Sacha Gilbert

A paper out of New York University on social media finds "0.1% of users shared 80% of fake news," and "74% of all online conflicts are started in just 1% of communities" sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

To my dying day I'll never be able to wrap my head around this. They PAID HIM IN BOYS. The SBC is the Epstein Island of denominations.

Trump admits he bypassed federal bidding laws to hand a Lincoln Memorial project to his personal country club contractors. He treats national monuments like his own private real estate properties. The corruption inside the White House is absolutely staggering.

Bombshell: Leaked audio recordings prove Argentina's libertarian President Javier Milei is conspiring with the drug lord Juan Orlando Hernández -- the drug-trafficking former dictator of Honduras, whom Trump freed from prison. In a recording between Milei and the drug lord, Hernández proposed creating a right-wing fake news operation, with the support of the US government, in order to spread propaganda online to "eliminate the left" in Latin America, targeting Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, and the left-wing opposition in Honduras. The self-declared "anarcho-capitalist" Milei offered to contribute $350,000 USD of Argentine government money to help fund this disinformation operation, while millions of Argentines are suffering in poverty, and they have to eat donkey meat, because they can't afford local beef. Link: jornada.com.mx/noticia/2026/0…

David Sacks is another apartheid-bred malignant narcissist conman who was installed by Musk and Thiel to convince Trump to inflate the worst financial bubble in all of recorded history so they could skim billions off the top.

The only reason Hegseth and Trump promote this lie about Biden sending troops to polling places is because they plan to do it themselves, as I warned last year. It's an emergency; the other guys did it first; illegals are voting, etc.

The @PulitzerPrizes decision to award @jkbjournalist a special citation for work she did exposing Epstein a decade ago is an unusual acknowledgment that the Pulitzer Board messed up badly when they ignored her work in the first place after a pressure campaign by Dersh etc.

"Since Trump returned to office in January last year, Pete Hegseth... has fired or forcibly retired 24 generals and senior commanders, with no performance-related reason given. About 60% have been Black or female." theguardian.com/us-news/2026/m…

This is the question worth asking every time a story like this comes out: if there’s no money for your health care, your kids’ schools, or the programs your family depends on, where is it going?      The Trump Administration just paid $17.4 million to fix two decorative fountains outside the White House. Three years ago, the same job was estimated at $3.3 million.       And guess what? The construction company that got the contract is the same one building Trump’s $400 million White House ballroom, and they got it without any competitive bidding whatsoever. The contract wasn’t even posted publicly, as required by federal law.      So how do you get from $3.3 million to $17.4 million? They added 27% for inflation. Then they added another 24% for inflation again. Then they tacked on additional charges that federal contracting experts said they had never seen before in their careers.      And the justification for bypassing the normal bidding process entirely? The fountains needed to be ready for America’s 250th anniversary. It’s worth noting that these fountains haven’t worked for nearly a decade. If the repairs were truly that urgent, why are they only fixing them now, and why are taxpayers footing a surcharge for the rush?      You are paying for this.   nytimes.com/2026/04/25/us/…

Zoila Guerra Sandoval lost her former partner, Jose Mynor Lopez, in the 2024 Key Bridge collapse. In response, the government offered her permanent residency if she applied. She did. Clerical errors blocked it. Now, she faces deportation and possible separation from their 7-year-old U.S. citizen daughter, who has already lost her father. A promise was made and broken. A mother should not have to fight to stay in the country where her partner gave his life working.

Tomorrow, @TexasMonthly will be dropping a ~12,000 word story on Paul Pressler, the alleged sexual predator who remade the Southern Baptist Convention and helped ordain the marriage between the GOP and white evangelical voters. There is *a lot* in there and I hope you'll read it.

On a Thursday in April, Alex Bronzini-Vender went to Yale, where the Palantir Foundation convened its third annual Atlantic and Pacific Forum. “The event hadn’t been publicized online, and I saw no signage for it in the building’s lobby,” he writes. Only select Yale students had been invited. It was sensible enough to keep the conference somewhat hidden. Palantir has become a byword for America’s growing surveillance state. The company sells something seemingly mundane: software that helps clients analyze and sort data. But in the hands of the firm’s highest-profile clients, you can see the consequences of good organization. Palantir’s Maven Smart System helps armies decide who to kill; the firm’s technologies aid ICE in combing through diverse sources — from Medicaid data to seized smartphones — to select deportation targets. Palantir’s reputation is, accordingly, poor on campuses like Yale’s. The university’s student government voted this month to demand that the university divest from the company. But the Atlantic and Pacific Forum — part intellectual salon, part job fair — offered a gathering of converts to the company’s cause and a call for new adherents. “When the elevator doors opened, I saw the room was rapidly filling,” writes Bronzini-Vender. Read Bronzini-Vender’s full dispatch from the event, where the Yale students found the Palantirians, the Palantirians found the Trump people, and everyone found the open bar: nymag.visitlink.me/j-ejHh

