Texas

Republicans aren’t mad gerrymandering exists, they’re mad that they’re not the only ones using it

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

HCR
Heather Cox Richardson

April 22, 2026

Virginia voters yesterday agreed to a constitutional amendment that would temporarily redistrict the state if any other state redistricted for partisan reasons: that is, in retaliation for the partisan redistricting President Donald J. Trump launched in Texas in 2025 in an effort to retain control of the House of Representatives.

As Matt Cohen of Democracy Docket noted, Trump supporters immediately insisted the voting was rigged, probably through mail-in ballots. Trump himself took to social media to attack the election, repeating charges of rigging and then adding: “In addition to everything else, the language on the Referendum was purposefully unintelligible and deceptive. As everyone knows, I am an extraordinarily brilliant person, and even I had no idea what the hell they were talking about in the Referendum, and neither do they! Let’s see if the Courts will fix this travesty of ‘Justice.’”

In fact, Trump himself began this mid-decade partisan gerrymander race with his pressure on Texas to rejigger its maps to give Republicans more House seats. That prompted California to retaliate with its own temporary redistricting to offset the new Texas Republican-leaning seats. Other states followed suit. Republicans redistricted Missouri, North Carolina, and Ohio, in addition to Texas, and expect those mid-decade redistricts will net them nine more seats. Democrats think their redistricting of California, along with a court-ordered redistricting of Utah, will get them an additional six seats. They are hoping that the temporary redistricting of Virginia will give them four more seats.

State lawmakers in Florida will convene a special session next week to consider redistricting that state, as well, to benefit the Republicans.

Journalist Brian Tyler Cohen noted that the Republicans have full control of the federal government and could pass a law to ban partisan gerrymandering any time they want to, as Democrats have called for, but they refuse. “Republicans aren’t mad gerrymandering exists,” Cohen notes; “they’re mad that they’re not the only ones using it.”

The Republican National Committee, now controlled by Trump, immediately sued over the Virginia election, and a Virginia judge ruled that both the constitutional amendment and the referendum voters approved were invalid. He said that “any and all votes for or against the proposed constitutional amendment in the April 21, 2026 special election are ineffective,” and prevented officials from certifying the results.

But, as Yunior Rivas of Democracy Docket wrote, Virginia attorney general Jay Jones is challenging the decision, saying: “Virginia voters have spoken, and an activist judge should not have the power over the People’s vote. We look forward to defending the outcome of last night’s election in court.”

Complaints about the Democratic push for a partisan gerrymander in Virginia have exposed a tendency to excuse Republican machinations to control politics while jumping on Democrats for similar behavior.

In August 2025, when Texas Republicans began this fight by redistricting their state after a brutal contest that drove Democratic legislators to leave the state and take refuge in Illinois and Massachusetts to deny Republicans enough legislators to pass a redistricting law, the Washington Post Editorial Board wrote: “What’s happening in the Lone Star State is not a threat to democracy.” “Even if Texas’s move triggers an arms race, the trend will not put American democracy on life support,” it said, dismissing the concerns of those fighting the Republicans’ attempt to game the 2026 elections.

But with last night’s Democratic partisan gerrymander—one that, unlike the Texas gerrymander, went before the people for a vote—the Editorial Board changed its tune. It called this redistricting plan “a power grab by Democrats.” “They’re right that the [Republicans] started this fight by trying to pick up five House seats in Texas through gerrymandering, but they can spare us the false sanctimony about democratic norms going forward,” board members wrote.

Their argument appears to be that the Democrats stand a good chance of winning the midterms even if the Republicans have gamed the system, so the Democrats should not push back. “The news will embolden Republicans in Florida to forge ahead with their own gerrymandering…, continuing the race to the bottom,” they write, seeming to excuse the behavior of Republicans by blaming Democrats for it.

