“People expect governments to operate with transparency, and they expect strong safeguards against undue influence.”
Crackdown on lobbyists after explosive anti-corruption inquiry
Trump’s Unlikely Strategy to Control History: Footnotes
The Atlantic, no paywall: “Most of Donald Trump’s efforts to control the nation’s largest museum complex have been loud.
He tried to fire a Smithsonian museum director on social media, ordered the placement of warning signs outside its American-history museum, and demanded that the museum take down a modernist sculpture he dislikes. But while this political theater plays out publicly, the White House’s Office of Management and Budget is quietly using an obscure funding power as part of its campaign to influence how the Smithsonian tells the American story.
Late last month, according to previously unreported public records, OMB included a footnote in two recent apportionments of federal funds that conditions nearly $190 million for the Smithsonian on the institution’s compliance with Trump’s March 2025 executive order accusing it of spreading “divisive narratives.” Essentially, the White House is trying to force adherence to its preferred version of history through a little-known but legally binding budget mechanism. The fiscal-year-2027 footnote, which applies to funds carried over from last year in two of the Smithsonian’s main salaries and expenses accounts, reads:
To the extent permitted by law, amounts apportioned shall be available for obligation in a manner consistent with Executive Order 14253 (March 27, 2025), “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.”
The Global Rise of Electoral Dictatorships. Is the U.S. Next? Midterms Could Decide
The Emancipator: “When Americans first elected Donald Trump president in 2016, there were nearly 4 billion people living in nations where they could vote in fair and competitive elections.
Last year, when Trump took office again, this estimate had fallen by half, to barely above 2 billion In the intervening years, the number of people barred from voting within conventional dictatorships (or “closed autocracies”) increased from an estimated 1.74 billion to 2.27 billion. But most of the decline in people who can vote in fair and competitive elections can be attributed to the global rise of what I call electoral dictatorships, also known as “electoral autocracies.”
While elections are banned in conventional dictatorships, elections are regularly held in electoral dictatorships. But to ensure their continuous grip on power, the electoral dictators—who identify as presidents and prime ministers—hold uncompetitive and unfair elections after aggressively suppressing political opponents.
- In 2016, an estimated 1.94 billion people lived in electoral dictatorships.
- In 2025, 3.77 billion people did.
- If Republicans retain control of Congress in the midterms, then an electoral dictatorship is likely to emerge in the United States…”
American High School Students Are Selling Guns Bound for Cartels
The New York Times, no paywall: Drawn by money and status, teenagers in Arizona are buying, stealing and selling weapons destined for criminal groups in Mexico. They are too young to buy a beer and barely old enough to drive, yet these four teenage boys have already found their way into the criminal underworld. On weekends, they drive into the Sonoran Desert outside Phoenix. I watched them line up AR-15s and AK-style rifles against their cars, pose for photos and spend the afternoon shooting targets.
At night, they head to parties, smoke pot and scroll endlessly through their social media feeds. These teenagers are part of a growing network of American high school students and young adults who are helping to arm some of Mexico’s most powerful and violent cartels, according to U.S. officials and trafficking experts who are tracking the trend. They source weapons like handguns and high-caliber rifles, and sell them almost exclusively to cartel operatives based in the United States, the teenagers said…”
See also CBS News: “…Gun rights: Viramontes v. Cook County and Grant v. Higgins. This latest Second Amendment dispute to arise following the Supreme Court’s landmark 2022 decision expanding gun rights involves state laws banning AR-15s and similar semiautomatic weapons. The two cases, which will be argued Dec. 2, involve a Connecticut law and an ordinance in Cook County, Illinois. Cook County’s prohibition was put in place nearly 20 years ago, while Connecticut tightened its rules for semiautomatic firearms after the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
More than 10 states and the District of Columbia prohibit AR-15-style semiautomatic weapons. In both of the cases from Illinois and Connecticut, lower courts upheld the bans. The appeals courts each applied the new standard for determining the constitutionality of gun restrictions that the Supreme Court laid out in 2022, which requires the government to show that a law is consistent with the nation’s historical tradition of firearms regulation. In its ruling then, the Supreme Court recognized for the first time that the Second Amendment protects the right to carry a firearm outside the home. The justices have been asked to take up a number of challenges to longstanding federal and state gun laws in the years since. In 2024, the Supreme Court upheld a federal law that bars people subject to domestic violence restraining orders from having guns.
Then, last year, it said that under the Second Amendment, the government cannot prosecute a habitual marijuana user for having a firearm. The high court also struck down a Hawaii law that required concealed-carry permit holders to receive permission before bringing their firearms onto private property that is open to the public. The Supreme Court had turned away challenges to laws from Maryland and Illinois banning AR-15s and other semiautomatic weapons, leaving those restrictions in place…”
Relevant and related, via The New York Times: Justice Dept. Turns to Partisans and Conspiracists to Fill Depleted Ranks. The civil rights unit has recruited people whose questionable work histories and dearth of education and experience might have disqualified them in the past, former officials said.
A former prosecutor forced off a high-profile murder case for peeking at the defense team’s strategy documents. A onetime gambling executive who promoted conspiracy theories about the Las Vegas massacre in 2017. A Florida activist who once served 20 days in jail for hacking a local elections system.
They are among the 130 lawyers who have recently joined the Justice Department’s short-staffed civil rights division as the Trump administration has struggled to fill the depleted ranks of a unit that was once a magnet for legal talent. Since early 2025, upward of 300 nonpolitical career employees, representing decades of experience, have left the division after its leader, Harmeet Dhillon, repurposed it to pursue President Trump’s agenda…”
