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His speech marked a major escalation in the Trump administration’s efforts to assert federal control over state election procedures.

Jacob Knutson at Democracy Docket:

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin threatened top election officials in all 50 states and D.C. with criminal charges if they do not comply with the Trump administration’s demands to feed their voter rolls through a flawed federal database. Mullin’s threats came just hours after President Donald Trump resurrected debunked claims of fraud in the 2020 election during a primetime address as part of his ongoing efforts to undermine U.S. elections before the upcoming midterms. In its totality, Mullin’s speech amounted to a major escalation in the Trump administration’s attempt to assert federal control over state voter rolls and their election procedures.

Alongside his threats Friday, Mullin claimed that the database in question had identified over 250,000 noncitizens registered to vote in California, New Jersey, Nevada and Pennsylvania. At no point during the speech did Mullin specify how DHS obtained those four states’ voter registration data, though many states offer public versions of their rolls for sale or download. He also did not claim that any of the alleged registered noncitizens voted in U.S. elections. The secretary only said that the department identified the noncitizens using the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE), a database originally designed to help states check the citizenship status of people applying for government benefits. The Trump administration has now retrofitted it into a broader citizenship check, but critics say the new version is deeply defective and regularly misidentifies eligible voters.

Mullin’s threat came a week after the Department of Justice (DOJ) sent all state election chiefs letters warning they could face criminal prosecution over possible noncitizen voting. The department’s notice angered both Republican and Democratic officials.

[...] In recent months, federal courts have repeatedly ruled that the executive branch has very limited authority to demand access or changes to states’ rolls. Despite those rulings, Mullin threatened that state election officials who do not collaborate with the Trump administration and feed their voter rolls through the SAVE database could face criminal charges. “The states who choose not to participate with the SAVE program and they choose not to participate in secure elections, we will make sure that we make those states a priority to look at who voted in their states and will hold them, the election officials, accountable,” Mullin said. Starting with former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Trump’s DHS appointees have endeavored to transform the SAVE database into a new system to monitor and directly shape state voter registration lists. And under Mullin, the department has taken several steps to force states to use the database to purge voters from their rolls. The database, however, has repeatedly falsely identified eligible voters as noncitizens. It particularly falsely flagged naturalized citizens as ineligible to vote.

Fascist shit-faced cockmaster DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin threatens election officials across America if they refuse the Trump Regime’s demands to feed their voter rolls through the flawed federal database SAVE.

The life and death of May Pollard, 16, provides a window into the tragic effect that legislation and political rhetoric have had on trans p

theoutcastrogue

The KIDS Act, ostensibly aimed at protecting children, will raise the risk for journalists, dissidents, and whistleblowers.

"Democrats and Republicans in Congress have struck a deal on a bill they say will help keep children and teens safe online. The KIDS Act could pass on the House floor as soon as next week; if enacted, it would fundamentally change the way everyone — not just kids — accesses the internet.

At stake is your ability to use many social media platforms without revealing your identity.

That’s because the KIDS Act at least strongly incentivizes — and, for some services, outright requires — age verification. Many platforms will turn to age verification to avoid potential liability under the law. Companies like X, video-sharing services like Vimeo, and others with a history of users’ populating social feeds with edgy content may be required to verify users’ ages because they host a certain amount of content deemed “sexual material harmful to minors,” a term that the KIDS Act defines broadly.

That’s a big problem for people who need to be able to use the internet anonymously, since, as Taylor Lorenz has previously written about in The Intercept, “there’s no way to reliably verify someone’s age without verifying who they are.”

Threats to online anonymity harm everyone, but one group is often overlooked: journalists and the sources who talk to them. Age verification requirements will help the Trump administration carry out its vendetta against the press by creating new avenues to identify journalists’ confidential sources. [...]

