Is there nobody in this country man or woman enough to stand up to Trump and his insanity? There are rumors that ship carrying Russian diesel is already nearing a U.S. port. Where are the unions refusing to unload the ship? Where are the members of Congress moving to stop Trump’s treasonous deal? Where are the senior people on Trump’s team willing to stand up for this country and publicly take a stand against this perfidy?
The kyivindependent.com reported on October 10:
The revelation (about Trump’s diesel deal with Russia) raised questions about whether Washington had already negotiated terms with Moscow while Ukrainian and Europeanofficials were still trying to establish the parameters of an energy truce.
“It felt like a trap,” the senior Ukrainian official said.
“To be honest, everyone was shocked as f*ck.”
The timing of the U.S. decision only deepened the suspicion.
Following Trump’s direction, the U.S. Treasury Department announced that its Office of Foreign Assets Control was “immediately issuing a temporary general license to allow the supply of Russian diesel to the global market.”
One Ukrainian official pointed to April 7, the date on which the waiver was set to expire, as evidence that Washington had planned the measure around a specific timetable.
“They lifted the sanctions until April 7… So they were preparing this for Oct. 7. It’s a birthday present for Putin. They’re counting the six months,” the official said.
I’d write about this situation in my own words, but Ron Filipowski already said it best today in Meidas+:
… Trump announced today that he and Vladimir Putin have reached a deal to tamper with the American election where the US will fund the genocidal Russian war machine by buying massive quantities of oil and diesel from the evil autocratic regime. He posted on Truth Social:
“I have just concluded a highly successful discussion with President Vladimir Putin, of Russia, wherein it was agreed that Russia will immediately supply over 300,000 Tons of Diesel Fuel to the American and Global Marketplace, another 500,000 Tons during the month of November, and 1,000,000 Tons immediately thereafter. Additionally, based on the condition of their Diesel Refineries, Russia will then deliver, within a short period of time, 3,000,000 Tons of Diesel Fuel. Between our TOTAL CONTROL of the Strait of Hormuz, and this great announcement on Russian Energy, Diesel Prices for Americans and, indeed, the World, will be COMING DOWN, IN RECORD NUMBERS, AND FAST! Lower prices for Americans, especially our Great Farmers, Ranchers, and Truckers, is my Greatest Priority. This is a very big and important announcement.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy immediately issued a statement saying that Trump betrayed Ukraine:
“At this very moment—while our team is speaking with the American team in Florida—the President of the United States is talking to the Kremlin leader, the leader behind this war and this aggression, and is reaching an agreement allowing Russia to export diesel. This means additional funds for the war, additional funds to fuel the suffering inflicted upon us.
Undoubtedly, this only emboldens Putin and enables them to continue fighting. It is happening right now, just as we are discussing peace: America is allowing Russia to export diesel. This means millions, billions. Ultimately, it all goes towards the war against people, against Ukraine—against all of us.
I believe our team is simply being used as a smokescreen. This is certainly dishonest; it is certainly not how partners should act. And, in my view, it is a weak decision—sadly, a weak decision made by strong partners.”
… And here we are, with Trump and Putin colluding to tamper with another American election. The US is now officially allied with Putin and Russia against Ukraine. We will fund Russia’s genocidal war machine in exchange for Putin helping Trump and the Republican Party in the midterms. One of the most shameful and disgusting days in the history of this Republic.
Watching Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial, a movie premiering at the New York Film Festival on October 5 about the rise of Sam Altman and OpenAI, “is like watching a horror movie you happen to be living through”, says an article in Vulture, an entertainment news website and the pop culture vertical of New York Magazine. The same could be said about watching Trump’s presidency.
As New Yorker Editor David Remnick wrote on October 12, “Because Trump is simultaneously an autocrat and a performance artist, because Americans tend to cling reflexively to the fraying notion of national exceptionalism, it is difficult to reckon with the idea that a President might be not merely shambolic and incompetent but something far darker, even evil.”
While Trump is seeking a $1.5 trillion Pentagon authorization, he is setting up a Pentagon slush fund within the Office of Strategic Capital that is expected to be a destination for money generated by profits from the sale of Venezuelan oil, which will presumably be spent unconstrained by Congressional review. A recipe for chaos.
Almost a million people have lost a combined nearly $4 billion on the $TRUMP memecoin; financial disclosures show that Trump personally has made more than $600 million from it. He is de facto stealing from mostly his own supporters.
In an astonishing case of political reprisal, Trump’s Justice Department is investigating whether the major television networks — ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC and Fox News — violated federal antitrust laws when the group briefly suspended their White House pool coverage. This followed a call by Laura Loomer, the far-right influencer who has often had the ear of Trump, or an antitrust investigation into TV networks for colluding “to refuse to cover President Trump”. “The trend we’re observing is profoundly undemocratic,” commented Jem Bartholomew of the Columbia Journalism Review.
Laura Loomer
With international national security threats multiplying, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and President Trump have fired, pushed to retire, or blocked the promotions of more than two dozen senior military leaders in the past 21 months, including high profile generals, admirals, and civilian defense leaders. The latest departure was Army Secretary Dan Driscoll. The New York Times reported “…in a meeting with the president, Mr. Driscoll complained that Mr. Hegseth had fired some of the Army’s most combat-tested leaders, imperiling its efforts to modernize the force, military officials said. He also warned Mr. Trump that the firings and blocked promotions have damaged morale, causing some in the military to question the fairness of a promotion system that is supposed to be apolitical and merit-based, senior officials said.” Other departures have included: the Army’s top uniformed officer, Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George; Navy Secretary John Phelan; Army Gen. Christopher Donahue (the last U.S. soldier to leave Afghanistan); Adm. Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to serve as chief of naval operations and to become a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin; Air Force Vice Chief of Staff Gen. James Slife; the head of U.S. Southern Command, Navy Adm. Alvin Holsey; NSA director, CYBERCOM commander Gen. Timothy Haug (fired shortly after far-right activist Laura Loomer pressured Trump to fire him).
Donald Trump’s Justice Department, which has prioritized investigating people who have investigated Trump, is reaching back in history to consider whether prosecutors mistreated an earlier Republican president: Richard Nixon, more than half a century after that scandal led to Nixon’s resignation, according to the Wall Street Journal. “The department is reviewing whether the special prosecutor’s office that investigated the famed Watergate break-in committed misconduct, according to people familiar with the matter, more than half a century after that scandal led to Nixon’s resignation.
Trump officials are withholding updated COVID vaccines from the Vaccines for Children program, delaying access for children in at least 11 states and one U.S. territory, The Guardian reported. More than half of American children receive vaccines through the program.
Trump consulted Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot in deciding whether to capture Nicolás Maduro. In December 2025, about a month before the U.S. invaded Venezuela and captured its president,Trump met with Elon Musk and spent hours talking to Musk’s Grok chatbot, including asking how Venezuelans would respond to the capture of their president. Grok characterized Maduro as a “deeply unpopular dictator” and said Venezuelans would celebrate his downfall, prompting Trump to conclude the chatbot was “ingenious.”
The Trump administration is using public dollars not appropriated for that purpose to produce and pay for television adsTimes. Trump personally instructed his budget director to use taxpayer money for TV ads , according to The New York Times. The money came from U.S. Customs and Border Protection, an arm of DHS that oversees the Border Patrol and customs and immigration at airports. The Washington Sun reported that on Sept. 19, the White House Office of Management and Budget gave Customs and Border Protection $20 million for “OBBBA commemorative events.” The next day, CBP awarded the advertising company LMD Agency Inc. a contract for $20 million for a “national media campaign.” Lawmakers are pointing to the $20 million apportionment as an unauthorized use of funds, claiming the administration went around Congress to pay for an ad campaign that the law had deemed prohibited.
Donald Trump’s Truth Social company is charging investors $100,000 for faster access to his posts announcing government policy, allowing them to trade on information before everyone else gets it, while his company makes money selling this advantage. the practice continues while 53 former federal prosecutors and agents have advised a federal court that the program likely violates federal criminal laws involving securities, conflicts of interest, and public corruption.
