With the Trump regime’s rampant abuse of power, I’m glad you’re here. Because I have some great news for you in this edition today. They may seem enormous when posting online or at a lectern—but put them under oath, make them show their work, and what they’ve got is worthless.
I’ve been fighting Trump head-on since 2016. And what I’ve learned is that as long as we never give up the fight, he absolutely will lose. I’m certain of it.
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The Drag Queen Who Beat Texas
The state of Texas spent three years trying to turn drag performer Brigitte Bandit into a criminal. Senate Bill 12 threatened any bar that booked performers like Bandit with a $10,000 fine, with performers possibly facing a year in jail.
In March of 2023 Bandit testified against that bill inside the state’s Capitol, wearing a dress that listed names of children killed in the Uvalde mass shooting. Lawmakers were arguing about drag queens, she said later, while kids were being killed in Texas schools.
After her testimony, Bandit sued—along with other Pride groups and businesses—Ken Paxton, three cities, and three district attorneys. A few months later, the whole thing went to trial in a Houston federal courtroom. For three years, Texas had said this law was about protecting children. Now it had to prove a child had been harmed.
It couldn’t. Attorney General Ken Paxton called an expert witness, a doctor brought in to talk about what explicit material does to kids. Under oath, that doctor said he had never seen anyone seriously hurt by a drag show. Not one of the seven government offices that were sued over this law offered any other evidence.
That December, Bandit was sent a package from Nashville, Tennessee—a gift from the one and only Dolly Parton. It was a custom guitar covered in rhinestones, signed by Dolly to Brigitte.
Texas appealed and won, and this spring the ban came back to life. Bandit was right back where she started.
But on Tuesday, Judge David Hittner struck the law down again and barred Paxton from enforcing it. A judge put on the bench by Ronald Reagan.
This Saturday night in Austin, Bandit brings out the guitar.
Trump’s Own Judges Just Protected These Kids
In May of this year, federal prosecutors used a grand jury in Fort Worth, Texas, to demand the name of every patient treated for gender dysphoria from a New York hospital. They wanted any patient who was treated before their 18th birthday, going all the way back to January 2020. Names, medical charts, consent forms—17 different categories of records on children living halfway across the country.
None of these families were accused of anything—so three of them sued, along with two young adults. They filed under false names, because giving the government their real ones was exactly what they were afraid of.
Judge Katherine Polk Failla blocked the grand jury’s demand in June, and locked that block in place in July. It wasn’t the regime’s first try. They had spent a year chasing the same records with a different kind of subpoena and lost in front of at least seven federal judges, with one calling the reasoning behind it a smokescreen. So they went to a Texas grand jury instead.
Then they appealed Failla’s block, asking for permission to collect the files anyway. On Wednesday, three appeals judges said no again in a single paragraph—two of them were put on that bench by Trump.
The records stay sealed, the regime doesn’t get the names.
The Professor Who Refused To Lie
For 17 years, Adam Kalkstein was the only climate scientist on the faculty at West Point. He’s a conservative Republican, so it’s not easy for the Trump regime or anyone in their party to just write him off.
According to a lawsuit he filed on Monday, his department was ordered to remove every mention of human-caused climate change from all of its courses in September of 2025. They were warned that if anyone talked to the press or Congress about it, his department would simply get dissolved.
West Point had already forced Kalkstein to give up his tenure in order to keep working. They kept him on the payroll using money from his own research grant.
So Kalkstein complied. He even covered the word “anthropogenic”—the scientific term for human-caused—on charts from scientific journals so cadets wouldn’t see it. By November he couldn’t do it anymore, and he told the dean they were lying to the students.
The dean, Brigadier General Shane Reeves, told Kalkstein to resign and walked out. Kalkstein’s contract wasn’t renewed.
Reeves also shows up in a second lawsuit brought by law professor Tim Bakken over a similar kind of gag order. A department head told Bakken what leadership was actually doing, calling it radical compliance. In May, a judge appointed by George W. Bush blocked those rules and told the academy its cadets are not “snowflakes.”
West Point had until July to appeal that ruling, but it let the deadline pass. The gag order is dead and Bakken is still teaching there.
Kalkstein is the second professor to take West Point to court. His case is just getting started. The first one already won.
Shapiro Took Kennedy’s Call
Health Secretary Bob Kennedy (I refuse to refer to him as RFK) called Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro on Tuesday morning offering up federal help. The state announced two measles-associated deaths of unvaccinated people in Lancaster County, the first in 35 years. Pennsylvania now has 393 cases in 29 counties.
Shapiro took the call in a parking lot, telling Kennedy his state could handle it. Then Shapiro told Kennedy exactly what he thought of him. He’d been blunt, he said afterward. He called Kennedy’s actions and rhetoric harmful to communities across America, and to Pennsylvania in particular. He said there are real-life consequences to Kennedy spreading his misinformation and scaring parents, instead of letting actual doctors give them the truth.
Shapiro wasn’t the first to say it. In May of 2025, Sen. Angela Alsobrooks filed a resolution declaring Kennedy didn’t have the confidence of the Senate or the American people. Sens. Ron Wyden and Elizabeth Warren signed on to it. Alsobrooks took it to the floor, where Senate Republicans killed it.
That September, Sen. Raphael Warnock told Kennedy to his face that he was a hazard to the health of the American people. Not much has changed.
In 2021 Kennedy spoke to a crowd of 1,500 Amish and Plain families in Gordonville, in Lancaster County. He told them that drug companies make money off selling cures for diseases which he claimed vaccines cause.
Shapiro doesn’t need Kennedy’s help. He just needs Kennedy to stop talking.
We’re up against a bunch of cheating Republicans who know that if everyone votes, they lose. They are trying their best to interfere in our elections from every angle possible, so it’s on us to make sure everyone we know actually shows up.
And those voters are going to need the facts while there is a firehose spraying everywhere with lies and misinformation. That’s where we come in.
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Before you go, hit the ❤️ like button on today's edition and restack it. It truly makes a big difference. Sixty-seven days left, and we're going to be loud for every one of them.
Onward!
Scott
Shapiro answered Bob Kennedy’s call and told him the blunt truth. What would you say to him if that call came to you instead?
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This week is the proof. They came for a performer, a stack of kids’ medical files, and a professor who wouldn’t lie to cadets — and they left empty-handed. That’s what happens when you make them show their work. Don’t you dare tell me nothing ever changes. We’re 67 days out. Stay loud.