Mandating age verification effectively hands Big Tech and the government a skeleton key to the identities of every whistleblower, dissident, and investigative reporter who uses online platforms, not to mention everyone else, including children. This kind of surveillance on steroids that surrenders our right to speak, report, and read the news anonymously won’t make anyone safer."

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The Trump Administration Is Quietly Rolling Back Decades-Old Workplace Guidance

The memo to help employers had been in place since 1979. Not anymore.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission voted Monday to rescind decades-old guidance that helps employers ensure their workplace is equitable and inclusive.

In a press release the next day, the agency claimed the guidance had violated civil rights law and Supreme Court precedence, referring to a unanimous high court decision from last year that made “reverse discrimination” easier to prove.

In 1979, the EEOC issued a memo for employers who wanted to comply with affirmative action laws that mandated making the workplace more equitable, while still not violating civil rights laws. The rule was called the "Affirmative Action Appropriate Under Title VIl of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as Amended," referencing the section of the landmark legislation that prohibits discrimination based on race, color, sex or national origin.

“The EEOC is choosing to get rid of a tool that is intended to help remedy discrimination to try and reduce barriers to opportunity so that workers can have a fair chance to compete for jobs based on their qualifications and merit and not be excluded because of who they are,” said Katie Sandson, senior counsel on education and workplace justice at the National Women's Law Center.

For example, she said, if a university's employment practices were leading to an underrepresented and underpaid group among its faculty, they could turn to the memo to help figure out how to address the issue.

“The guidelines provided a roadmap for how those employers could take proactive steps to remedy the situation,” Sandson said.

The EEOC was created in 1964 as part of the Civil Rights Act to fight workplace discrimination, but there has been a drastic shift in what kind of complaints the agency has been focusing on since Donald Trump returned to office. Experts say this week’s rescission is just another way for the Trump administration to dismantle civil rights laws that protect workers from discrimination.

“We see this as part of the larger attack by the federal government on anything that they consider to be promoting diversity, equity, inclusion, accessibility ― the basic values that underlie our civil rights laws,” Sandon said. “We’ve seen those values under attack from day one of this administration.”

The Trump administration has indeed been chipping away at anything it perceives to boost diversity, equity and inclusion. The phrase has become a catch-all for programs at workplaces, schools and public institutes that deal with racial or gender equity. The federal government has barred agencies and departments from using words like diversity and equity, and threatened to pull funding from states with DEI programs, and Trump has repeatedly trashed racial equality programs.

“This latest rescission from the EEOC makes even clearer that it is beholden to President Trump's vision of a re-segregated U.S. workforce,” Deborah Vagins, the senior vice president of advocacy and programs at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, said in a statement. “The Commission is actively attempting to reverse hard-won progress promoting equal opportunity.”

The EEOC also proposed rescinding a workplace data collection rule in May. The rule, which required companies to send over aggregate data about the demographics of its workforce, was intended to help bosses be proactive in finding any areas where they might be falling short of diversity goals — or even running afoul of civil rights laws.

“This is a broader strategy of reshaping who the EEOC serves,” Sandson said.

Lucas, the EEOC chair, has given credence to the idea that diversity efforts are harmful to white men. She posted a video to X last year, in which she urged more white men to make discrimination complaints.

“We’ve seen them basically suggest that DEI practices are discrimination against white men,” Sandson said. “And so all of this sends a message to employers that if they try to take these types of inclusive and equitable actions, they might be targeted.”

The EEOC announced in February it was suing a Coca-Cola distribution company for sex discrimination after a male employee filed a complaint about a women-only networking event. Then, in May, the agency sued The New York Times after a white male reporter claimed he wasn’t promoted to an editor role because of his race and gender.

“I think it sends a really scary message that if you are not a straight, white, Christian man, this agency is not necessarily here to protect you,” Sandson said. “They’re not looking out for your rights and your interests.”