The U.S. war against Iran has cost the Department of Defense more than $38 billion through Aug. 1, and will continue costing up to $3 billion a month or more depending on the intensity of this now preparing to send a third aircraft carrier strike group, led by the USS Theodore Roosevelt , to the Middle East, adding 9,000–10,000 troops to the more than 50,000 U.S. troops already in the region.
According to Forbes, President Trump is an estimated $2.7 billion richer than when he won the 2024 election, having cashed in on crypto ventures and overseas deals. The Washington Post reported growing anger among younger crypto enthusiasts who supported Trump only to watch his family haul in enormous sums from their crypto ventures while several Trump-linked investments plummeted in value.
Adding insult to injury, the Washington Sun reports that GetTrumpMemes.com is promising invitations to ‘an evening at his members-only club, Trump National Washington D.C., with 3 Legends and President Donald J. Trump for the 185 largest holders of the Trump Coin. The top 29 purchasers will be invited to an additional ‘VIP Reception with YOUR FAVORITE PRESIDENT,’ while the 4 biggest will also receive an 18-karat Trump-branded gold watch. “The winners will be chosen based on a formula that seems designed in part to increase sales of $TRUMP in the next two months,” the Sun said, noting that Trump’s meme coin has already earned him $635 million from the venture since it started in 2025, while purchasers of Trump’s crypto products have lost an estimated $4.7 billion combined thus far.
President Trump’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has opened an investigation into Nike over the company’s racial diversity hiring and promotion strategy. Trump has objected to Nike’s marketing campaigns around social justice.
In an unprecedented move, Melania Trump has earned over $18 million since 2024, according to federal financial disclosure reports released in mid-2026. with $10.71 million from an Amazon MGM Studios licensing agreement for her self-titled documentary, Melania. and over $6 million ($6,011,259) from digital assets and collectible sales, which surged significantly from prior years.
Over 5 million Americans, or 13% of beneficiaries, have lost SNAP benefits following the implementation of strict federal rules from the Republican’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
During his second term, Trump’s administration has systematically targeted the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) through budget cuts, staff reductions, and the termination of major climate research programs. The agency has lost roughly 20% to 30% of its staff due to firings and early retirements. Only after intense public pressure and bipartisan backlash from lawmakers and scientists did the administration halt a plan to dismantle the $368 million Ocean Observatories Initiative , which would have removed over 900 deep-ocean sensors and high-tech data buoys. Trump has also proposed major cuts to research funding at the National Science Foundation across all its directorates and halting funding for the Arctic Report Card, a longstanding effort to synthesize the latest research about the fastest warming place on Earth. Meanwhile,in another part of NOAA, NOAA Fisheries, the arm of NOAA tasked with overseeing commercial fishing, is facing a budget cut of more than 40% in the fiscal 2027 budget proposal. That would result in cuts to science programs, fisheries management and data collection.
In a September 28 interview with Time magazine, Trump was asked, “Would you rule out declaring a state of emergency in the lead up to the midterms unless there’s widespread violence in the streets? Trump: replied, “I don’t rule anything out or in. We’ll see. You mean the Insurrection Act? TIME: Yeah. Trump: No, I’ve never used it. I could use it. A lot of people think I should use it sometimes.”
Trump went on to laud his intellectual superiority in the Time interview. “I have the highest of IQs. I have the highest. I’m fine, and I understand that stuff,” he said in a rambling statement. “You know, my uncle was at MIT for 41 years, and you know, I’m a—I believe in genetics, frankly, and I understand. I understand it much more than I think any president would, because I do have an ability on this. I have an ability on those things that were the new frontiers.”
In the same Time magazine interview, Trump repeatedly declined to rule out demolition of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Asked if he would commit to not bringing in wrecking balls to demolish the building, he respond, “I’m not committing to anything. We’re going to see how it plays out in court.”
Noncitizens residing in the United States who faced removal proceedings have traditionally been eligible for bond hearings. As independent journalist Anthony Davis has pointed out, So long as an individual could demonstrate that they posed neither a public safety threat nor a flight risk, immigration judges regularly permitted them to remain at home with their families while their legal cases progressed. The Trump administration discarded this standard, reinterpreting the Immigration and Nationality Act to dictate that any migrant who entered the U.S. without authorization must be subjected to mandatory, un-bondable detention until their case resolves. In short, asylum, protected under international law, has been criminalized in America.
On September 15, 2026, ICE removed thousands of immigrants with final deportation orders from its public detainee locator, eliminating the ability of lawyers and families to find where many are being held. If lawyers can’t find their clients they can be deported before an attorney or court has a chance to intervene. More than 30 human rights groups asked a UN panel to intervene. The change affects more than 16,000 people.
The federal Fiscal Year (FY) 2026 ended October 30. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates the FY 2026 Deficit will total $2.0 Trillion, with interest, at over $1 trillion, representing the second largest expenditure in 2026. “The country’s future fiscal outlook is even more dismal,” the Committee says. With annual debt payments of more than $1 trillion a year, it is inevitable that the cost of servicing the US national debt will start to cut deeply into other government programs.
Arrests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement this summer soared to record highs since the start of this Trump administration — with 43,000 in June, more than 49,000 in July and nearly 51,000 in August — as officials cut or narrowed the pathways to legal residency in the United States and expanded the pool of people eligible for deportation, according to the new York Times. Federal agents appeared in nearly every corner of daily life, carrying out operations at hospitals and airports, outside suburban schools and along rural construction sites and truck stops. They fanned out from coastal cities in Maine to desert towns in Arizona, across the open plains of Wyoming and down through the southern borderlands.
On September 29, the Supreme Court cleared the way for the Trump administration to deport immigrants to third countries where they have no ties, with little or no notice and no meaningful chance to object. In a 6-3 decision, the Court put on hold U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy’s ruling that the policy is unlawful until the justices consider the case, with arguments set for December. The Trump administration has authorized or pledged at least $410 million to facilitate deportation agreements to send immigrants to third countries with 31 countries, mostly in Africa and Latin America, as of the end of June, the Washington Post reported on September 21, and documents from inside the Office of Remigration (A 1984-ish term if there ever was one) reviewed by The Post show financial commitments that include $81 million in direct payments to 13 of the foreign governments. More than 23,000 people have already been sent from the United States to 26 countries other than their own in 2026, including large numbers of children and adolescents. The Supreme Court’s decision means the current deportation policy can remain in place for months because the court won’t hear oral arguments on the case until December, likely leaving a decision until 2027.
The Treasury Department and the IRS have proposed a rule that would revoke tax-exempt status from private schools—everything from elementary schools to universities—that offer “targeted support to Black or other minority students,” including assistance offered to minority students, such as minority student clubs and mentoring programs.
With the US military already stretched, American soldiers recently joined a police operation in Ecuador against a cartel. Eighteen Latin American nations have joined a new U.S.-led coalition against cartels, and at least three of them — Colombia, Guatemala and Ecuador — have already agreed to joint military operations with the Pentagon.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act helped roughly triple the ICE budget, allocating $45 billion for building new immigration centers and hiring 10,000 new ICE agents. “One dispiriting lesson of the imperial boomerang is that, once. bought and paid for, structures of intimidation and oppression tend to endure,“ said David Wallace-Wells.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has spread its detention center tentacles across the United States. Most of us know the names of a few Nazi concentration camps, like Dachau, Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, where Anne Frank died. But they were part of a massive complex of more than 850 ghettos, concentration camps, forced-labor camps and extermination camps CNN has identified. They stretched from France and the Netherlands in the west to Estonia, Lithuania and Poland in the east that the Nazis established during the 12 years Adolf Hitler was in power. Their purpose — to segregate , oppress and persecute their opponents. Like the ICE detention centers, the Nazi system started small and then metastasized like a cancer, according to the Wiener Holocaust Library.
The Trump administration, defying Congress, has stripped tens of millions of dollars in U.S. military assistance from European and Middle Eastern countries and will give those funds instead to conservative-leaning governments in Latin America, according to The Washington Post. Some of the money was included in a Ukraine supplemental bill specifically for countries affected by the war in Ukraine.