This pattern—expecting Republicans to behave wildly and cheat to grab power while expecting Democrats to behave according to the rules of normal times—has been going on now for years, and it is a dynamic that reflects the political patterns of the years before the Civil War. Then, Americans expected southern Democrats to bully and bluster and rig the system while northerners tried to jolly them into honoring the laws.

In the 1850s, southerners championed their region as the one that had correctly developed the society envisioned by the Founders. In the South a few very wealthy men controlled government and society, enslaving their neighbors. This system, its apologists asserted, was the highest form of human civilization. They opposed any attempt to restrict its spread. The South was superior to the North, enslavers insisted; it alone was patriotic, honored the Constitution, and understood economic growth. In the interests of union, northerners repeatedly ceded ground to enslavers and left their claim to superiority unchallenged.

Then, on May 22, 1856, Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina beat Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts nearly to death on the Senate floor shortly after a speech in which Sumner had called out those who were forcing enslavement on Kansas and insulted a relative of Brooks. Southern lawmakers and newspapermen alike cheered the violence against an elected representative in the Capitol. Lawmakers refused to expel Brooks, and one newspaper editor wrote: “We trust other gentlemen will follow the example of Mr. Brooks…. If need be, let us have a caning or cowhiding every day.”

But the attack on Sumner was a bridge too far for his colleague, Massachusetts representative Anson Burlingame. On June 21, he stood up in Congress to call out as inferior Brooks and the system of enslavement he defended. Burlingame was sick and tired of buying peace by letting southerners abuse the North. Enough, he said, was enough.

Enslavement was not a superior system, he said; it had dragged the nation backward. Slavery kept workers ignorant and godless while the northern system of freedom lifted workers up with schools and churches. Slavery feared innovation; freedom encouraged workers to try new ideas. Slavery kept the South mired in the past; freedom welcomed the modern world and pushed Americans into a new, thriving economy. And finally, when Sumner had spoken up against the tyranny of slavery, a southerner had clubbed him almost to death on the floor of the Senate.

Was ignorance, economic stagnation, and violence the true American system? For his part, Burlingame preferred to throw his lot with the North, which he said was superior to the South in its morality, education, economy, loyalty to the government, and fidelity to the Constitution. Northerners were willing to defend their system, he said, with guns if necessary.

Burlingame’s “Defense of Massachusetts” speech marked the first time a prominent northerner had offered to fight to defend the northern way of life. Previously, southerners had been the ones threatening war and demanding concessions from the North to preserve the peace. Burlingame explained that he was willing to accept a battle because what was at stake was the future of the nation.

Forgotten now, Burlingame’s speech was once widely considered one of the most important speeches in American history. It marked the moment when northerners shocked southern leaders by calling them out for trying to destroy democracy. Northerners rallied to Burlingame’s call, and to the new Republican Party he was helping to build, because he had shown it would stand up for their rights.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) echoed Burlingame today when a reporter asked what she thought of complaints about the Virginia vote. “Oh, wah, wah, wah,” she laughed. “Listen. Democrats have attempted and asked Republicans for 10 years to ban partisan gerrymandering. And for 10 years, Republicans have said no. Republicans have fought for partisan gerrymanders across the United States of America, and these are the rules that they have set….

“What they’re just mad at is that they have been accustomed to a Democratic Party that rolls over, doesn’t fight, and takes everything sitting down. And what they’re mad at right now is that we are here in a new day. And we have been asking the Democratic Party to stand up and fight, and now they did, and now the Republican Party doesn’t like the fact that they are fighting against someone who actually will stand up for the American people.

“So if Republicans decide that they would like to revisit a ban on…partisan gerrymandering, I welcome them. We have the bill right here to end this all today. But they don’t want to because they like pursuing and continuing to enact an unfair electoral landscape. And so we have an obligation to defend ourselves.”

Source: Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

My Friend Leatherface

by

 

Remembering a creative conservationist as plutocrats take a chainsaw to Texas.