(continue reading)

President Donald Trump launched his $TRUMP memecoin in the days leading up to his second inauguration, ushering in a pro-crypto administrati

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Ex-EPA staffers sue after agency fired them following dissent letter

by Rachel Frazin - 07/01/26 5:01 PM ET

Seven former staffers at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) are suing the agency after it fired them following their criticisms of the Trump administration.

The employees were let go after signing a letter saying that the administration was undermining public trust and ignoring scientific consensus to benefit polluters, among other concerns.

On Tuesday, they filed two lawsuits, arguing that their firings violated their freedom of speech and seeking reinstatement at the EPA.

The suit also alleges that these specific staffers were fired while others who signed the letter were not because they were probationary employees — a status given to those who are new or recently promoted — meaning they had fewer protections.

The president of American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) Council 238, the union representing the staffers, praised their actions in a statement on the lawsuit.

“One year ago, over a hundred of EPA employees did something extraordinarily brave: they spoke out to defend science, public health, and the EPA’s mission. For that, they were punished. But they are not standing alone,” Justin Chen said in a written statement. “AFGE Council 238 will keep fighting until every employee is vindicated and every federal worker knows they can exercise their First Amendment rights without fear of retaliation.”

An EPA spokesperson declined to comment, saying the agency doesn’t comment on pending litigation.

When it fired the staffers, the agency said it “has a zero-tolerance policy for career officials using their agency position and title to unlawfully undermine, sabotage, and undercut the will of the American public.”

The lawsuits have pointed to language in the initial letter indicating that the employees were acting in their personal capacities.

A group of Democratic senators also wrote a letter to EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin demanding a reversal of the firings.

saywhat-politics

Republicans hold only 53 seats in the Senate, meaning a legislative effort, much less a constitutional amendment, currently has no chance of

Republicans hold only 53 seats in the Senate, meaning a legislative effort, much less a constitutional amendment, currently has no chance of advancing.

June 30, 2026, 1:13 PM MST

By Allan Smith

President Donald Trump on Tuesday brushed off a major loss at the Supreme Court, whose 6-3 decision struck down one of his signature initiatives: an effort to limit birthright citizenship.

Trump and some of his congressional allies quickly said they weren’t fully giving up the fight, saying they believed a path forward was to pass a law containing the same provisions as his defeated order. But with the current makeup of Congress, that legislation would be dead on arrival.

juicetrump2

In 1993, she squeezed a $333m settlement from a Californian energy company in a scandal over contaminated water. Three decades later, she ha

justinspoliticalcorner

The MAGA movement has used and abused people’s ignorance and fear about transgender people as a Trojan horse to implement its fascist agenda

Wajahat Ali for The Progressive:

Once upon a time in America, I wrote a cautionary tale warning what would happen if chickens enthusiastically voted for Colonel Sanders. The chickens thought they’d be spared because of their privilege, wealth, and proximity to KFC restaurants, so they foolishly joined Colonel Sanders’s campaign against veal and goats. A year later, they ended up as fried chicken. The fast food analogy is for the many deluded Americans who suffer from amnesia and thought a fascist regime would stop its march of hate after destroying LGBTQ+ people. As such, they chose to re-elect Donald Trump, a convicted criminal who incited a violent insurrection and lied to the world about COVID-19 as President, resulting in needless deaths and anti-vaccine disinformation. To win over some religious, male, and suburban voters, Trump and his MAGA crusaders decided to reboot a successful strategy of manufacturing a fake boogeyman to distract from their numerous lies, grifts, and failures. They landed on transgender panic, focusing on one of the world’s marginalized communities that represents less than 1 percent of the total population.

The 2021 Virginia governor’s race between Republican Glenn Youngkin and Democrat Terry McAuliffe served as the original test case for what became a national campaign. Youngkin championed “parental choice” when it came to opting out of a diverse school curriculum that promoted inclusion, particularly focusing on LGBTQ+ characters and themes in books. Ahead of the 2024 national elections, Republicans spent more than $200 million scapegoating transgender people, even running television ads during the NFL season with the tagline “Kamala is for they/them; President Trump is for you.” Unfortunately, it worked like gangbusters. True to form, Democratic leadership was caught flat-footed, refused to respond with a successful counter-message, and decided to move to the right instead of promising to defend some of the most bullied and tortured children in the United States.