The Trump administration has largely halted direct financial and military aid to Ukraine, shifting the main burden of support to Europe, while upending the US approach to the invasion of Ukraine and treating Russia increasingly not as an adversary, but an ally.
Two more years of this?
New York Magazine writer-at-large, Frank Rich, recently shined a light on the people collaborating with Trump. American titans of finance and tech and the law, such as Jeff Bezos, Scott Bessent, and Todd Blanche, have “enabled a kleptocracy that might make Suharto and Marcos look like shoplifters,” Rich wrote. “What’s curious is that they seem so nonchalant about it all, as if no reckoning were coming,” said Ryu Spaeth, features editor at New York Magazine “As Frank shows in this brilliant and forceful essay, history suggests otherwise.”
When, or if, all this is over, will all of its co-conspirators and enablers, who now seem to eagerly embrace the law of the jungle, seek the shield of the rule of law? Don’t be surprised.
President Trump put up another taxpayer-paid television ad on Sept. 30. The spot, first flagged by political ad-buying firm Medium Buying, flaunts a flashing series of missile strikes and F-22 jet acrobatics interlaced over bombastic speech from Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
His second administration has been equally brazen and blatant in ignoring Congress’ power of the purse.
Health and Human Services Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently funded enhanced security for himself by taking about $12 million from the department’s Office of Minority Health. The Wall Street Journal noted that the Reagan administration created the Office after a landmark report showed that Black life expectancy in the U.S. was shorter than white Americans’ and that Black babies were more likely than white babies to die.
Meanwhile, Trump’s administration has thrown the 433 sites managed by the National Park Service into turmoil, shifting funding and workers to pet projects in Washington, according to the New York Times. Earlier this year, the administration used at least $67 million generated by entrance fees from parks to help fund projects in Washington favored by Mr. Trump, like the botched Reflecting Pool repairs.
In August, the Washington Post reported that to assemble funding in that account, the White House budget office authorized a series of transfers from the U.S. Secret Service and the White House Military Office totaling $500 million, planning and budget documents indicate, while an additional $305 million came from private donations., primarily using taxpayer dollars. Instead of seeking Congressional appropriations, the administration has pieced together funding from other agencies and private donors and directed it to an account intended routine maintenance of the executive mansion. To build the fund, the White House budget office authorized a series of transfers from the U.S. Secret Service and the White House Military Office totaling $500 million.
And now USA Today just reported that The Trump administration is using public dollars not appropriated for that purpose to produce and pay for a television ad that features President Trump urging Americans to “defeat communism,” while touting his economic record and personal resilience, as a choir in the background recites the verse “Love me. The ad reads “Paid for by the U.S. Government” at the end. “It appears to mark an extraordinary breach of White House practice under previous presidents separating public funding from political advertising,” USA Today observed.
Trump Administration’s TV Ad
Despite criticism, another government-funded political ad promoting Trump aired on Fox News Sunday, during “Saturday Night Live,” “Fox News Sunday,” and several college and NFL football games. The 30-second ad showed a grim-faced Trump walking down a hallway as audio from a rally speech played in the background. “This is the final battle,” Trump says. “With you at my side, we will demolish the deep state.”
“We will cast out the communists, Marxists, and fascists. We will throw off the sick political class that hates our country. We will rout the fake news media, and we will liberate America from these villains once and for all,” Trump says in the ad.
Sept. 27 Ad.
The taxpayer money used to fund the ads that started airing last week came from U.S. Customs and Border Protection, an arm of DHS that oversees the Border Patrol and customs and immigration at airports, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Four high-ranking House and Senate Democrats wrote a letter to White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles demanding the Trump administration immediately take an earlier ad off the air off the air and report exactly how many taxpayer dollars were spent creating and airing the illegal political propaganda. “If President Trump wants people to love him, he can pay for it himself,” the letter said.
“This is the sort of government propaganda one might expect in North Korea, not the United States of America, and it is an egregious and utterly illegal misuse of Americans’ hard-earned tax dollars,”the lawmakers wrote, noting the ad constitutes a blatant violation of Section 718 of Division E of the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2026, which forbids any federal funding from supporting propaganda, as well as other federal laws.
The White House has responded that the ad is nothing more than “a public service announcement”.
Trump’s diversion of federal funds for purposes not explicitly appropriated by Congress has been a central flashpoint across both of his presidential terms. “Critics and lawmakers argue that the administration’s actions bypass federal law, while the administration has relied on emergency powers, executive orders, and legal maneuvers to pause, claw back, or redirect funds to fit its policy goals,” says international law firm Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman.
Congress needs to reassert its power of the purse and its responsibility to the American people NOW!
Three days later, the administration began running pro-Trump national ads featuring the president railing against communism and praising his past achievements. Lawmakers are pointing to the $20 million apportionment as an unauthorized use of funds, claiming the administration went around Congress to pay for an ad campaign that the law had deemed prohibited.
LMD Agency received the $20 million contract from the CBP’s public affairs office as part of a larger contracting vehicle the ad agency already has with the US Coast Guard.
That larger contracting vehicle is normally used for Coast Guard recruitment campaigns, according to a review of federal spending databases. Because LMD Agency already had a larger “indefinite delivery vehicle” contract, CBP did not have to run a separate solicitation process to award the contract.
Marie Nahayo’s lifeless body was found hanging from a tree in the courtyard of her home in Burundi, East Africa on March 8 of this year.
Human rights monitoring groups flagged her case as part of a deeply worrying trend of “staged suicides”—disguised murders intended to cover up violent crimes. During that month alone, 11 lifeless bodies were found across the country all killed by extreme violence.
“March 2026 marks the continuation of a cycle of serious and systematic human rights violations in Burundi,” reported ACAT-Burundi, a human rights group. “The evidence gathered confirms that the right to life, a fundamental pillar of any rule of law, is repeatedly violated in various forms: assassinations, enforced disappearances and torture.”
Bodies in the street in Cibitoke neighborhood of Bujumbura, Burundi(Human Rights Watch)
“At the same time, Burundi struggles with high malnutrition, limited access to clean water, sanitation, and healthcare, and frequent climate disasters that intensify hunger and poor living conditions,” says Third Country Deportation Watch.
The US State Department urges travelers to re-evaluate trips to Burundi due to safety and security risks, with the potential for political unrest and violent crime — such as armed robbery, carjacking, home invasions, and assault — existing nationwide.
Despite this perilous situation, on August 27, 2026, the United States detained and forcefully transferred 12 nationals from Cameroon, Angola, Mauritania, and Sudan to Burundi under a third country removal agreement.
“Such arrangements are taking shape in particular in Africa, where Mr. Trump has ushered in a new style of diplomacy that prioritizes deal-making over enforcing human rights and promoting democracy,” the New York Times reported in April 2026. “The policy is called “America First in Africa”.
The Trump administration has authorized or pledged at least $410 million to facilitate deportation agreements with 31 countries, mostly in Africa and Latin America, as of the end of June, the Washington Post reported on September 21, and documents from inside the Office of Remigration (A 1984-ish term if there ever was one) reviewed by The Post show financial commitments that include $81 million in direct payments to 13 of the foreign governments.
More than 23,000 people have reportedly been sent from the United States to 26 countries other than their own in 2026, including large numbers of children and adolescents. According to Third Country Deportation Watch, at least 35 countries have signed agreements with the United States to take deported immigrants as the Trump administration pays other countries with documented histories of corruption and human rights abuses millions of dollars to take in deported people under “third country” agreements.
The Guardian recently reported that in August about 20 people were put on a flight in the US, shackled at the wrists, waist and ankles, and sent to Liberia as part of a major third-country deportation arrangement. When six of them refused to get off the plane, they were dropped off in another African country, Equatorial Guinea, “one of the world’s most repressive and corrupt regimes, where armed men took them to a former luxury hotel turned detention centre in the capital, Malabo, where they have been held ever since,” the Guardian reported.
As of October 24, at least 63 third-country nationals had been sent to Equatorial Guinea since last November via at least six ICE-chartered flights, where they have reported being beaten, threatened, held at gunpoint, and deprived of food, water, hygiene products, and medical care, according to The American Prospect.
