I tried to spend my weekend with my wife and son—just be present, just be a dad, a husband, watch the Grammys, and build some Legos. But every quiet moment got hijacked by the same rage: the latest drop of the Epstein files.

Because what’s in those files (at least the ones we have so far) isn’t just scandalous—it reveals a far more insidious, enraging, and sickening pattern in our justice system. From the credible accusations against Donald Trump to the grotesque involvement of his entire administration, the Democrats sprinkled throughout, and all the rich, well-connected monsters in between—it’s sick.

And I keep asking myself the same thing: How is it possible that, through multiple administrations, no one—no one—has gone to prison for the trafficking, abuse, and outright violence against over a thousand children?

How the hell is that even remotely possible? And of course, we know the answer. We’ve always known it.

America has a ruling class right now that sits above the law and never faces real consequences. A corrupt, powerful, untouchable class of wealthy and well connected freaks who protect each other.

It’s not about right versus left. It’s not about ideology. And it sure as hell isn’t about justice or public service.

It’s about maintaining their grip on power, padding their wallets, and doing whatever the hell they want to whoever they want—without consequence. Without shame. Without fear. This rot goes deeper than any party, because the President of the United States is accused—credibly and repeatedly—of sexually abusing children.

Let that sink in. Sworn testimony. Under penalty of perjury. An eyewitness stating Donald Trump threatened a child with violence. Threatened to kill her family. As I spent time with my son this weekend, that allegation kept swirling in my head.

And what happened? Nothing. No serious DOJ probe. No meaningful FBI investigation. Zero accountability.

Just decades of silence, cover-up, and delay—while survivors are dragged back through their trauma by a system designed to exhaust them into silence.

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Meanwhile, Ghislaine Maxwell sits in a cushy, minimum-security prison that might as well be her country club, courtesy of a deal brokered by Todd Blanche—Trump’s former personal lawyer and now Deputy Attorney General.

Epstein died in custody under suspicious-as-hell circumstances, conveniently ensuring the most powerful people implicated would never have to answer questions under oath. We all know that if he were alive, Trump would’ve pardoned him by now. And what do we get? Nothing. No reckoning. No full transparency. Just a rigged game that protects abusers and screws over survivors.

This is not just a Trump thing. He’s a grotesque, bloated symptom of a much deeper disease. But goddamn if he isn’t the most miserable, corrupt human being to ever sit in the White House.

And somehow, in this country, the abuse of children doesn’t move the needle. Not locally. Not statewide. Not federally. How the heck is that even possible?

And then we have the audacity to talk about fixing this country—to talk about affordable housing, healthcare, dignity in retirement—as if justice is optional. As if rot at the top doesn’t poison everything below it.

And that starts with winning elections, but elections without courage are just rituals. Symbolic action. Not material. It requires building a Democratic Party with a spine. What the hell happened when Democrats actually had power?

I’m proud of folks like Robert Garcia, Ro Khanna, and a few others pushing hard to get the truth out, but what the hell happened under Joe Biden’s administration? They had access to the files. They had the power. And still—they didn’t go after the monsters inside. Why? Because some of those monsters were close to them. Because they didn’t take it seriously. And that’s unacceptable.

We’re never getting back on track until we tear this entire corrupt machine down, brick by brick. Until we rip power out of the hands of these corrupt billionaires and political ghouls who rob the American people, exploit the justice system, and turn politics into a game of self-preservation instead of public service.

The next Democratic administration needs to do more than talk policy. It needs to understand power—and how to use it. Because this country is diseased. And the people responsible need to go down. Not just for abusing kids, but for looting the economy, for wrecking lives, for grinding working Americans into dust while they buy their third yacht and brag about it on TV.

Most Americans are killing themselves just to get by while watching proof—over and over—that the system is rigged against them. But Jeff Bezos gets to bulldoze half of Venice for his third wedding, and Elon Musk gets to meltdown on X like he’s got some kind of moral high ground—despite being in the damn Epstein files himself, begging for invites to Epstein’s wildest island parties. And still, we’re supposed to pretend he’s just some eccentric genius? Fuck that.

This is why people give up. You suffer. The victims suffer. The entire country suffers.

And the MAGA influencers? Don’t even get me started. They’re out here spinning new conspiracy theories every five minutes to protect their king—Trump—and every crony around him. Trump’s Commerce Secretary? In the files. His pick for Fed Chair? In the files. And yet we’re supposed to buy this fantasy that Trump was somehow on the outside of all this? Come on.