After Trump’s victory, California Governor Gavin Newsom, the great white knight of the Democratic Party, invited rightwing demagogues on his podcast for friendly chats. To allegedly win over Trump voters, he said Democrats must be “more culturally normal” on transgender issues. Newsom’s “normal” includes inviting the world’s worst billionaires into his “big tent” and refusing to denounce Israel’s genocide of Palestinians, but pronouns are a step too far for the liberal governor who hopes to become President.

[...]

In United States v. Skrmetti, the conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court sided with a Tennessee law and banned gender-affirming care for minors. So much for parental rights! In Chiles v. Salazar, two liberal Supreme Court Justices joined the majority to rule against a Colorado law banning “conversion therapy” for minors, even though the practice has been debunked by the medical community and compared to torture by the United Nations. In Mahmoud v. Taylor, the MAGA crowd used a Muslim American plaintiff to successfully argue that Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland must allow parents to opt out of LGBTQ+ themes in the curriculum. Everything was supposed to become great again—except it all became worse.

Emboldened by attacks on transgender people, the Trump Administration set its sights on pro-Palestine activists, depriving them of their rights and liberties. The administration continued its white nationalist march by kidnapping and deporting more than 230 innocent brown men, such as Kilmar Abrego Garcia, to a foreign prison in El Salvador. Since the majority kept silent, Trump and his budget Goebbels, Stephen Miller, then unleashed masked and armed U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents on liberal American cities. Eventually, these agents murdered two innocent white protesters, Renée Good and Alex Pretti. Members of the Trump Administration referred to them as “domestic terrorists,” while praising and pardoning January 6 insurrectionists, including people who were convicted of seditious conspiracy charges.

The MAGA movement used and abused people’s ignorance and fear about transgender people as a Trojan horse to implement its fascist agenda. ICE and CBP agents began terrorizing white and suburban communities with impunity. Trump didn’t end any wars, but instead became more imperialistic, embroiling the United States in an unwinnable conflict in Iran, leading to rising gas prices, alleged war crimes, market volatility, and food shortages. Instead of releasing the Epstein files, Trump backtracked on his promise, engaged in a massive cover-up, and forced the Justice Department to prosecute his enemies.

Wajahat Ali wrote a very good column in The Progressive Magazine about the MAGA movement’s use of scapegoating trans people as a Trojan horse to implement its fascist agenda.

saywhat-politics

In a separate ruling, the justices allowed Lisa Cook to remain at the Fed. Follow for live updates.

What we're watching

• The Supreme Court on Monday rejected President Donald Trump’s attempt to immediately fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, further cementing the Fed’s independence.

• The court, meanwhile, expanded the president’s power to fire officials, overturning the nearly century-old precedent Humphrey’s Executor. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in a dissent, said it “promises only chaos.”

• The justices also upheld state laws that count mail ballots that arrive after Election Day, an unexpected rebuff of Trump’s longstanding attacks on mail-in voting. Trump immediately called for Congress to pass the “SAVE America Act,” which would limit mail ballots and install strict new ID and proof-of-citizenship requirements for voting.

justinspoliticalcorner

High commissioner for human rights calls for ‘those responsible for violations of the law’ to be held to account

José Olivares at The Guardian:

Volker Türk, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, on Friday raised the alarm internationally about deaths in US government immigration custody and called for “prompt, independent, impartial and effective investigations”. Türk’s call came as the Trump administration faced investigations by watchdogs at its own Department of Homeland Security (DHS) into deaths and use of force against people detained in its expanding immigration detention system across the country. Donald Trump is coming under increased pressure amid the surge in deaths within Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody, which comes under the DHS, including a significant series of suicides – and a lack of transparency from the US president and his federal agencies.