On Sept. 18, the New York Times reported that two men deported to Equatorial Guinea by the Trump administration “were hooded, bound, beaten with guns and shoved down a flight of stairs recently by police officers at a remote hotel where immigrants are being held indefinitely, according to witnesses and lawyers. Videos and interviews show that police aggression inside the hotel escalated in recent weeks and peaked on Sept. 11. The police put burlap sacks over the two men’s faces, tied their hands with rope, beat them with guns and shoved them down the stairs as several deportees watched. The beatings were recounted by multiple witnesses and lawyers.
Equatorial Guinea agreed to take deportees from the United States, but has given them no legal rights or documents that would let them live or work there, even temporarily, leaving them in limbo.
About 1200 Venezuelan migrants have been sent to El Salvador, with many of them deposited in CECOT (the Center for Terrorism Confinement)—a notorious maximum-security mega-prison. Migrants have testified that they were shot with rubber bullets and beaten on a regular basis. Many of them have alleged that they were routinely raped and tortured.
ICE has also deported migrants originating from countries such as Afghanistan and Iran to volatile regions like the Central African Republic and South Sudan. The U.S. State Department warns “Do not travel to Central African Republic due to risk of unrest, crime, kidnapping, landmines, and terrorism” and “Do not travel to South Sudan due to risk of unrest, crime, kidnapping, and health risks”.
Deported men shackled by both hands and feet, guarded by US service members, aboard the plane to South Sudan
Detainees have also been sent to the African nation of Eswatini, where they’ve been held in a maximum-security prison without charge and with no access to legal counsel.
On October 29, 2026, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Trump administration had agreed to send around $35 million in military aid to a Central African military unit in Cameroon previously accused of war crimes as part of a wider arrangement to deport third-country migrants to the region. The military aid and deportation deal were brokered simultaneously by State Department officials as part of the same package, according to U.S. officials and congressional aides.
Then, on October 30, the New York Times reported that the Trump administration had detained dozens of Afghan immigrants in Louisiana, including relatives of people who helped the U.S. military, and planned to deport them to Afghanistan. More than 150 Afghan immigrants were expected to be deported, one official said, making this one of the largest single expulsions of Afghans.
And on October 30, the New York Times reported that he Trump administration had detained dozens of Afghan immigrants in Louisiana, including relatives of people who helped the U.S. military, and planned to deport them to Afghanistan. More than 150 Afghan immigrants were expected to be deported, one official said, making this one of the largest single expulsions of Afghans.
Not only are people being deported, but the administration is making the process as cruel as possible.
“There have been widespread reports of ICE agents using the threat of sending people to third countries in order to pressure them to sign and accept deportations to their home countries,” says Amnesty International. “The cruelty is by design. It is meant to force immigrants to live in fear …filled with fear that they’ll be arrested and deported to an unfamiliar and possibly unsafe place.”
“The cruelty is the point,” Adam Serwer wrote in a seminal essay in The Atlantic in October 2018. “President Trump and his supporters find community by rejoicing in the suffering of those they hate and fear,” he said.
Congressman Ronny Jackson, a Texas Republican in office since 2021, knows how to pull a fast one in the fundraising festival.
Rep. Ronny Jackson
He’s blanketing email inboxes with a deceptive, plaintive plea from Team Ronny. This one came to me in Oregon:
Ronny’s no stranger to controversy.
In March 2021, a scathing Pentagon inspector general report said he engaged in “inappropriate conduct” while serving as a White House physician, made sexual comments and “disparaged, belittled, bullied and humiliated” subordinates. The report also said he “engaged in inappropriate conduct involving the use of alcohol during two incidents” on overseas presidential trips in 2014 and 2016.
President Trump nominated Jackson to be Secretary of Veterans Affairs during his first term in 2018, but Jackson withdrew his nomination after accusations of drinking on the job and over-prescribing medications to patients.
Texas voters in the heavily conservative 13th Congressional District later elected Jackson to Congress in 2020 anyway with a strong endorsement from Trump.
Now Jackson’s out there playing tricks with emails ostensibly seeking the opinions of recipients on the midterm elections:
“Patriot, we’d like to invite you into the inner circle,” the message says.
“You’ve gone above and beyond to display the traits of someone who truly cares about their country, their community, their family, and the future of traditional conservative civilization. Therefore, we wanted to reach out to you personally, one-on-one, to get your thoughts on the outlook of the upcoming midterm elections.”
To lend a patina of legitimacy to the message, the plea then includes a series of questions:
❓DO YOU SUPPORT PRESIDENT TRUMP’S PLAN TO DEPORT ILLEGALS?
❓DO YOU BELIEVE OUR NATIONAL SECURITY IS AT RISK IF AMERICA LACKS BORDER SECURITY?
❓ARE YOU PLEASED WITH PRESIDENT TRUMP’S JOB PERFORMANCE SO FAR?
❓DO YOU BELIEVE THE GOVERNMENT SHOULD BE DOING MORE TO STOP ANTI-AMERICAN IDEOLOGY FROM BEING TAUGHT IN SCHOOLS?
❓ARE YOU GLAD DONALD TRUMP IS PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES?
❓DO YOU SUPPORT THE SECRETARY OF WAR, PETE HEGSETH?
❓DO YOU BELIEVE REPUBLICANS WILL MAINTAIN MAJORITY CONTROL IN CONGRESS AFTER THE 2026 MIDTERMS?
❓If the 2028 Presidential Election were held today, who would you prefer to win?
Then, of course, comes the real message. “Add Your name and submit your answers” along with a $20.26 contribution or show your dedication with a contribution ranging from $47 to $3,500.
“Your contribution will benefit Texans for Ronny Jackson and Trump National Committee JFC”, the email assures recipients.
Ah yes, but how much to each? In tiny barely readable text, the message says you have click through to find out. If any recipients do, they will discover that $19.25 of a $20.26 contribution will go not to Trump, but to “Texans for Ronny Jackson TX-13”. Only $1.01 will go to “Trump National Committee JFC. The same percentage division applies to all contributions. A $1000 contribution will send $950 to Jackson and just $50 to Trump, a $3,500 contribution will send $3,325 to Jackson and $175 to Trump.
To add insult to injury, unless you are careful and uncheck a box, the pledge will become a monthly recurring contribution with an indeterminate end date. In adopting this scheme, Jackson joins other politicians who have been criticized for manipulating contributors.
In 2021, the New York Times reported that the Republican National Committee and the campaign committee for Donald Trump had refunded $12.8 million collected from people in the first half of 2021 who thought they were making a single donation. Instead, the online solicitation signed them up for weekly contributions.
Four state attorneys general have begun looking into the online fund-raising practices of both political parties, specifically seeking information about the use of prechecked boxes to enroll contributors in recurring donation programs that spurred a wave of fraud complaints and demands for refunds last year.
The attorneys general for New York, Minnesota, Maryland and Connecticut sent letters to WinRed, which processes online donations for Republicans, and ActBlue, which processes online donations for Democrats, asking for documents related to the practices.
In 2023, researchers at Columbia University who analyzed millions of campaign contributions found that about half of top Republicans had signed donors up for automatic recurring contributions.
Critics allege that the practice is an attempt to intentionally manipulate small-dollar contributors. In May 2021 the Federal Election Commission (FEC) voted unanimously to recommend that Congress officially ban pre-checked recurring donation boxes, demanding mandatory “affirmative consent”. Congress has not, however, taken action to ban the practice.
Similar efforts at the state level have failed, too. In 2025, for example, the New Jersey assembly considered, but didn’t pass, Assembly Bill No. 5559 (the “Political Donation Transparency Act”) which would have prohibited automatic enrollment in recurring political contributions and established penalties for violators. A 2026 effort in Missouri failed as well when HB 1788, which would have restricted recurring contributions, passed the Missouri House, but ultimately died in the Senate.
Jackson is seeking another term in November. He will face Democratic candidate Mark Nair, who ran unopposed for his party’s nomination.
