More broken.

That’s his legacy.

Donald Trump isn’t building anything lasting in America. He’s consuming it.

Like all arsonists, he mistakes destruction for strength.

But the American story doesn’t belong to Donald Trump.

The White House doesn’t belong to Donald Trump.

The Kennedy Center doesn’t belong to Donald Trump.

The country doesn’t belong to Donald Trump.

And one day, long after this bloated and corrupt old man is gone, the shame of this era will linger over everyone who watched this spectacle and decided silence was safer than courage.

History is recording names now.

Every one of them.”

— Substack, May 31, 2026.

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This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.

Ask voters in the country’s most competitive congressional districts what’s wrong with America, and you’ll hear two answers. First, everything costs too much. Second, the government is corrupt. 

Ask them which party will actually fix those problems, and you’ll get a shrug.

Corruption now ranks as a top-tier concern alongside cost of living and threats to democracy. Yet, the parties are essentially tied on the question of who will clean up our government — with nearly half saying they trust neither one. That’s the uncomfortable finding from Change Research across 62 battleground districts and an alarm bell in the months leading up to the 2026 midterms.

While the nine-point edge Republicans held on “taking on government corruption” last year is entirely gone, not a single point transferred to Democrats. Yet, momentum is building as a growing wave of leaders embrace an anti-corruption message this cycle. There’s Florida Congressman Maxwell Frost as one example, who has repeatedly spoken out against billionaire-backed companies driving the housing crisis and requiring consumers to subscribe to what they once owned outright. Then there’s those running for Congress like Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, who has endorsed a wealth tax on multi-millionaires to “restore balance to an economy that has left working families behind.”

The good news? With nine in ten voters believing corruption permeates every government institution, progressive lawmakers and candidates have a can’t-miss chance to win over voters on the issue. A clear majority of Americans also consistently see corruption as part of the reason prices are high and why they are struggling in this economy. When asked where they feel it, they can already point to what they pay for health care, in taxes, and at the grocery store. 

And the best news? This growing wave of progressive populists understand that raising taxes on billionaires is overwhelmingly popular — 77% of voters support doing so, including 71% of Independents and 65% of Republicans.

At a time when billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos crush entire communities to make their next million in a minute, anti-corruption lawmakers need to connect the dots between corruption and voters’ rising cost of living. Our proposed solution is clear: Tax the billionaires to reconcentrate their wealth and reduce their influence over everything from elections to affordability to freedom of the press.

Concentrated wealth buys political influence. Political influence buys policy outcomes. Those policy outcomes show up on your bills and in your daily life as the uber-wealthy consolidate even more power and wealth unchecked, forcing the rest of us to pay more for less as they do. Taxing their extreme wealth becomes not only smart economic policy, but also an anti-corruption tool at every level of government.

Any other anti-corruption reform that leaves concentrated wealth intact would be like trying to stop a flood with a sponge. As long as a few hundred people control more money than entire states, they will always find new ways to buy the rules — new loopholes, new lobbyists, new politicians beholden to billionaires.

Take health care, where Democrats in Congress hold their strongest trust advantage and where voters most clearly feel corruption in their daily lives. Americans know they pay more for prescription drugs, insurance premiums, and hospital visits than the citizens of any other wealthy country. Billionaire-backed private equity firms buy up hospitals and clinics across the country, strip them for parts, and leave communities with higher costs and lower-quality care. Pharmaceutical companies and insurance giants spent decades operating in the shadows and millions in dark money to create this system — and the revolving door between regulators and the industries they’re supposed to regulate.

Housing tells the same story. Billionaires buy up houses and apartments, raising the prices until families are forced to move. Working families across the country are priced out of homes they could have afforded a decade ago — not by accident, but by policy choice. Wall Street landlords, private equity firms, and real estate billionaires spend hundreds of millions blocking zoning reform, weakening tenant protections, and electing politicians who allow them to keep profiteering.

