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.

=========

“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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 I’ve never known too much about him, just enough to wonder how he turned into such a monster. I believe his homosexuality played a large part in his betrayal of America as he was most likely blackmailed over the years. The world can be a cruel place. Especially in the south in the 1960’s. Had he been openly outed his life would have been over and he would have lost everything. His job, his family and his friends. That was the reality of the times. He never had the courage to take that chance, so he will be remembered as the man who betrayed America and Americans. He had so much potential. Money, power and secrets corrupt. Mitch McConnell is a crystal clear example.

THE BODY MAN

A Personal Reckoning with a Man I Knew, and What He Became

....

I found out this morning that Mitch McConnell is in the hospital again. This time it seems like it might be the end. No details. Just a terse statement from a spokesman saying he is "receiving excellent care." He is 84 years old. He is in his final Senate term. And as I sit here reading those three sterile words,

I feel something I did not expect to feel.

Sadness.

Not sympathy for what he did to this country. Not forgiveness. Not amnesia about the damage. Just.... the quiet, complicated grief of a man who once knew another man, long before either of them became who they are.

....

I was the Body Man.

It is not a glamorous title. You get lunch. You run errands. You keep the schedule. You log names. You ride in cars for hours across Kentucky with a folded road map on the dashboard and a stubborn refusal to admit you are lost. GPS did not exist yet. Not for civilians anyway.

Instead, you stopped at gas stations. You flagged down farmers. You asked directions from people who gave them the only way rural Kentuckians know how.... "turn left where Bobby used to grow tomatoes," "go past the old Grange hall, it burnt down in '68 but you'll know the spot," "you can't miss it" from people who have lived there their whole lives and genuinely cannot imagine that you can, in fact, miss it.

You miss it anyway. You circle back. And you get Mitch there on time.... not out of loyalty, not out of admiration, but because the man in the back seat is cranky, humorless, and utterly without grace when things go sideways.

A 19-year-old with a road map and a full tank of adrenaline will move mountains before he sits in that car listening to Mitch McConnell bitch about something. Failure is not an option.... less because of ambition and more because the silence from that back seat when he is displeased is the most uncomfortable thing a young man has ever experienced.

I spent 107 straight days with this man. Sometimes 10 to 12 hours a day. Closer than family. You see everything when you are the Body Man. The unguarded moments. The exhaustion. The fear. The loneliness that powerful men carry and never discuss. You see who someone actually is when the crowd goes home and the lights go down and there is nothing left but a tired, weak man in the back seat of a car somewhere in eastern Kentucky.

And what I saw was not the Mitch McConnell the world would eventually come to know.

The man I drove across Kentucky was broken. Shy. Physically damaged by polio, visibly uncomfortable in his own skin, uncertain in crowds, afraid of his own shadow. A 39-year-old County Judge from Jefferson.

Not beloved. Not feared. Not powerful. Just.... a man struggling against odds, trying to win a Senate seat, surrounded by advisors who seemed to know exactly what they wanted from him, even if he did not fully know yet what he was agreeing to, what he was getting into.

He would go on to defeat incumbent Democratic Senator Walter "Dee" Huddleston on November 5, 1984, by a razor-thin margin of only 5,200 votes out of more than 1.8 million cast. Just over 0.4%.

Nobody saw it coming. The polls had Huddleston up by as much as 20 points two months before election day. That improbable, paper-thin victory was the first domino. Everything that followed grew from that night.

I remember opening a champagne bottle at a rally. I was young and inexperienced with such things. When I untwisted the wire, and the cork exploded and hit Mitch in the back of the head, he nearly jumped out of his skin. Genuinely believed for a fraction of a second he had been shot. The tough, stone-faced Senate titan who would one day bring American democracy to its knees was, in that moment, a startled and frightened little man.

I think about that moment now.

There was one pattern I noticed throughout that entire summer that I never forgot. The constant presence of men from Texas.

Advisors. Money men. Oil people. They were always there. We picked them up at the Lexington airport. At the small Richmond airport. Sometimes at the London airport. We flew on their planes when the route was too far to drive. They were woven into that campaign the way thread is woven into fabric.... invisible until you pull it, and then suddenly it is all you see.

These were not ordinary supporters. They did not wave signs or knock on doors. They arrived on private planes, spoke quietly in corners, and left without being photographed. They had the easy confidence of men who were not asking for anything because they already knew what they were going to get.

I was 19 years old. I logged names. I kept schedules. I did not fully understand what I was watching.

I understand it now.

....

What Mitch McConnell became is not a matter of opinion. It is a documented catastrophe.

He is the man who held the Supreme Court hostage, refusing to hold hearings for Merrick Garland for 293 days, claiming the American people deserved a voice in the process.... and then jamming Amy Coney Barrett onto the Court in the final days before an election he knew his party might lose.

It was not principle. It was power, naked and unapologetic.

He is the man who declared his singular goal in 2010 was to make Barack Obama a one-term president. Not to govern. Not to serve his constituents. Not to protect democracy. Just.... to destroy a presidency.

He said it out loud. He was not ashamed.

He is the man whose years of obstructionism were turbocharged by Citizens United, the catastrophic 2010 Supreme Court decision that blew open the floodgates of dark money into American politics.

McConnell did not just accept that ruling. He celebrated it. He had spent his entire career fighting campaign finance reform, arguing with a straight face that unlimited corporate money was a form of free speech. Citizens United did not change him. It vindicated him.