Immigrants at Camp East Montana, a sprawling desert detention camp on the Fort Bliss military base in west Texas, are in danger. A lawsuit filed in El Paso, Texas on Oct. 15 is asking the court to order defendants to protect the health and safety of the detainees as people detained there raise alleged constitutional, statutory and ethical issues.
A satellite image of Camp East Montana
“All tell similar stories – of relentless physical and verbal abuse by guards; of going days or weeks without seeing the sun; of filthy, crowded living conditions with repeated outbreaks of measles, tuberculosis and other diseases; and of egregious medical neglect that has resulted in unnecessary suffering and death,” the lawsuit says.
President Trump’s mass deportation push has resulted in the detention of a massive and growing number of alleged undocumented immigrants in the United States. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) reports holding an average of approximately 65,000 to 73,000 people daily in its detention facilities. It’ is a vast network with detainees constantly being shifted around multiple times far from their homes. In theory, all these people are subject to deportation.
America’s gulag-style detention centers like Camp East Montana are being used as waystations for deportations back to home countries where great danger lurks and to third countries where they are not citizens, frequently don’t speak the local language, have no personal ties and are subject to God knows what brutal conditions and even death.
More than 23,000 people have been sent to 26 countries other than their own in 2026, and according to Third Country Deportation Watch, at least 35 countries have signed agreements with the United States to take deported immigrants. The Trump administration pays other countries with documented histories of corruption and human rights abuses millions of dollars to take in deported people under “third country” agreements. As Jonathan Capeheart has said, “…the stories from immigrants swept up in third-country deportations should shock the conscience of a nation that says it believes in equal protection and the rule of law. “
The Guardian recently reported that in August about 20 people were put on a flight in the US, shackled at the wrists, waist and ankles, and sent to Liberia as part of a major third-country deportation arrangement. When six of them refused to get off the plane, they were dropped off in another African country, Equatorial Guinea, “one of the world’s most repressive and corrupt regimes, where armed men took them to a former luxury hotel turned detention centre in the capital, Malabo, where they have been held ever since,” the Guardian reported.
On Sept. 18, the New York Times reported that two men deported to Equatorial Guinea by the Trump administration “were hooded, bound, beaten with guns and shoved down a flight of stairs recently by police officers at a remote hotel where immigrants are being held indefinitely, according to witnesses and lawyers. Videos and interviews show that police aggression inside the hotel escalated in recent weeks and peaked on Sept. 11. The police put burlap sacks over the two men’s faces, tied their hands with rope, beat them with guns and shoved them down the stairs as several deportees watched. The beatings were recounted by multiple witnesses and lawyers.”
ICE has deported over 200 Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador and deposited many of therm into CECOT (the Center for Terrorism Confinement)—a notorious maximum-security mega-prison. The migrants have testified that they were shot with rubber bullets and beaten on a regular basis. Many of them have alleged that they were routinely raped and tortured.
ICE has also deported migrants originating from countries such as Afghanistan and Iran to volatile regions like the Central African Republic and South Sudan. The U.S. State Department warns “Do not travel to Central African Republic due to risk of unrest, crime, kidnapping, landmines, health, and terrorism” and “Do not travel to South Sudan due to risk of unrest, crime, kidnapping, landmines, and health risks”.
Detainees have also been sent to the African nation of Eswatini, where they were held in a maximum-security prison without charge and with no access to legal counsel. And last year U.S. immigration and federal authorities tried to deport nationals from Laos, Vietnam, and the Philippines to war-torn Libya until a federal judge blocked the planned flights.
As reporting of the abuses associated with third country deportations spreads, it’s tempting to think the Trump administration is not ashamed, but gleeful, as word gets out that not only are people being deported, but the administration is making the process as cruel as possible.
Even in cases where ICE is deporting people to their home countries, the situations are often dire. There’s been an escalation of deportation flights to Haiti since the June 2026 Supreme Court decision that allowed the termination of Temporary Protected Status (TPS), stripping legal protections from an estimated 330,000 Haitian immigrants. The humanitarian and security crisis in Haiti will expose all such deportees to harm. According to the New York Times, some 3,000 people were killed there in the first six months of this year, many of them in gang-related violence.
“Millions of people in Haiti continue to face a compounding crisis of food insecurity, forced displacement, deadly disease outbreaks, and surging violence,” says Alice Ribes, the International Rescue Committee’s director for Haiti. “Public services in many areas have collapsed under gang rule, leaving people with limited or no access to clean drinking water, food, medical care, and education.”
The firm that runs Camp East Montana, which currently holds about 2,026 detainees, is Chantilly, Virginia-based Amentum Services Inc. The company is one of the largest government contractors in the United States, managing massive portfolios across defense, intelligence, homeland security, and civilian agencies. It stands to be paid more than $1.2 billion if it operates Camp East Montana from March 2026 through September 2027.
Of all things, an article in The Cut, a digital section of New York magazine, about the death of Gloria Steinem on September 2 at 92 spurred me to write this piece about Donald Trump and the Smithsonian’s interpretations of history.
Frankly, I’ve never thought much about Gloria Steinem, but for some reason I was intrigued and pored over the entire 5,948-word article. What a fascinating life!
“She was a talented, driven, and powerfully charismatic emblem for a movement that was always more complicated and sometimes more radical than she herself was,” wrote Rebecca Traister. “Her life, her work, and her contradictions together provide a remarkable illustration of the political and social disruption mainstream America is willing to tolerate, occasionally celebrate, and also revile.”
Traister wrote that Steinem frequently said she hoped to live to 100. “I’ve so loved being here,” she said in the HBO documentary. “I love it so much. I never want it to end.”
So what’s the connection of all this with Donald Trump and the Smithsonian?
The Washington Post reported on September 2 that the Trump administration is threatening to cut off executive agencies’ cooperation with the Smithsonian Institution “…if its leaders do not abandon what the administration described as “an ideological agenda that seeks to transform both the Smithsonian and the country.”
Trump set off a misguided attack on The Smithsonian when he launched his campaign against the institution last March. that was when he signed an executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” that instructed his administration to eliminate what it called “divisive narratives” and “improper ideology” from the Smithsonian and restore it as “a symbol of inspiration and American greatness.”
The executive order instructed Vice President JD Vance, who sits on the Smithsonian’s board, to work with Congress and the Office of Management and Budget to withhold funding for exhibits or programs that “degrade shared American values” or “divide Americans based on race.”
What the order really did was order that the telling of America’s history conform to Trump’s ideological view that there be just one public interpretation of American history, his.
But the fact is history is constantly being reviewed, re-interpreted, revised, re-thought. Topics of intense interest to one generation slip back as new topics emerge. Historical revisionism is a fundamental element of the discipline as new evidence emerges and societal perspectives change. Interest in some figures declines as new heroes and villains emerge.
Benjamin Franklin spoke to this fact in 1787 when he called upon those gathered art the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia to rally behind the new plan of government they had devised:
“I confess that there are several parts of this constitution which I do not at present approve, but I am not sure I shall never approve them,” he said, “For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged by better information, or fuller consideration, to change opinions even on important subjects, which I once thought right, but found to be otherwise.”
My decision to examine more closely Gloria Steinem’s life was a reflection of a new interest in somebody with whom I was only vaguely familiar. In a similar vein, I’ve been tackling books that offer new perspectives on historical events.
For quite a while there was a widespread belief that North America, for example, was some vast, wild, untouched wilderness barely populated by primitives before more sophisticated and civilized Europeans arrived. You will be dissuaded of that notion if you read Cahokia: Ancient America’s Great City on the Mississippi by archaeologist Timothy R. Pauketat. Research has revealed that in pre-Columbian America native civilizations built massive urban centers like Cahokia in southwestern Illinois which was populated by tens of thousands of people.
I long admired Apple’s leaps into China to grow its business, but I got a new perspective, and new concerns, on the implications of Apple becoming so deeply intertwined with China when I read “Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company” by Patrick McGee.
