In 2006 Mike Judge made a film called Idiocracy. The premise was simple. A perfectly average man falls asleep and wakes up 500 years in the future to find that American civilization has descended into spectacle, corporate capture, and leadership that rewards the loudest voice rather than the most competent one.
The President of that future America was a former professional wrestler and entertainer. The Oval Office had been redecorated to look like the lobby of a sports bar. Mike Judge thought he was writing satire.
This week a 92-foot steel fighting structure called The Claw is rising from the South Lawn of the White House. The man who spent years calling 4.2 percent inflation an existential catastrophe went on camera and said he loves inflation. The personal criminal defense lawyer of the sitting president has been nominated to serve as the nation's chief law enforcement officer.
And the most secure room in the United States government, the room where JFK managed the Cuban Missile Crisis and Obama watched a Navy SEAL team bring the world's most wanted terrorist to justice, was reportedly converted into a war room to manage the president's personal legal exposure to Jeffrey Epstein.
Mike Judge, call your office. Seven stories. Every full piece is on my Facebook page and on Substack. Here is what you need to know.
A 92-foot, 600-ton steel structure called The Claw is currently rising on the South Lawn of the White House for a UFC event on June 14th. That date is both Flag Day and Donald Trump's 80th birthday, which tells you everything about whose party this actually is. The Public Integrity Project filed a federal emergency lawsuit this week calling the entire arrangement deeply corrupt. In a legal filing. Using those exact words. National Park Service regulations generally prohibit commercial sporting events on federal landmarks. Large-scale temporary structures are supposed to require congressional authorization and an environmental review. Neither happened. The full story of how this is legally possible and what the lawsuit argues is on the page.
The President stood before cameras this week and said he loves the inflation numbers. The number in question is 4.2 percent. The same man, not long ago, said the Biden administration gave America the worst inflation in the history of the country, that it decimated hard-earned savings, that people were dying because of what Democrats had done to the economy, and that it cost the typical family $28,000. The number he called catastrophic and the number he now loves are in the same neighborhood. The only thing that changed is who is holding the microphone. Full breakdown is on the page.
On the same day Trump signed a $70 billion bill funding ICE and Border Patrol through the end of his term, he publicly demanded Congress pass a $350 billion military reconciliation package. This is the third reconciliation bill he has demanded in a single congressional session. The United States already leads the world in defense spending by more than the next several countries combined. What he is asking for would be the largest peacetime defense expenditure in the history of human civilization. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projects the Golden Dome missile defense system alone could reach $1.2 trillion over two decades. There is a $36 trillion national debt. The demand does not mention it. Full analysis on Facebook and Substack.
According to reporting excerpted from the forthcoming book Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump by New York Times journalists Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, drawn from more than 1,000 interviews over three years, Trump's most senior officials spent a significant portion of the past year using the Situation Room not to protect the American people but to protect the president from his own history with Jeffrey Epstein. The crisis began last July when the DOJ's claim that no Epstein client list existed backfired spectacularly, enraging Trump's own political base. The Wall Street Journal began preparing a damaging investigation. And inside the West Wing, the most secure communications facility on American soil became, according to sources, an Epstein war room. Full piece on the page.
On June 8th Donald Trump formally nominated Todd Blanche to serve as the permanent Attorney General of the United States. Blanche was Trump's personal criminal defense lawyer until January 2025. Since Pam Bondi was removed in April he has been running the Department of Justice as acting AG. The distinction between the nation's chief law enforcement officer and the personal legal fixer of the man who appointed him is not a technicality. It is the only structural difference between a functioning republic and something else entirely. The full history of how we got here and what it means is on Facebook and Substack.
The EPA is aggressively dismantling Biden-era air quality rules that required states to meet stricter anti-pollution standards. The administration is rebranding science-based pollution limits as legacy paperwork and handing local regulators permission to ignore historical pollution caps. The stated justification involves phrases like regulatory flexibility and local autonomy. What that means in practice is that major industrial facilities now have significantly more latitude to determine how much pollution they can emit before consequences arrive. The full piece on what specifically is being eliminated and who benefits is on the page.
The House passed the Secure America Act, a $70 billion funding bill for ICE and Border Patrol, by a vote of 214 to 212. The bill does not mention the names Renée Good or Alex Pretti. Good was shot and killed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis in January. Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse and VA employee, was shot multiple times and killed by CBP officers in January. Both were American citizens. The agencies that killed them just received $70 billion and a mandate to continue through the end of Trump's term without a single significant reform attached. The role played in the final vote by Tim Walberg, the lawmaker who suggested handling Gaza like Nagasaki and Hiroshima, is in the full piece on Facebook and Substack.
Here is the thing about Idiocracy that people forget. The film is not really about stupidity. It is about what happens when the incentives of a system gradually stop rewarding competence, accountability, or truth and start rewarding spectacle, loyalty, and the ability to make the audience feel good in the moment. The characters are not villains. They are the perfectly logical product of a system that selected for exactly what they became.
A UFC cage on the White House lawn is not an accident. A personal defense lawyer nominated as the nation's top law enforcement officer is not an oversight. Inflation being catastrophic under one president and beautiful under another is not a mistake. These are the perfectly logical products of a system that has stopped selecting for anything else. Mike Judge released that film as a warning. We are living in the sequel nobody greenlit.