He built his entire political empire on it. Unlimited corporate money. Hidden donors. Super PACs operating in the shadows. The very Texas oil money I watched flow quietly into that first Kentucky campaign eventually became the architecture of a system that sold American democracy to the highest bidder.

He is the man who enabled Trump. Twice impeached. Never convicted. McConnell even acknowledged after January 6th that Trump was practically and morally responsible for the insurrection.... and then voted to acquit anyway.

Cowardice dressed in procedural language.

He is the man who blocked gun safety legislation after mass shooting after mass shooting, year after year, while the bodies of children were still being counted.

The bastard who gutted voting rights protections the moment the Supreme Court gave him the opening.

The jackass who packed the judiciary with hard-right ideologues who have now systematically dismantled reproductive freedom, environmental protections, and worker rights for a generation.

He did not break democracy by accident. He broke it on purpose, with precision, over decades, for the benefit of the extremely wealthy and the industries that funded his rise.... starting, in my memory, with those quiet men from Texas stepping off private planes at small Kentucky airports.

And yet.

Here I am this Sunday morning, 84-year-old Mitch McConnell back in a hospital with no public explanation, and I am sitting with something that feels uncomfortably like sorrow.

Not for what he became. Not for what he did. But for what I saw that summer. A shy, hobbled, deeply human man who was afraid of champagne corks. Who was damaged by polio as a child, shunned as a young man, never quite comfortable in his own skin or in a room full of people who were supposed to like him.

A strange small man who was unlikely and awkward and unlovable in the most painfully human of ways.

Now ...I have watched him shuffle through the Capitol in a wheelchair. I have watched him freeze mid-sentence on camera, that terrible blankness crossing his face while worried aides reached for him. I have watched a man grow old in the most public and unforgiving way possible, his body failing him the way it failed him as a boy, the polio coming back around to collect what it was always owed.

There is no satisfaction in watching anyone disappear like this.

I do not believe in celebrating the suffering of human beings, even those who caused enormous suffering themselves. That path leads somewhere dark, and I have spent too much of my life fighting darkness to walk willingly into it.

But I will say this clearly, because clarity is what this moment demands:

The damage Mitch McConnell did to this country is not theoretical.

It lives in the women who have lost bodily autonomy because of the Court he shaped.

It lives in the communities flooded by climate disasters that were decades in the making while he blocked every meaningful response.

It lives in the families shattered by gun violence he could have helped prevent and chose not to.

It lives in the students crushed by debt while he protected the wealthy. It lives in the hollowed-out democracy he helped auction off to the unlimited corporate money he spent an entire career cultivating.

He was not a victim of the system. He was one of its primary architects. The man who actually wrote the script. He did not stumble into power and get corrupted by it. He pursued it deliberately, accepted the terms offered by the men on those private planes, and delivered exactly what was expected of him for four decades.

He shaped this collapse.

When he announced he would not seek reelection, McConnell said he would leave the Senate with great hope for the endurance of the Senate as an institution.

I hope he meant it.

I suspect deep in that dark soul.... some part of him did. The man behind the mask, the one I drove around Kentucky forty years ago, probably did.

But the Senator he became consumed the man entirely.

I am sad this morning. I will not pretend otherwise.

But the sadness belongs to 1984, to a young Body Man logging names in a notebook, driving a shy and frightened candidate who had no idea yet what he was about to let himself be turned into.

Or maybe he did know.

Maybe that is the saddest part of all.

That man deserves my grief.

What he became deserves our reckoning.

And our reckoning is not finished.

LM

.

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 BREAKING:

In South Memphis, one community organizer has spent nearly two years pushing back against one of the most powerful men in tech — and that fight has now landed in federal court.

KeShaun Pearson is the executive director of Memphis Community Against Pollution, a grassroots group that's been challenging Elon Musk's xAI over its "Colossus" supercomputer facility, built in the majority-Black Boxtown neighborhood in 2024. According to reporting from Inside Climate News and the Southern Environmental Law Center, xAI ran dozens of methane gas turbines to power the site for over a year without the proper Clean Air Act permits — turbines Pearson says have made an already heavily polluted area even harder to breathe in.

The NAACP has since filed a lawsuit against xAI, alleging Clean Air Act violations. Pearson, who also helped lead a successful 2021 campaign to block an oil pipeline from the same neighborhood, has continued organizing residents, with activists staging a peaceful "die-in" protest outside the facility's gates in May, partly to mark how long the turbines had been running.

xAI and Memphis city leaders, including Mayor Paul Young, have defended the project, pointing to hundreds of local jobs and a city ordinance directing a share of the company's property taxes back into nearby communities. When approached for comment by The New York Times over residents' air quality concerns, xAI dismissed the criticism as "legacy media lies."

The fight in Memphis has become one of the most closely watched data center disputes in the country, raising hard questions about who benefits — and who pays the price — as the AI boom expands into more communities nationwide.

Follow this page for more on the people standing up to the data center boom!

Sources: Inside Climate News ("In South Memphis, Elon Musk's Colossus Operated Gas Turbines Without Appropriate Permits, Residents and Activists Claim"); Democracy Now! ("'Colossus Failure': Elon Musk's Data Centers Face Lawsuit for Polluting Black Neighborhoods in Memphis," April 22, 2026); MLK50: Justice Through Journalism ("Memphis activists block xAI operations to protest pollution," May 2026)

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