As the son of a man who served proudly in the U.S. Navy during WWII, I have always been interested in President Truman’s decision to drop the atomic bomb, wondering whether it was the right decision, particularly as some revisionists have challenged it. I’ve read multiple books on the war and that decision, arriving at the conclusion it was the right one in the face of up to a million American casualties if an invasion went forward. And, by the way, historians have been constantly re-evaluating Harry Truman the man and his presidency.
I’ve read the first two books of Rick Atkin’s trilogy on the American revolution, Bernard Bailyn’s “The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution”, Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense”, Ron Chernow’s “Alexander Hamilton” and countless others to better understand that world-changing event.
Before seeing Ken Burns’ documentary, The American Revolution, were you aware of the astonishing effort led by Boston bookseller Henry Knox to haul 59 heavy cannons and mortars from captured from British forces at Fort Ticonderoga across 300 miles of frozen wilderness to Boston, forcing a British evacuation of the city without a shot being fired? Wow! It spurred me to read an entire book, Henry Knox’s Noble Train by William Hazelgrove, about the endeavor.
The Noble Train
I’ve been taken aback to read of the extent to which slavery extended far beyond the South into into New England, even into the Norman Rockwell-perfect small town of Wallingford, Connecticut where I grew up. As Anne Farrow wrote in “The Logbooks: Connecticut’s Slave Ships and Human Memory”, In Connecticut and elsewhere in New England, “All the best families owned ‘captives’.”
Slaves on a tobacco farm in Connecticut
I grew up as a child idolizing Charles Lindbergh for his single-handed crossing of the Atlantic to Paris in the Spirit of St. Louis. I even made a special trip during a later visit to Hawaii to visit his grave on the grounds of the Palapala Ho’omau Church at the end of the road to Hana on the coast.
t wasn’t until I read numerous books about his life that I learned he was a leading spokesman for the America First Committee that opposed America’s entry into WWII. Also, although many Americans shared his early opinions, Lindbergh went further, blaming “the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt Administration” for pressing for American intervention. I also learned after he died in 1974 that he led a double life, starting a romance with a woman in Munich, Germany in 1957 and having three children with her who knew him only as ”Mr. Careu Kent”.
Charles Lindbergh speaking at an America First Committee rally in Fort Wayne, Indiana, October 3, 1941.
Suffice it to say, every time I turn around I find stories that challenge my views on people and issues of historical significance.
On July 4th, of all days, White House Domestic Policy Council Director Vince Haley released “Saving America’s Story,” a 162-page report accusing the National Museum of American History of “extreme political activism”. The report’s key finding: “museum leadership has explicitly adopted an ideological framework that no longer treats the American story as a shared national inheritance to be taught or celebrated, but as a political instrument to divide, dispirit, and discourage our citizens.”
What ought to dispirit all Americans is something else. That’s the Trump’s administration’s impulsive and capricious efforts to shut down debate on America’s glorious, and yes, flawed, history.
Corvallis, Oregon has finally gotten its moment in the sun.
The television commercial keeps popping up like a bad penny.
“My name is Karen and I’m the head pharmacist at Corvallis Drug,” it begins. “We’ll get customers come in and they’re looking for a brain supplement and Prevagen is the one I recommend…It’s just a product I believe in.”
Well, good for you, Karen, and probably for your pocketbook, but not so good for your customers.
Because Prevagen is marketed as an over-the-counter dietary supplement rather than a prescription drug, standard celebrity or professional testimonial rules apply rather than strict prescription drug broadcast laws enforced by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). That’s Karen’s the escape hatch.
Quincy Bioscience, the privately held company that manufactures Prevagen, used to hype that’s its secret was “an ingredient originally discovered in jellyfish”, a protein called Apoaequorin found in bioluminescent crystal jellyfish, scientifically known as Aequorea victoria.
equorea victoria
In 2024, a jury found Quincy’s advertising deceptive and fraudulent. The ruling, which came on charges first filed by the Federal Trade Commission and Attorney General of New York in 2017, forbid Quincy from making claims that Prevagen-branded products can improve memory or cognition, that Prevagen can show results within 90 days, and that Prevagen is “clinically proven” to work.
But you still see the Prevagen commercials and the product can be found at most major retailers. How come? It’s because Quincy shifted its marketing to vague taglines like “For Your Brain” instead of pulling ads its entirely. And the commercials still work.
Quincy launched Prevagen in 2007. According to the FTC, the supplement had already generated more than $165 million in sales by 2017. Because Quincy is a private company, sales since then are not public, but are believed to be substantial, and the product isn’t cheap. Amazon, for example, is advertising 60 capsules of Prevagen Extra Strength with 20mg of Apoaequorin for $193.89.
Unfortunately, Prevagen is not the only heavily promoted brain supplement. Another is Neuriva, an over-the-counter dietary supplement, not an FDA-approved drug.
Neuriva is marketed to fuel multiple “indicators of brain health” such as focus, memory, learning, accuracy, and concentration. Its key active ingredients are 100mg of coffee cherry extract and 100mg of plant-sourced phosphatidylserine.
But its brain health claims also lack strong support from well-designed clinical trials and Neuriva, like Prevagen, has faced legal challenges over how its products are advertised.
So, don’t take Karen’s advice or rely on yucky jellyfish to make you sharper.
“There’s no evidence to suggest there’s an ingredient in supplements that can improve brain health,” says Dr. Pieter Cohen, an internist with Harvard-affiliated Cambridge Health Alliance, whose research focuses extensively on dietary supplements. “Nothing legally contained in supplements has been proven to improve your thinking or prevent memory loss.”
It used to be that if you didn’t read your local newspaper you simply didn’t know what was going on.
When I was growing up in the small town of Wallingford, Connecticut in the 1950s, my family read the Meriden Record, established in 1867, at the breakfast table and the New Haven Register, around since 1812, in the afternoon.
When I moved to Lake Oswego, Oregon, a suburb of Portland, in 1987, one of the first things I did was subscribe to the local paper, the Lake Oswego Review.
In 2006, Lake Oswego spent $20 million to acquire some property featuring an 89,000 sq. ft. office complex, intending to transform the site into a community center. But all hell broke loose when local opposition to the plan surfaced. Over coming years, the issue generated persistent news coverage in the Lake Oswego Review.
A couple years in, I asked a local friend, an educated professional, “So, what do you think about the controversy over the proposed community center?”
“Huh,” he replied. “Don’t know much about it.” I was shocked. He didn’t subscribe to the Lake Oswego Review, the principal news source for local residents.
That was back when as many as 8,500 local newspapers still played a critical role in the civic health of communities across America.
But since 2000, more than 3,200 newspapers in the country have simply vanished. In 2025, only about 36% of U.S. adults said they got news from their local daily paper at least sometimes, down from around 55% in 2000, and I suspect that percentage has continued to slip, particularly among young people. Overall news trust is also continuing to decline, although the most trusted news brands continue to be local television outlets and regional or local newspapers.
The loss of local media coverage in Oregon has been painful for the producers and consumers.
The Chronicle, which had served the southern Willamette Valley region in Lane County since 1909, focusing on Springfield, Creswell, Cottage Grove and Pleasant Hill, died a painful death earlier this month.
The staff of the Chronicle on their last day.
“We never put our heads down or ran on muscle memory,” Executive Editor Erin Tierney-Heggenstaller wrote in the last edition. “We were strategic, offering communities with virtually no other credible journalistic outlet what people say they want: award-winning hyper-local news about family, friends, and neighbors; practical reporting to make daily life easier; and curated content edited with standards that social media, AI slop, and corporatized commodity news no longer offer. “Build it, and they will come.” But they didn’t.”
The Lake Oswego Review hasn’t been spared from the same tumult.
Founded in 1921 as the Western Clackamas Review, renamed the Oswego Review in 1928, and then the Lake Oswego Review in 1961, the paper underwent several transformations, gradually expanding its readership and impact. By 1976, the paper was being published twice a week, totaling 90 pages and with a circulation of 8,200. In 1978, Eagle Newspapers, an Oregon regional newspaper group rooted in John Day, purchased the paper.