“Those responsible for violations of the law must be held to account, and the rights of the victims’ families to truth, justice and reparation, and guarantees of non-recurrence must be upheld,” Türk said, in a statement. Türk’s call on Friday followed an announcement by the federal government’s Homeland Security watchdog office that it will be investigating deaths in ICE custody and use of force on detainees in immigration jails. Similarly, it follows a scathing report by Human Rights Watch released this week about deaths in ICE detention. The report, co-authored by Physicians for Human Rights, alleged “violations of ICE policy and international human rights law”. Türk also expressed alarm over the use of solitary confinement inside ICE detention centers.

“All these factors exacerbate vulnerability and raise serious concerns as to whether some of these deaths in ICE custody could have been prevented,” Türk added. The UN has previously said that the use of solitary confinement for more than 15 days is considered “torture”, in a report that accused the US of using the punishment excessively in its prisons and jails, as well as overuse worldwide. The US inspector general’s office within the DHS, meanwhile, announced the two separate investigations on Wednesday, after an increasing number of deaths in ICE custody and multiplying allegations of abuse and mismanagement inside ICE facilities.

“We are conducting this evaluation because of an increase of detainee deaths in ICE custody each year since fiscal year 2022,” the DHS inspector general’s office said when announcing its internal investigation. The watchdogs will look at whether “systemic factors, policies, or processes” played a role in deaths between 1 October 2021 and 31 March of this year.

Since the Trump administration took office again in early 2025, ICE has dramatically increased its number of arrests and detentions of immigrants nationwide, attempting to fulfil Trump’s campaign promise of “mass deportations”. Early in the administration, top Trump officials set a goal of 3,000 arrests per day, leading to a surge in ICE operations nationwide and protests in opposition to the harsh deportation campaign. Mortality in ICE custody is at its highest level in over a decade, according to Human Rights Watch and Physicians for Human Rights. The US-based advocacy’s report released this week calculates that in the first 500 days of Trump’s second administration, 52 people have died in ICE custody in the US. [...]

The DHS has repeatedly denied there has been a surge of in-custody deaths, despite its own data and press releases indicating the contrary.

On Friday a spokesperson for the agency said: “ICE is regularly audited and inspected by external agencies to ensure that all ICE facilities comply with performance-based national detention standards. All detainees are provided with proper meals, quality water, blankets, medical treatment, and have opportunities to communicate with their family members and lawyers.” The statement continued: “There has been NO spike in deaths. Consistent with data over the last decade, death rates in custody under the Trump administration are 0.009% of the detained population. As bed space has rapidly expanded, we have maintained higher a standard of care than most prisons that hold US citizens – including providing access to proper medical care.” The DHS did not respond specifically to the remarks and allegations by Türk and the HRW report or the announcement of the watchdog investigations.

When a detainee dies in ICE custody, the agency is required to inform the public within 48 hours and later release further reports. Human Rights Watch and Physicians for Human Rights said there was a shocking lack of transparency about deaths inside ICE’s secretive network of facilities.

“ICE so severely limits the information it provides to Congress, families and the public that oversight is nearly impossible,” said Dr Katherine Peeler, a co-author of the report and assistant professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. “In the cases where we do have access to ICE and outside hospital records, we are seeing a breathtaking breach of the duty of care.”

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk calls for prompt investigations into deaths in US government immigration custody as a result of Trump Regime policies.

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Federal judge bars Trump’s proof of citizenship requirement to vote

Watch live from outside the Senate as President Donald Trump ratchets up tensions with Senate Republicans, abruptly canceling plans to sign

Follow the latest news on President Donald Trump and his administration | June 24, 2026

Edited By BRIDGET BROWN, MICHAEL WARREN, LUENA RODRIGUEZ-FEO VILEIRA and AISHA I. JEFFERSON

Updated 1:38 PM CDT, June 24, 2026

A federal judge on Wednesday permanently barred President Donald Trump’s administration from implementing most of his first executive order on elections, part of which sought to require people to show documentary proof of citizenship when they register to vote. The judge agreed that the states and Congress have constitutional authority over elections, deeming Trump’s requirements a violation of the separation of powers.