Then I turn on cable news and there’s Todd Blanche again, spewing nonsense about transparency and how “all the files have been released.” They haven’t. Claiming the investigation is over. It isn’t. Pretending this is all wrapped up when it clearly, clearly isn’t. And worse, implying the reason they’re holding some names back is because the crimes detailed in those accusations—violence, murder, God knows what else—are even worse than what we’ve already seen. Which should terrify everyone.

If you’ve seen even a fraction of those documents, you know how bad it is. And the fact that survivors have to keep reliving that trauma in a system that doesn’t give a shit? That’s the real indictment of where we are. That’s the rot at the center of the American experience: the average person is suffering, giving up on democracy, on justice, on community, because they can see the system is rigged against them. When monsters like Trump and Musk and the rest can walk free, why would anyone feel hope? Why would anyone bother to participate? Why would you work harder, vote harder, believe harder, when everything is stacked against you?

Most Americans are killing themselves just to get by, while these billionaires flaunt their wealth, abuse kids, and get away with it. And the people who are supposed to protect us—our leaders, our law enforcement, our institutions—either can’t or won’t do shit. They lie. They cover. They protect their own. And they laugh at the rest of us like it’s all some game.

But politics shouldn’t be a game. And justice shouldn’t be selective. Government shouldn’t be about protecting predators and crooks. It should be about helping regular people get a damn job, earn a decent wage, raise their family, retire with some dignity. That’s what this whole thing is supposed to be about. But it hasn’t been for a long time. And I am so tired.

I’m tired and I’m furious. Because all I wanted this weekend was to be a husband. A dad. A guy on the couch watching the Grammys. But I couldn’t stop thinking about this horror show we’re all living in. I’m exhausted by what this country has become.

And let me leave you with this: it’s not just Trump. He’s the rotting face on the front of it, but the disease runs deeper. And every one of us has to find a way to push back. To call it out. To demand better. To be useful, however we can. Big ways. Small ways. Just find yours.

Anger is not the problem. Apathy is. Stay angry. Just aim it well.

On Friday, I testified in front of Governor J.B. Pritzker’s “Illinois Accountability Commission,” the state government body he set up after the Trump administration’s “Operation Midway Blitz” attack on Chicago last summer and the precursor of the even larger federal occupation of Minneapolis that we’re experiencing now. The body’s goal is to both document what happened to Chicago, with an eye on future prosecutions, understand the role of various Trump officials in this federal occupation, and offer recommendations about how to fix immigration enforcement going forward.

(snip)
As I told the commission, “US law enforcement has never experienced a scandal as big, as far-reaching, destructive, and as far-lasting as the wave of corruption and criminality that has overtaken CBP and the Border Patrol since 2005. It’s a story that too much of the public still doesn’t know and too many policymakers still don’t understand.”

I also totaled up some new numbers to get at the scale of the problem:

Criminality is so rampant inside CBP that it has seen one of its own agents or officers arrested every 24 to 36 hours since 2005. CBP’s misconduct scandal is so long-running that today it would be old enough to drink.

In total, according to CBP’s own discipline reports, over the 20 years from 2005 to 2024 — the last year numbers are available — at least 4,913 CBP officers and Border Patrol agents have been arrested themselves, some multiple times. (In 2018 alone, a single CBP employee was arrested five times.) To put that number in perspective:

• The population of CBP agents and officers who have been arrested would make it roughly the nation’s fourth largest police department — equal to the size of the entire Philadelphia police.

• Indeed, for much of the 2010s and likely before and since, it appears the crime rate of CBP agents and offices was higher PER CAPITA than the crime rate of undocumented immigrants in the United States.

“During the Cold War, there was an organization called the World Peace Council, some called it a KGB front organization, it was financed by the Soviet Union… It was anti-Western, pro-Soviet Union… the strategy of the KGB was to make it look like it was very diverse… but the point was to weaken the West.”—Dietmar Pichler

I often repost one of my podcast interviews with Vienna-based disinformation analyst Dietmar Pichler, who frequently attends our weekly Tuesday Happy Hour meetings to update us on the latest breaking news on Russian attacks on democratic nations.

He explained the origins and infiltration of the peace movement, and how for Russia ‘peace’ is an anti-Western operation.

It’s important that we have armor against the upside down world of information warfare. Those promoting peace in the same breath as appeasement in Ukraine are actually promoting Putin’s war objectives, and there is a Soviet history of infiltration and the co-opting of peace narratives.