This is how Reconstruction ended and Jim Crow began last time

Absolute insanity. Donald Trump admits he judges the Chairman of the Federal Reserve not on economic policy or interest rates, but because the Fed didn't give Trump's real estate company a massive building renovation contract! The corruption is completely out in the open.

When Trump pulled out of the international nuclear agreement with Tehran in 2018, Iran lacked even a single bomb's worth of uranium. Since then, it accumulated 22,000 pounds of enriched uranium. @BlackiLi @WilliamJBroad nytimes.com/interactive/20…

The New York Times recently published leaked Supreme Court memos from 2016, when a majority of justices voted to block the Obama administration's Clean Power Plan before any lower court had ruled on it. Chief Justice Roberts argued the EPA regulations would cause "irreparable harm" through a "substantial and irreversible reordering of the domestic power sector." It was the wrong standard - the lower court hadn't been given a chance to rule. And it was applied with no consideration of the harm the Obama administration would suffer from having its major policy blocked. Now read that against the second Trump administration's record on the same emergency docket. The Trump administration has filed a record number of shadow docket applications and has won 80 percent of the time. The Court has allowed, through this process with little or no written reasoning, mass layoffs at the Education Department, racial profiling in immigration sweeps, and the termination of legal immigration status for hundreds of thousands of people. The "irreparable harm" standard Roberts applied in 2016 - that delay in implementing a desired policy causes sufficient harm to justify emergency intervention - is precisely what he applied to the Obama climate rule. The same standard has since been applied to Trump administration policies that, by any measure, have produced a far greater reordering of American institutions than anything the Clean Power Plan envisioned. The memos reveal something simple: the standard was not principled in 2016. The record since then confirms it still isn't.

SHE NAMED THE ABUSERS. THEY SENT HER ON A DIVERSITY COURSE. In 2001, solicitor Adele Weir was hired by Rotherham Council on a Home Office programme to research child sexual exploitation in the area. What she found was horrifying. Her ten-page mapping exercise named suspects, listed car registrations, and linked 54 abused children to one family. She estimated 270 victims at that point alone. She took her findings to senior South Yorkshire Police (@syptweet) officers. They told her the report was unhelpful. A police commander accused her of making up stories and deliberately lying. She was told to anonymise individuals and institutions. She was told she and her colleagues were exceeding their roles. Then files were stolen from the Risky Business office where she worked. No broken locks. No broken windows. A computer had been accessed. A police officer stopped her in her car and told her, in no uncertain terms, that people knew where she lived. Her work was sidelined. By 2007 the operation around her had effectively collapsed. Her reports were finally released by South Yorkshire Police (@syptweet) in 2015, only after a Freedom of Information request. The Jay Report, published in 2014, found that approximately 1,400 children had been abused in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013. It concluded that by 2005 it was hard to believe senior officers and elected members were not aware of the problem. Zero senior officials were prosecuted. Zero. A researcher identified the abuse network in 2001 with names, car plates, and victim counts. The institution's response was to bury the paperwork and threaten the person who wrote it. Source: The Guardian @guardian | Wikipedia | Jay Report 2014 | Home Affairs Committee Evidence 2014-2015

New: From dismantling guardrails that upheld the integrity of past elections to installing allies who pushed theories that the 2020 vote was stolen, here are the key takeaways from our recent investigation. propub.li/4cW4bHB

A California federal judge ordered ICE not to deport a man while his legal action contesting detention was pending. They did anyway. The judge demanded his immediate return, but now ICE can’t get him back. It’s been more than two months latimes.com/california/sto…

I spent 6 months researching Michael Wolff's relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, including 1,830 pages of emails in the Epstein Files. I never expected what I found. #EpsteinFiles api.omarshehata.me/substack-proxy…

A rundown of the Trump administration’s scandals and crimes resembles, with shocking likeness, the grave, sweeping charges laid out in the Declaration of Independence against the last American king. trib.al/Xc6hWuo