Trump’s push for stricter voter identification rules in federal elections has been ruffling Senate Republicans. Trump worsened tensions earlier Wednesday by abruptly canceling plans to sign a bipartisan affordable housing measure, insisting that the Senate first move his voting legislation even though it doesn’t have enough support to pass.

The president then attended a preplanned lunch with GOP senators, whose increasing frustrations include his diversions from the party’s agenda and his unclear Iran war strategy. Republican senators had hoped to use Wednesday’s housing bill to show voters they care about affordability ahead of the November midterm elections.

Later on Wednesday, Trump also has a face-to-face with NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte, two weeks ahead of the annual summit of the military alliance, as the Pentagon reviews the U.S. military footprint in Europe.

justinspoliticalcorner

A new data investigation says the paper of record increasingly framed transgender rights as a debate instead of a lived reality.

Christopher Wiggins at The Advocate:

A new data investigation argues that The New York Times sharply changed the way it covers transgender people beginning in 2022, moving from rights-based framing toward more skeptical, conflict-driven coverage that elevated opponents of transgender rights and gave less prominence to transgender people themselves.

A shift in the paper of record

The analysis, published Friday by civil rights attorney Alejandra Caraballo in The Dissident, reviewed 3,242 Times articles published between 2014 and early 2026. Caraballo also published an accompanying data site, where readers can review the findings and methodology. “This isn’t about any individual story,” Caraballo, who said the project took her two months to complete, told The Advocate in an interview Monday. “This is about the whole corpus of how they’ve covered trans issues over time.”

The New York Times did not initially respond to The Advocate’s request for comment. After this story was published, the paper rejected the analysis and denied that its coverage is biased or anti-trans. In a statement to The Advocate, Danielle Rhoades Ha, the Times’ senior vice president of communications, said the paper’s role is “to report accurate, fact-based information on all aspects of a story to help the public understand vital issues better.” Caraballo, a clinical instructor at Harvard Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic, said she undertook the project because years of criticism from transgender writers, journalists, and advocacy groups had often been met by the Times with defenses of individual stories. The problem, she said, was not always factual error, but the cumulative effect of framing, story selection, and prominence. “It is harder on the individual level because there isn’t anything usually factually wrong with their stories,” Caraballo said. “But part of the problem is the framing, what they choose to highlight, and how much priority they give certain stories.” [...]

The 2022 turning point

The analysis identifies three broad eras in Times coverage: a “tipping point” period from 2014 to 2017, a quieter and more neutral period from 2018 to 2021, and a marked shift beginning in 2022, when coverage of transgender issues increased and became more centered on medical skepticism, youth gender-affirming care, and political conflict, Caraballo explained. She said the Times’ coverage of transgender youth and gender-affirming care became the clearest example of the change. She pointed to the 2022 New York Times Magazine story titled “The Battle Over Gender Therapy,” subsequent reporting on puberty blockers, and health and science coverage as key in the shift.

“What you end up having is this disparity where the legislation that gets passed, hundreds and hundreds of bills across dozens of states, just gets pushed to the back of the newspaper, doesn’t get push notifications, barely gets any really major coverage,” Caraballo said. “And then the front page, the stuff that gets push notifications, the stuff that’s all at the top, that’s the stuff questioning gender-affirming care for trans youth, which is what they were mostly trying to ban in all these states.” The data site says the analysis found four major changes. Protective framing fell, opponents of transgender rights became more prominent, conflict framing increased, and coverage of health care changed most sharply, according to Caraballo’s analysis.

The New York Times did everything possible to make trans rights into a "controversy", especially in sports and gender-affirming care for minors.

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