Davis Bates

I’m a US citizen and a veteran. ICE arrested me for no reason. Jailed for three days without an explanation or ability to notify anyone, George Retes argues the only path to healing starts with the government taking accountability for its actions.

“I spent three nights and three days in federal custody. During that time, I was never told what I was charged with, was not allowed to shower despite being covered in tear gas and pepper spray, had no phone call to my family, and no access to an attorney.” - George Retes, U.S. citizen and veteran.

Tennessee man arrested, gets $2 million bond for posting Facebook meme Larry Bushart posted a meme on a local Facebook page about Charlie Kirk. He now faces years in prison.

Everything about this is bonkers. The arrest, the charge, the possible sentence, the **$2 million bail.**

reason.com/2025/10/10/t...

They don't even bother to lie badly anymore. I suppose that's the final humiliation.

It’s this multiple times a day

He said in “two weeks” — 159 weeks ago.

A five-point-five billion Trump golf course in Qatar, and Qatar gets an air base in Idaho.

This arrest appears to be in direct violation of a temporary restraining order prohibiting DHS officers from arresting journalists. The officers here may well be subject to contempt of court. protectdemocracy.org/wp-content/u...

BREAKING: Masked Border Patrol agents aggressively arrested WGN video producer Debbie Brockman in Lincoln Square Friday morning, supposedly for "obstructing justice." (Video via Josh Thomas on Facebook)

Follow @heartlandsignal for more.

Kristi Noem Secretly Took a Cut of Political Donations A dark money group paid $80,000 to Noem’s personal company when she was governor of South Dakota. She did not include this income on her federal disclosure forms, a likely violation of ethics requirem...

Kristi Noem, while governor of South Dakota, supplemented her roughly $130,000 salary by secretly accepting $80,000 donated to a political nonprofit she was affiliated with, records show.

She never disclosed this income on federal ethics forms.

(Published June)

In late July, Paul Ingrassia, the White House liaison for the Department of Homeland Security, arrived at a Ritz-Carlton in Orlando with a lower-ranking female colleague and others from their department. When the group reached the front desk, the woman learned she didn’t have a hotel room. Ingrassia then informed her that she would be staying with him, according to five administration officials familiar with the episode. Eventually the woman discovered that Ingrassia had arranged ahead of time to have her hotel room canceled so she would have to stay with him, three of those officials said.

"30-year-old conservative lawyer and activist who is Trump’s nominee to lead the Office of Special Counsel, which deals with federal employee whistleblower complaints and discrimination" cancelled his colleague's hotel room so she would be forced to stay with him.
www.politico.com/news/2025/10...

I’ve Seen Epstein’s Photos of Trump With Topless Girls: Author Trump biographer Michael Wolff reveals he was shown the lewd photos by Jeffrey Epstein himself.

Trump biographer Michael Wolff reveals he was shown the lewd photos by Jeffrey Epstein himself.

pretty sure I had it bookmarked for years. a true public service.

I’m not kidding when I say these weird ass costumes and antics are actually an extremely effective tactic from a media standpoint bc when enough people do them, the media can’t fully scrub them out

Can you put into words what that purpose is? You and the frog have really become icons of this protest. There’s been a nice overall whimsy that has shown up. The frog is amazing. We had a bunch of other inflatable people here last night, too. I saw people playing Twister the other day. What they rely on is fear. So by coming out in an absurdist manner, it speaks to them, to some extent, that we’re actually not that afraid. It also dismantles their narrative a little bit. When they try to describe this situation as “war-torn,” it becomes much harder to take them seriously when they have to post a video saying [U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security] Kristi Noem is up on the balcony staring over the Antifa Army and it’s, like, eight journalists and five protesters and one of them is in a chicken suit.

www.wweek.com/culture/2025...

ICE is sending people to a prison in Africa’s only absolute monarchy Inside the “legal black hole” in Eswatini, where Trump is sending detainees.

everything you need to know about the "legal black hole" to which Trump is sending detainees

www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

DOGE Developed Error-Prone AI Tool to “Munch” Veterans Affairs Contracts We obtained records showing how a Department of Government Efficiency staffer with no medical experience used artificial intelligence to identify which VA contracts to kill. “AI is absolutely the wron...

A former DOGE staffer developed an AI tool that hallucinated the size of Veterans Affairs contracts.

For example, it concluded that more than a thousand deals were each worth $34 million, when in fact some were for as little as $35,000.

(Published June)

Opinion | Jack Smith’s lawfare and James Comey’s arraignment on pathetically weak charges Good people will be deterred from public service if they see a meaningful risk of winding up in jail afterward.

I spent more than a decade at The Post. It was good to me and I was proud to work there. I’ve largely refrained from being critical since I left. But this framing of the special counsel probe is embarrassing and flatly wrong. Stunning, but not. www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...

At the risk of angry-posting, I hope we learn something from this given the *extensive* environmental justice and environmental concessions that were made to "protect" the programs

“Someone” cancelled my family’s flight out of the country at the last second.

We got our boarding passes. We checked our bags. Went through security. Then at our gate our reservation ‘disappeared.’

BREAKING: Israeli war planes continue to launch raids on Gaza City as Palestinians celebrate the ceasefire announcement, according to an Al Jazeera Arabic correspondent on the ground.

🔴 LIVE update: aje.io/xqppys

Inside the Justice Department Where the President Calls the Shots The president has executed a wholesale transformation of the Justice Department, taking control in ways he could have only dreamed of in his first term.

So of course the weirdest and most alarming thing here is that Trump intended to DM the AG on Truth Social to order her to indict Comey and accidentally posted it publicly. But there are other very weird details within...

www.wsj.com/politics/pol...

Incredible.

Jack Posobiec references the earliest version of antifa -- the anti-fascists in the Weimar Republic who were opposed to the Nazi Party -- as the bad guys.

You'd think there would be more interest from the US media that Trump is simply delusional - at best being fed complete fabrications by his team, at worst in serious cognitive decline and unable to recognise reality.

POLITICO "They killed Charlie Kirk — the least that we can do is go through a legal process and redistrict Indiana into a nine to zero map," Sen. Jim Banks, the Republican of Indiana, told POLITICO last month.

What www.politico.com/news/2025/10...

Hello from Downtown Portland North Park Blocks!

YouTube video by Farm to Taber How Trump Made Slavery Great Again

put all the "we had anti-slavery regs for farm workers & Trump got rid of them back in June" videos in one place

youtu.be/J8zit-g86v8

i feel like we're living through era of "gas leak politics"

AI and the complete destruction of whatever was left of U.S. regulatory corporate oversight is going to take all of this to the next level

these trust fund failsons envision the internet as a giant ouroboros that just shits ad engagement cash and kickbacks, quality or usefulness be damned

photo of Google News search results for Amazon Prime Day (the second this year)

twice a year the entire U.S. press becomes a marketing extension of a single billionaire-owned retailer, and nobody in any position of editorial power thinks it's weird or gross

Imagine that. The terror inflicted on immigrant workers is now being used to lower wages.

Trump Labor Department Says His Immigration Raids Are Causing a Food Crisis In a filing in the Federal Register, the Labor Department argues there are “immediate dangers to the American food supply” due to a lack of migrant agricultural workers.

"Either Trump’s Labor Department actually believes that Trump’s immigration enforcement is destroying the agricultural sector and threatening food security, or they are pretending this threat is real in order to crush wages for both foreign and domestic agricultural workers."