Week of May 15, 2026
5 headlines
Zeteo
First Draft: Trump Wants to Give $1.7 Billion of YOUR Money to HIS Pals
Let’s be crystal clear about what’s happening here: Wannabe Dictator Trump wants to take $1.7 billion from your paycheck, your kid’s school, your crumbling infrastructure, and hand-deliver it — gift-wrapped — to the same people who stormed the capital and assaulted police, and this slush fund with be totally controlled by him. No oversight, no review, just a Trump loyalty check. This isn’t a budget proposal. It’s a Venmo request from a mob boss. The thugs and criminals that went to jail for seditious conspiracy, the ones that Trump pardoned, are now going to get paid for attempting to overthough our government. Now that Trump is back in the White House, he’s sending the invoice to and you, the American taxpayer.
This is on top of the absurd amout of money we are shelling out to fund this illeagl war. The same Epstein Class of billionaires, defense contractors, and Wall Street parasites who’ve been feeding at the public trough for decades — only now they’ve dispensed with the middlemen and just straight-up written the budget themselves. Trump and DOGE gutted the agencies that might have stopped this. The watchdogs are gone. The inspectors general are gone. The oversight committees are staffed with MAGA loyalists whose only qualification is the ability to clap enthusiastically during a Truth Social post.
You should be furious. Not mildly annoyed — furious. Because $1.7 billion isn’t an abstraction. It’s veterans’ healthcare. It’s Head Start programs. It’s the bridge in your town that’s been ‘under review’ for six years. While Genghis Don’s pals pocket your money, they’ll tell you the country is broke and you need to work until you’re 72. Don’t let them normalize this. Call somebody. Show up. Make noise. The only thing standing between American democracy and a full-blown kleptocracy is whether enough people get angry enough to do something about it.
The Intercept
Hegseth Asks for More Money as Iran War Costs Skyrocket
Pete Hegseth — the man who got the job because he looked good on Fox News and has a crusader tattoo — is now standing at the Pentagon cash register asking for a bigger allowance after blowing the family budget on a war nobody voted for. The Iran conflict, which was sold to the American public somewhere between a presidential tweet and a Karoline Leavitt press briefing, is hemorrhaging money at a rate that would make even the most hardened defense contractor weep tears of pure joy. And ‘weep with joy’ is exactly what they’re doing, because every skyrocketing cost is another yacht payment for Raytheon’s board of directors.
Here’s the pattern you need to understand: wars don’t just happen — they’re products. They’re manufactured by the defense-industrial complex, marketed through compliant media, and sold to a public that’s been sufficiently terrified. The Techno-Fascists in Silicon Valley provide the surveillance infrastructure, the dark money networks fund the think tanks that provide the intellectual cover, and men like Hegseth provide the theological justification. ‘God wills it,’ remember? Hard to audit a divine mandate. The cost overruns aren’t a bug — they’re the entire business model.
Every dollar Hegseth is asking for is a dollar that won’t go to housing, healthcare, climate resilience, or education. The military-industrial complex has been pulling this bait-and-switch for seventy years, but it’s never been this naked, this shameless, or this heavily tattooed. When a man who can’t manage his personal sobriety is managing a trillion-dollar war budget, and he’s asking for MORE — that’s not a defense request, that’s a hostage situation. And we’re the hostages.
ScheerPost
While Pentagon Spends Billions on War, Military Families Say They’re Getting Short-Changed
There is no more perfect encapsulation of the MAGA con than this: the people who wave the biggest flags, put the most military stickers on their trucks, and voted most enthusiastically for Orange Jesus are the same people getting absolutely gutted by his administration. Military families — who sacrifice everything, who move every two years, who watch a spouse deploy into a war zone based on a tweet — are being told there’s no money for their housing, their healthcare, their kids’ schools on base. But don’t worry, Raytheon just posted record quarterly earnings. Funny how that works.
This is the oldest trick in the oligarch playbook: weaponize patriotism as a distraction while you pick the patriot’s pocket. The defense budget isn’t about defending America — it’s about defending defense contractor profit margins. The Epstein Class doesn’t send their kids to war. They send your kids to war and then charge you for the privilege. DOGE — Elon Musk’s personal government demolition project — has been slashing the exact support programs that military families depend on, while the Pentagon’s procurement budget for next-generation weapons systems somehow remains untouched. Almost like the people making the cuts know exactly whose getting screwed.