The administration is even leveraging the power of government to enrich the president and his allies in ways once unimaginable. President Trump sued his own government for $10 billion for releasing his tax returns and is still fighting to create a slush fund on the taxpayers’ dime for the wealthy and well-connected who got him elected after widespread backlash.

Every one of those outcomes was paid for, politically, by the same concentrated wealth at the top. As long as billionaires and corporate executives can deploy unlimited resources to protect their power, they will find a way around any rule Congress writes. Taxing wealth at rates high enough to actually shrink the largest fortunes changes what’s possible to buy — and helps eliminate the practices driving up costs for life-saving medication, groceries, and school supplies.

The bottom line is that the affordability crisis and the corruption crisis are one and the same. There’s a version of the 2026 election in which lawmakers not only plainly say what most Americans already believe, but also what they’ll do to tackle the obscene concentration and corruption of wealth at the very top.

That’s what wins in 2026 — and elects a Congress that can actually lay the groundwork for passing a wealth tax in 2029.

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Tiffany Muller is the President of End Citizens United, Let America Vote, and the End Citizens United/Let America Vote Action Fund.

Igor Volsky is the campaign director of Tax the Greedy Billionaires, which is educating leaders on the consequences of extreme wealth.

 

As of 2026, there are over 5,400 data centers operating in the United States. That's more than the next 14 countries combined. China — the country most people assume leads — has roughly 450. The US has them beat by more than ten to one.

831 more are under construction right now.

And corporations will do whatever it takes to keep building.

We already have the proof. In Virginia, Microsoft needed land for a data center expansion. Surveyors found a Black cemetery. Regulators downplayed its significance, never contacted a single family member, and the graves were cleared. The data center sits there today. In Pittsylvania County, over 200 graves — descendants of enslaved people, families who had held that land since emancipation — were dug up and relocated to make way for a data center campus. In North Carolina, a man fighting a data center on his family's land said publicly: "Our foreparents are buried on that site. Not history in a book — real people, in the ground."

Here's how it's legal — and getting more legal every year.

There is no federal law that protects Black burial grounds on private property the same way Indigenous burial grounds are protected. The moment a cemetery gets labeled "abandoned" — and authorities have wide discretion to make that call — nearly every protection vanishes. Any cemetery, any community, any family plot sitting on land a corporation wants is vulnerable under that loophole.

Then comes the next tool: eminent domain.

Eminent domain lets the government — or a private company acting with government approval — take your land for "public use" whether you want to sell or not. It's been used for roads and schools for generations. Now it's being used for AI infrastructure.

In Georgia right now, Georgia Power is using eminent domain to seize land along a 35-mile corridor to build transmission lines that feed AI data centers. Over 330 homeowners targeted. Up to 30 homes being demolished. The Georgia Public Service Commission approved the entire plan in December 2025. Residents say they never had a real chance to fight back.

Now here's the part that should alarm everyone.

In Ohio, a business trade group is pushing to change state law to allow what they're calling "possession authority" — meaning corporations could take your land and begin construction before you've even been fully compensated. Right now the law requires payment first. They want to flip that. Once that flips, your only leverage is gone before you ever set foot in a courtroom.

This is how it happens to any cemetery:

Step 1 — Label it abandoned or minimize its significance.

Step 2 — Acquire surrounding land through eminent domain for "grid infrastructure."

Step 3 — The cemetery becomes isolated, surrounded, legally unreachable.

Step 4 — Possession authority kicks in. Construction starts before families can fight back.

Step 5 — By the time anyone responds, the land is gone.

Your grandparents' graves are not protected if a corporation decides that land serves a data center. The law as it stands — and especially as it's being rewritten — does not stop them.

Share this before it happens somewhere near you.

The truth doesn't always need a filter — it just needs someone willing to say it. — Voices Without Words

#VoicesWithoutWords #DataCenters #PossessionAuthority #KnowYourRights #CemeteryProtection— in Lake County, Indiana.

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