Since we are in the final sprint to Election Day, and Trump’s chaos is going to new heights, I’m glad to have some great news for you today.
Before we jump in, can you do me a quick favor? Can you hit the like button and restack this edition? The MAGA propaganda machine spends millions to bury stories like these. Your share makes a huge difference in ruining their schemes.
And if you’re not yet a paid subscriber, know that we need you on board more than ever. With only 47 days to go until the midterms, we are full speed ahead. Help fuel our investigations, our social media organizing, and our enormous pressure campaign on Congress by joining us today:
The Judge Said No. Trump Shut It Down.
Congress named the Kennedy Center after President John F. Kennedy in 1964, and in 1983 wrote a law barring any additional memorials in the Center’s public spaces. On August 13, the board voted to add an inscription on the building praising Trump anyway, and to rename the grounds after him.
On Tuesday, federal Judge Christopher Cooper ruled against Trump’s board for the second time since May. “Simply put, Defendants cannot install memorials for President Trump or anyone or anything else at the Kennedy Center without Congress’s blessing,” he wrote. “The board resolution bucks a federal court order and a statute Congress enacted.”
The regime’s lawyers said the inscription wasn’t a memorial—just recognition. Cooper wrote that “the government plays word games,” then read their own words back: “renovated and restored by President Donald J. Trump.”
They also told the court the renovation dies without his name on the marble. The judge found “no proof” the donations depend on it. Congress had already set aside $257 million for repairs. And Cooper wrote that he could “even less reward a decision by Board members, including the Chair, to curb the Center’s fundraising efforts because they cannot abide statutory restrictions on displaying his name.” The Chair is Trump.
Hours later the board voted to close the building anyway. That afternoon, Trump posted that the renovation “cannot begin until such time as the D.C. Circuit rules on the Board’s approved name.”
Nobody had to prove Trump was holding it hostage. He told reporters the regime should “certainly have recognition” for raising the money—and without it, the building would close and “end up being ripped down.”
Justice Department lawyers appealed the same day. By Wednesday the doors were locked and the building fenced, which the regime now says was the executive director’s call, not the board’s. Cooper’s May order bars the board from carrying out a closure until he lifts it. He hasn’t. The only name on the building is still Kennedy’s.
He Called It Obviously Untrue. Twice.
For nearly half a century, if you came to this country to study, you could stay as long as the program lasted. The Trump regime replaced that with a rule nobody voted on. Spend four years in the US, then reapply and just hope. There is no appeal if the answer’s no.
The rule hit students, researchers, medical residents, and foreign journalists—who got cut down to 240 days. DHS gave the public 32 days to comment and set the rule to start September 15.
The reason they gave was national security.
On September 3, Judge F. Dennis Saylor asked what that was built on. The Justice Department came back with five incidents involving eleven people—out of tens of millions admitted over four decades. Saylor told them it “seems, obviously, untrue to me, just, obviously, untrue.” In his ruling he put it in writing: the national security claim “borders on the absurd.”
Then he asked the harder question: would this let the regime yank a visa from a foreign journalist who criticized the United States? “I certainly hope that that would not occur,” the government’s lawyer said. On the journalists, Saylor found DHS offered no national security evidence, no fraud evidence, and “no reasoned explanation, at all.”
On September 14, he blocked the rule nationwide. It was supposed to start the next morning.
They Called It An Office Move. A Judge Called It Absurd.
For thirty years, a farm outside Gilroy, California was a seed-research site. County inspectors found “unpermitted discharges of laboratory and process wastes into sinks and drains connected to the onsite septic system.” Formaldehyde turned up in that septic system three separate years.
Syngenta Seeds, one of the companies that operated there, was prosecuted over another Gilroy facility for illegally disposing of “more than 70,000 pounds of pesticide treated seeds.” In 2023 the companies left without finishing the cleanup.
The General Services Administration (GSA) leased that land for an ICE holding facility. The plans call for six concrete-reinforced holding rooms with concrete benches and an armory.
Federal law says study the ground first. GSA filled out one page—a form titled “Automatic Categorical Exclusion”—and demolition started.
Santa Clara County and California Attorney General Rob Bonta sued. When county inspectors came to the gate in June, the developer refused to let them in.
In court, the government called it a simple office move. Judge Eumi Lee wrote that “this assertion is absurd and contradicted by the record,” and called the paperwork “facially implausible.” The farm held 40 daytime staff. ICE first told the developer the site would hold fewer than a hundred people. In court it said at least 120 a day. The ICE official who gave that number “has not personally visited the Gilroy site.”
Nobody has tested whether that ground is safe. That’s what the review GSA skipped was for.
Demolition was set to resume yesterday morning. Judge Lee had already stopped it.
Sixty-Seven People Showed Up
Alisha Lange of Piqua, Ohio, got involved in 2023. She says a city-approved battery plant left her and her neighbors with long-term health problems. She took it to her elected officials, including Republican Rep. Mike Carey. Nothing came of it.
Then her town—population twenty thousand—took a Meta data center deal.
On November 3, 2025, the commission waived its three-reading rule and passed a tax package for the site that night as an emergency. A Columbus law firm the city had hired the year before advised them that suspending the readings “supports the immediate preservation of public peace, property, health, and safety.”
Sixty-seven people were in the room. One resident, Jackie Holfinger, had actually read the contract. The minutes record that she “saw a line in the resolution about the possible drilling of wells.” The mayor asked if the drilling language could come out. It was struck before the vote.
Lange and her neighbors went door to door for ten months and turned in more than 1,250 signatures on each of four petitions—a charter amendment banning data centers and crypto mining, and recalls of three commissioners over how the deal got done.
Tuesday night the commission voted to schedule all three recalls. They passed them by emergency ordinance, with the three readings waived—because the November 3 deadline left them no time.
“Even though the data centers are driving us apart,” Lange said, “the petitions are bringing us together.”
Sixty-seven people in a room. More than five thousand signatures later.
We have 47 days to go until the midterms, and my team and I are working relentlessly to do everything we can to win Congress and turn Trump into a lame duck, and we’re 100% reader-funded.
That independence lets us keep investigating the Trump regime, keep organizing on social media where we fight MAGA head-on, and keep up our pressure campaign on Congress, where we’ve delivered more than 855,000 letters from constituents.
No advertiser to keep comfortable. No corporate owner deciding what’s safe. No billionaire who can make a story vanish. Just our amazing community here.
Join us as a paid subscriber today to help us sprint through Election Day—and beyond:
Then hit the ❤️ like button and restack. It makes a huge difference, and helps us spread the news that we are winning. Thanks for all you do.
Onward!
Scott
What’s being built near you that nobody asked for—a data center, a warehouse, a facility—and did anyone in your town fight it?
Do you think all of Trump’s abuses of power help Democrats more in the midterms? Does it get people out to vote?
Constituent pressure is literally the only thing keeping the regime from operating in total darkness. We are less than 390 letters away from 5,000 on Hegseth, surging toward 15,000 to kill the Yosemite developer deal, and actively fighting tech oligarchs to pass the AI Ban.
Take two minutes and hit all three.
Impeach Hegseth:
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-congress-impeach-pete-hegseth/
Save Yosemite:
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-congress-stop-trumps-yosemite-giveaway
Ban Uncontrollable AI:
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-congress-pass-the-ban-on-ai-we-cant-control/
Sometimes it gets overwhelming with all of the nonsense out there. But the little victories like these, and the strength of this community, keep my fire burning strong. So grateful for everyone here! 🔥