When Russian stooges promote ‘peace,’ they’re really doing Kremlin theater. Loyal servants to organized crime, as Alex Alvarova explained, have no interest in peace.

When autocrats talk of peace, what they really mean is they want their opponents to surrender their weapons so they can go on murdering, raping, torturing, stealing children, resources, and borders indefinitely.

“What we know is that starting in the Cold War… we saw huge peace rallies all around Europe and in Germany, and these peace rallies, this peace movement, was infiltrated by the KGB,” Pichler told Bette Dangerous in our 2024 interview. “There was an organization called the World Peace Council, some called it a KGB front organization, it was financed by the Soviet Union… It was anti-Western, pro-Soviet Union… the strategy of the KGB was to make it look like it was very diverse… but the point was to weaken the West, to infiltrate and demoralize societies, to make us think that only us, the Western side, needs to lay down weapons. There’s a script behind all this.

“Being Austrian and knowing our history, if there’s one thing we learned about the crimes our own ancestors committed is there are times when things are black and white… if you take a look at the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and take a look at movements like Code Pink — they were here in Vienna for a Peace Conference… we know that this ‘peace’ movement during the era of the ‘80s — the actors that were active back then — a lot of them are active now, propagating that we should not support Ukraine, the same people! So what we always forget is that it’s not only that Putin is using the same techniques, they can rely on the same people they brainwashed back in the Soviet era.”

The Orwellian named ‘Board of Peace’

Today, I asked Dietmar to help us explain to those in our networks how ‘peace’ is once again being weaponized, Soviet-style, as Trump trolls the world with his so-called Board of Peace, which includes every tinpot dictator he could find and a notable shortage of leaders of any credible Western nations. Even the logo is a troll, mimicking the UN logo but with oligarch flourishes.

“In the information space, a ‘Board of Peace’ that includes countries at war, such as Russia and its partners, reminds me a little bit of the problem of ‘whitewashing’ and reality distortion, similar to what we have seen in the UN Human Rights Council, which has included several authoritarian regimes that violate human rights excessively,” he told Bette Dangerous. “This is ironic, especially given that the ‘Board of Peace’ is presented by its supporters as a possible alternative to the UN. It also has to be mentioned that there are reasons to be skeptical when an organization that should have an international impact relies so much on one person, in this case the U.S. president.“

America’s battered psyche had barely processed Donald Trump’s dictate to illegally bomb Venezuela — killing as many as 100 people — and capture its ruler when a political earthquake struck Minneapolis, where an ICE agent’s stone-cold killing of a 37-year-old mom in her SUV, captured on multiple videos, shook the national conscience. These two seismic stories sandwiched a grotesque effort by the Oval Office to whitewash the fifth anniversary of Trump’s attempted Capitol Hill coup on Jan. 6, 2021. Yet I would argue that American historians will look back and see the most consequential moment — amid seven more days that shook the world —occurred on the quiet hiss of a New York Times journalist’s tape recorder.

The nation’s 47th president insisted to anyone listening that he believes there are no limits to his power, other than those that he himself sets in a brain clogged by decades of Big Macs.
A dictatorship, if he can keep it.

(snip)

If the American Experiment dies, it will be because we didn’t stop the immorality of a white supremacy that calls Somali refugees “garbage” and a patriarchy that mutters “f---ing bitch” as it murders a woman in ice-cold blood. If it lives, it will be because we embraced the higher morality of empathy and compassion for our neighbors — and for people we don’t even know.

The world must choose between the morality of one man’s damaged soul and those ancient hierarchies, or that of the millions who are risking bodily harm and even death out in the streets, here and on the other side of the world. There is no longer any middle ground."

This is what America has come to:

A disabled widow, Melinda Price, 43, set out with her walker at 4 a.m. in hopes of getting health care not covered by her Medicaid insurance. A cancer survivor, she had lost her car to medical debt, and she could not afford an Uber. So Price hobbled for nearly two hours through darkened streets to a high school in Columbus, Ohio, where medics at a health fair promised free help.

Yet American health care may be headed for a future still more bleak:

President Trump’s cuts to Medicaid and other health programs will make things worse, especially for marginalized people like Price. One study projects that 51,000 Americans will die annually as a result of these cuts.

After her long walk, a weary Price waited with scores of other struggling people in the pre-dawn darkness for their numbers to be called to enter the building. Many patients were ahead of Price, having arrived the previous day and slept in their cars, so she rubbed her hands by an open fire someone had built to stave off the cold.