In 1996, former Review editor Steve Clark and his wife, Randalyn, bought the Review and its parent company, Community Newspapers Inc. Over the next few years, the company grew to include nine community newspapers. In August 2000, Lake Oswego residents Robert and Marilyn Pamplin bought Community Newspapers and transitioned it to Pamplin Media Group. Over the next 24 years, Pamplin grew to include two dozen newspapers in Oregon and their corresponding websites, including the Lake Oswego Review and the group’s flagship, the Portland Tribune, which had launched in February 2000.
“The Tribune and its family of newspapers provides the ‘right stuff’ that citizens need to engage effectively — with government, with each other, with the bigger world,” former Metro councilor Rex Burkholder said in 2016. “News, especially news that is about what is happening here and now, in one’s own community, is essential nourishment for anyone wanting to make a difference.”
On June 1, 2024, Mississippi-based Carpenter Media Group bought the entire Pamplin Media Group for an undisclosed sum. Carpenter, founded in 2023, says on its website, “The newspapers, websites and magazines we lead are the cornerstones of their communities, allies to businesses, incubators for innovation, and cultivators of journalistic talent. We aim to forge a well-informed, interconnected, and prosperous society – one community at a time.”
So much for that. In Oregon, a massacre followed.
Among the victims was the Lake Oswego Review, which had built a strong track record of publishing award-winning investigative and enterprise journalism, and two other Pamplin papers in adjacent cities, the West Linn Tidings and the Wilsonville Spokesman.
On February 11, 2026, the three papers were merged into one,The Review, a pale imitation of its three predecessors. The entire August 12, 2026 issue of The Review ran just 24 pages, including one self-congratulatory page promoting local stories in The Review, three pages of public notices and one page urging readers to let Oregon legislators know they value access to public notices in their local paper. The August 19 issue had just 15 pages of news.
With that kind of shrinkage in news coverage, it hardly matters whether my Lake Oswego friend subscribes to the local paper today.
Meanwhile, other local news outlets have shriveled as well.
In October 2024, Carpenter Media Group bought the EO Media Group, which owned Oregon’s Bend Bulletin, the East Oregonian and other rural Oregon newspapers, and proceeded to slash and burn the papers’ staffs. John Carr, Senior VP of Oregon and Washington at Carpenter Media, said the cuts were “necessary financial changes and cost-cutting measures that will stabilize these publications for the future.”
The Portland Tribune had 40-50 newsroom staffers when it launched in February 2001. It ceased printing in June 2025 following major newsroom cutbacks and layoffs and now operates strictly as a digital, online-only news service that requires a paid subscription to access. Although Multnomah County still describes the Tribune on its website as a ” Portland city newspaper, offering comprehensive coverage of news, sports, business, people and entertainment”, it now has just one reporter, Hannah Seibold , who describes herself as “the sole survivor of the Portland Tribune at this point”.
The Oregoniannewspaper, once the Portland area’s dominant local news source, has suffered as well. Founded in 1850 as a four page weekly, its first issue printed in a log shack on Portland’s SW First and Morrison,
I joined The Oregonian as a business reporter in 1987. It was a robust, well-respected paper then, with a proud past and a much-anticipated future. Daily Monday-Friday circulation was 319,624; Sunday circulation 375,914. When I left the paper 10 years later in 1997 to take a corporate communications job, daily Monday-Friday circulation was 360,000, Sunday circulation 450,000. We were on a roll.
Much of that success was attributed to Sandra Mims Rowe, who came on as editor in 1993 and tried to energize the newsroom with a hiring spree, bringing on reporters and editors from around the country. Under her leadership, the newsroom distinguished itself by winning five Pulitzers.
But the paper wasn’t able to escape the tumult of the newspaper business during her tenure. By the time she left the paper in Dec. 2009, she had to cut staff, salaries and benefits as circulation and revenue declined.
In 2009, The Oregonian’s daily circulation sat at 268,572 and Sunday circulation at 344,950, causing the paper to lose its position as one of the top 25 Sunday circulation papers in the country. That same year, the paper announced a long-term policy that protected full-time employees from layoffs for economic or technological reasons would end.
By 2012, daily circulation sank to 228,599, only slightly higher than circulation in 1950, and the declines continued. Talented reporters began departing in droves, some pushed out, others motivated by buy-outs. At the same time the once powerful paper saw its clout diminish as it abandoned rural Oregon and 7-day-a-week print distribution.
When I left The Oregonian in 1997 to take a corporate communications job, the paper employed a newsroom staff of about 400 journalists (reporters, editors, and photographers). The newsroom staff now consists of about 66 employees.
The paper publishes print editions just four days a week, while continuously updating its digital content. Average daily print circulation is 29,325 copies and Sunday print circulation is 44,294 copies. The days are long gone when what was in The Oregonian, particularly its opinion section and columnists, dominated local conversations all day.
So here we are. A once mighty paper hollowed out and humbled. A growing population served by a smaller paper. A weakened paper that no longer drives the daily discussion at the proverbial water cooler (or over a latte). A diminished, editorially impotent presence with a dwindling ability to hold powerful interests accountable.
But is the local news environment as depleted as often presumed? Is the gloomy view unwarranted?
As the size and impact of the traditional major dailies and weeklies in the Portland metro area have shrunk, other news outlets are working to fill the gap. Some of their audiences are limited and their coverage is not very deep, but together they are beginning to fill a continued need and judicious selectivity can provide unexpectedly broad local news coverage.
There is still, however, too much online coverage of national news and not enough of local. As Public Media Company CEO Tim Isgitt recently said to Poynter, “…public media is facing a perfect storm. We’re part of a rapidly changing media and technology landscape that is providing unlimited content — but perhaps not the content we need. We can get any national journalism we need, but we can get very little local journalism from this landscape…We’re part of a media and technology landscape that is largely failing our society — with detrimental societal impacts, whether it’s misinformation, lack of trust or the effects it’s having on polarization, teen mental health or the loneliness epidemic.”
Some local media in Oregon are trying to do better.
Willamette Week, an alternative paper and digital media outlet, continues to offers cultural, civic and political coverage and reaches hundreds of thousands of print and online viewers, even if it tends to focus on only a few topics each week and its daily local online news coverage is limited.
The Portland Mercury, an alternative bi-weekly, offers coverage of local arts, music, and city culture.
Other options include the solid news site OPB, City Cast Portland, a website and a daily podcast for local news, Oregon Capitol Chronicle, part of the States Newsroom, and a relative newcomer, Axios Portland, with two reporters, Meira Gebel and Kale Williams.
And there’s still Oregon Business, around since 1981, that reports on a wide range of topics such as leadership, innovation, technology, culture, politics and environment, and the Portland Business Journal, published since 1984, which delivers local commercial news, data, and networking opportunities for the Portland, Oregon metro area.
Another innovative outlet focusing on local business news is Portland Inno, a digital media outlet powered by the Portland Business Journal, focused on Portland’s local startup, technology and innovation economies. A recent story, for example, broke the news that Mark Ronay, who founded materials company Liquid Wire in 2016, had launched a company is called Spectralsurf, aimed at bringing down the costs of semiconductor manufacturing, with funding from Portland Seed Fund and ONAMI .
Then there are Portland’s television stations, KGW 8, KOIN 6, KATU 2 and KPTV Fox 12, offering varying levels of useful local news.
Portland’s local news outlets sometimes provide mindless drivel and poorly-researched gossip, comparable to the blitzing of the podium done by the Trump administration on a regular basis, and there’s a lot of slop out there, but they can also produce substantial deeply-researched impactful stories and the fact is the public is hungry for reliable local news.
Increasingly, however, that hunger for local news is being met not by the news outlets noted above, but by social media. Young people, in particular, move between podcasts, X accounts and YouTube livestreams where there’s no editorial control, no reviews and no accountability, where skepticism is required, but not often employed. Of course, young people will eventually grow older, but there is little likelihood that they will grow into accessing media as their parents did.
For the first time globally, more people are getting their news from social media platforms featuring independent online news personalities and commentators on platforms like Substack, TikTok and YouTube than television or news websites, according to a new report by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. This is particularly the case with younger audiences who often stumble upon information passively, consuming news that is automatically served to them through algorithm feeds, comment sections, and trending topics.