If you’re a veteran or a military family member reading this, I need you to hear me clearly: they are using your service as a prop and your sacrifice as a marketing slogan. The same politicians who put a flag in their lapel and ‘support the troops’ in their bio are the ones voting to cut your benefits while approving another no-bid contract for a defense firm that donated to their campaign. That’s not support. That’s theft with a yellow ribbon on it. Get angry. Get organized. Vote like your family’s survival depends on it — because it does.
The Intercept
FBI Quietly Closed a Probe Into Mahmoud Khalil While He Was in ICE Detention
Read that headline again, slowly. The FBI opened an investigation into Mahmoud Khalil — a legal permanent resident and Palestinian activist — based on what turned out to be a garbage tip. They investigated him. They found nothing. They quietly closed the probe. And while they were finding nothing, the Trump administration was using ICE to throw him in a detention center anyway, because the point was never the investigation. The point was the detention. The point was the message: if you protest, if you organize, if you have the wrong name and the wrong politics, we will destroy your life — and the law is just paperwork we use to make it look legitimate.
This is the architecture of authoritarian repression, and it’s being built in real time with your tax dollars. The FBI investigation was the legal fig leaf — the thing they could point to and say ‘we had concerns.’ When that fig leaf withered and died, they didn’t release him. They kept him locked up. Because this was never about national security. It was about sending a chill through every campus organizer, every Palestinian-American activist, every person who looked at Gaza and dared to say it out loud. Dark money-funded ‘research’ organizations (AIPAC) have been compiling lists of protesters for years. Now those lists have a deportation pipeline attached to them.
The Khalil case is a stress test for American civil liberties, and so far, the system is failing catastrophically. If a legal permanent resident can be detained indefinitely based on a bogus FBI investigation, then the First Amendment is already on life support. This is the moment — not the metaphorical moment, the actual moment — when you decide whether you live in a country with rights or a country with the theatrical performance of rights. Because there’s a very short distance between ‘deport the protesters’ and ‘disappear the dissidents.’ History has seen this movie before. It doesn’t end well.
ScheerPost
Trade War, Tech War, Energy War: Xu Qinduo Breaks Down the Trump–Xi Negotiations
What the financial press calls ‘Trump-Xi negotiations’ and what’s actually happening are two very different things. Strip away the pageantry and what you have is two authoritarian-leaning power structures — one is a one-party state, one is an oligarchy in a democratic costume — horse-trading over who gets to dominate the global economy for the next fifty years. The losers in this negotiation, regardless of outcome, are working people on both sides of the Pacific. American manufacturing workers, Chinese factory laborers, and every developing nation caught in the crossfire will pay the price while the Techno-Fascists and their Beijing counterparts carve up the digital and energy infrastructure of the planet between them.
Here’s what the trade war is really about: it’s not about protecting American jobs — if it were, you’d see investment in workers, not tariff revenue flowing into a general fund while social programs get cut. It’s about which billionaire class controls the chokepoints: semiconductors, rare earth minerals, AI infrastructure, energy grids. Elon Musk has business interests in China. Trump has licensing deals in China. The dark money donors behind the Republican Party have supply chains in China. This ‘war’ is being conducted by people who have enormous financial stakes in its outcome, negotiating on your behalf, in secret, with no meaningful oversight. That’s not foreign policy — that’s insider trading at a geopolitical scale. And speaking of insider trading - Trump released his stock portfolio holdings and surprise, he has purchased tons of stock in companies like Evidia, which he has direct control over deals made with China. Nothing to see hee folks.
The energy war dimension is the one that should keep you up at night, because it’s inextricably tied to the climate crisis that the same corporate interests have spent forty years lying to you about. While Trump and Xi play chess with LNG contracts and solar panel tariffs, the planet is burning — literally. The negotiations happening behind closed doors will shape the global energy transition, and the people shaping it are the same fossil fuel interests that bankrolled climate denial for generations. They’re not negotiating for a livable planet. They’re negotiating for market share in a world that’s getting hotter by the year. Pay attention. Then demand better.