“…most Americans now get their information and form their opinions through creators, podcasts, Substacks, group chats,” says Renée DiResta, an Associate Research Professor at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy. “Most traditional institutions have only minimal engagement or presence in those spaces. So that ecosystem runs on a very different model of legitimacy. People are following people, not institutions. They’re following people that they find appealing or relatable. Somebody coming to you from their kitchen.”
Substack is one beneficiary off this trend. One of the more prolific, and controversial, Substack commenters in the Portland area is Keven Dahlgren, who writes on homeless issues in Truth on the Streets. Another widely read site is Oregon Roundup by Jeff Eager, which says it covers “Oregon’s uniquely dysfunctional state government and the politics that create it.”
One problem, though, is that of the strong, reliable news, even local news, is only available if you are willing to shell out for a subscription, and many people are not. As one commenter on a substack post, Second Rough Draft, recently noted, “…the press sells what the public wants to buy. If there was a greater market for light, the media would cut back on the heat…elite audiences willing to pay are getting ample good information and others choose to pay less and get less.”
The Reuters Institute notes in a report, another troubling sign, that it is seeing stagnation or decline in overall online news engagement. People are turning away from the news. “The trends are worse among younger people and those without a university degree,” Reuters says.
Some of that decline may be simply due to the way social media works. “Social media algorithms are optimised for engagement, with the goal of keeping people on the platform as long as possible, ” according to Reuters. “This has seen social media companies prioritising things like entertaining short-form video and de-prioritising news…Political news caused headaches for them, so they turned away.”
The problem is locally-focused social media can be a swamp and it can be hard to separate truth from the muck.
“… in different, darker corners of the internet, it has become a source of endless misinformation and disinformation dispensed by a panoply of influencers, conspiracy theorists, edgelords, grifters and con men, DIY gurus, hostile foreign actors, and partisan echo chambers full of dittoheads and doxers,” observes John Ramage, a former and Arizona State University professor of English, on Substack. “It is a world without gatekeepers, regulators or arbiters, an epistemic wild, wild west where anyone who relies on evidence-based reasoning is dismissed as an establishment tool.”
Then there’s the problem of what’s happening when news-searchers engage with social media, such as items on X. 404 Media recently noted that X’s algorithm learns what you hate and shows you more of it, according to a new study just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The paper, titled Value misalignment of X’s feed algorithm is a reflection of value tensions in engagement, found that the site’s algorithm prioritized engagement above all else when it generated a user’s For You Page.
“When a user on X sees a post that makes them mad — like a press release from a politician from a political party they don’t like — sometimes they’ll fight about the post in the replies,” 404 Media noted. “It doesn’t matter who you follow or what your stated values are, X reads replying as engagement and will send more of the infuriating posts the user’s way.”
Reviewing The Story of Your Life: How Social Media Shapes the Way We Experience Everything, New York Times book critic Alexandra Jacobs noted that with social media,”All was sweet, innocent fun for awhile, then the algorithm came along and ruined everything, like a drifter in a Cormac McCarthy novel”, with all sorts of deleterious effects.
Or as historian Anton Jäger said recently on the Ezra Klein Show, “…our attention is fundamentally shaped now by algorithms that care about controversy, that care about newness, that are hunting amorally and constantly for whatever will get a rise out of people.”
It’s also important to realize that slop is proliferating on the web — some studies say 50 percent of online articles are now artificially generated. Then there are so-called “pink slime” sites, publications that mimic the appearance and output of traditional news organizations. Snopes, an online fact-checking and myth-busting website, can help sniff out such sites.
However you consume local news, “Studies have shown that the supply of local news is correlated with higher rates of civic engagement,” says the Agora Journalism Center at -the University of Oregon. “Robust local journalism matters to how informed citizens are, and according to another recent Knight Foundation report, a healthy news and information ecosystem creates “a virtuous circle whereby improved information contributes to improved community outcomes.”
If you want an educated, informed public in a position to make wise judgments, quality local journalism is key. As Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1787, “The way to prevent irregular interpositions of the people is to give them full information of their affairs through the channel of the public papers, and to contrive that those papers should penetrate the whole mass of the people.”
The Portland City Council approved a term sheet for a possible Moda Center renovation on August 12, one more step in a potential misguided commitment to a billionaire and his buddies.
The term sheet commits what The Oregonian has dubbed “a torrent of taxpayer money” of up to $573 million in public funds for the renovation of the Moda Center, including a state commitment of $365 million, a Portland commitment of $120 million and a Multnomah County commitment of $88 million. Portland would also commit up to $275 million in maintenance costs on the arena over the next 20 years and Multnomah County would chip in $13 million for capital expenses.
Don’t cry for Texas billionaire Tom Dundon and Rip City Rising, the group he leads in the Blazers deal, under which the group purchased 80.1% of the Trailblazers at a $4 billion valuation and the remaining 19.9% at a $4.5 billion valuation. Whatever they pay is likely to be rewarded with a much bigger payday down the road. At some point they are going to turn it over and probably make a bundle.
On august 21, it was reported that Marc Lore had agreed to sell his control stake in the NBA’s Minnesota Timberwolves and the WNBA’s Minnesota Lynx to billionaire investor Marc Stad at a $4.5 billion enterprise value. Lore and Alex Rodriguez purchased their initial controlling stake in the Minnesota Timberwolves and Minnesota Lynx from Glen Taylor based on a $1.5 billion valuation, completing the process in June 2025.
And look at what one owner just pulled off selling the Los Angeles Lakers.
Earlier this month, Mark Walter sold the Los Angeles Lakers to Bob Iger, the former Disney CEO and Los Angeles notable, and Josh Kushner, a venture capitalist. The deal came together in three days: $12.5 billion for a team that Walter bought less than a year ago for $10 billion.
Dundon and his investment group also stand to reap billions from the Blazers acquisition down the road. What makes ordinary people who would never go along with subsidies for billionaires become willing supporters of such rewards when they become politicians?
The payoffs for other buyers of NBA teams who have subsequently sold their teams have been eye watering.
Boston Celtics: Bought by an investment group, Boston Basketball Partners L.L.C, led by Wyc Grousbeck that purchased the team in 2002 for $360 million; sold to an investment group led by private equity mogul Bill Chisholm in August 2025 for $6.1 billion.
Phoenix Suns: Bought by Robert Sarver, leading an investment group called Suns Legacy Partners, in 2004 for $401 million; billionaire mortgage lender, Mat Ishbia, purchased the majority stake of the Suns and the WNBA’s Mercury for $4 billion in 2023.
Dallas Mavericks: Mark Cuban purchased a majority stake in the Dallas Mavericks from H. Ross Perot Jr. in January 2000 for $285 million; Cuban sold a majority interest in the team to Miriam Adelson and Patrick Dumont of the Adelson family casino empire for $3.5 billion in 2023.
Charlotte Hornets: Michael Jordan bought a majority stake in the Charlotte Bobcats (now the Hornets) from founder Bob Johnson in March 2010 for $275 million; sold his majority stake for $3 billion to a group led by Gabe Plotkin and Rick Schnall in July 2023.
Golden State Warriors: Bought from Chris Cohan by Joe Lacob and Peter Guber for $450 million in July 2010; current valuation estimated at $10.8 – $11.3 billion.
Milwaukee Bucks: Bought by former U.S. Senator Herb Kohl in 1985 for $18 million; sold by Kohl to Wes Edens and Marc Lasry in 2014 for $550 million; current estimated valuation $4.1 – $4.5 billion.
LA Lakers: Bought by Jerry Buss in 1979 for $67.5 million; in June 2025, Buss family agreed to sell controlling interest to Mark Walter, a minority owner since 2021 and owner of the L.A. Dodgers, for $10 billion.
And the money changing hands in these deals is likely to get bigger. “I am absolutely convinced that we have not reached anything close to a ceiling,” Irwin Kishner, a partner at the law firm Herrick and co-chair of its sports law division, told The New York Times. And particularly with the most recognizable teams, he said, “you could only envision the numbers going further north.”