By Sarah Kendzior | Aug 19, 2025
 

We pulled into Bastrop around noon. This is a bad move: everyone knows you don’t go to a rundown gas station in small-town Texas unless you’re looking for trouble. We were, so we walked right in.

The Gas Station is the only major surviving site from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the 1974 low-budget classic by Austin director Tobe Hooper, who cast local unknowns in leading roles and filmed in rural areas near the city. An exploration of human savagery more artistic than its title implies, the film tells the tale of road-trippers who stumble upon a family of sadistic cannibals. It is visceral, violent, and at times, beautiful.

The final shot — masked killer Leatherface twirling his chainsaw in the haze of the rising sun, unpunished and unexplained — is cinematic poetry. A light so lovely, it makes the darkness feel worse. It is a very American story.

I was in Austin on book tour and I wanted to see The Gas Station. Now I could, thanks to an unexpected break. An NPR host had blown me off for the second time after making me wait for his call like a 1950s schoolgirl. I was annoyed but had hours to kill and knew just the place for killing.

My husband and I set off for Bastrop, letting the capital fade from view. Austin was unrecognizable from my last visit in 2018. Tech oligarchs had built a skyline of skyscrapers that loomed like landing pads for bad ideas. Driverless cars zipped through bitcoin-bathed streets. The conspiracy theorists work for right-wing think tanks and nobody there is slacking. On the outskirts lurks Tesla, where a chainsaw-wielding Elon Musk rips through Austin’s famed weirdness and affordability.

I didn’t want to feel scared, so I headed to the site of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

* * *

Today The Gas Station is a barbecue joint that sells horror memorabilia. I had read it had items from the original Chainsaw, but that is no longer the case. They had them once, the owner said, but then the Californians ruined everything.

The Californians ruined everything is a phrase I was hearing a lot in Texas.

The owner explained that an entertainment corporation had forced them to transform their TCM pilgrimage site into a generic chop shop due to an alleged copyright infringement, despite the store’s connection to the original film. He spoke with the aloofness of someone used to greeting the disappointed.

“You can get barbecue,” he said with a shrug, gesturing at the cannibal-themed menu. “Or whatever.”

“I’m sorry this happened,” I said. “This is a national landmark. You should get to revive it. I’ve wanted to come here a long time. I used to write for Fangoria.”

He did a double take. We started talking. You hear about the coldness of Americans, but everyone warms up when you love what they seek to preserve.

I’d spent my book tour road trip getting pleasant surprises: swag from the Oklahoma Music Hall of Fame after I asked about neglected outlaw singer Sammi Smith; a print from the daughter of a Cherokee artist after I showed her a photo I’d taken of an obscure painting by her father in a museum years ago, and told her of my search for a copy, which she made for me in her studio. When your interests are strange, no one is a stranger.

The Gas Station owner regaled me and my husband with tales of the venue’s glory. He brought us out back to reveal a prop severed head in which he showed great pride. He mentioned Gunnar Hansen, the University of Texas graduate student who took what he thought would be a quick and amusing gig playing Leatherface, only to have it dominate his life. Hansen passed away at 68 in 2015.

“Leatherface was my phone friend!” I exclaimed.

“Who?”

“Leatherface! I mean, Gunnar,” I said. “When I was in college, I was supposed to interview him about Chainsaw. But we ended up talking about everything. Carl Jung and horror literature and the collective unconscious. Ocean life and ecology. He could recite Moby Dick. He made me want to go to Maine.”

“I proposed to you in Maine,” my husband interjected. “Maybe that should be your top memory of Maine.”

“It is,” I said. “But I was 20 and didn’t know anything. Leatherface gave me life advice.”

I had gotten Gunnar Hansen’s phone number through a friend of a friend from Lubbock. He agreed to speak to me, even though I had nowhere to publish my piece, and ended up using it for a college class in non-fiction writing. A former graduate student in English, Hansen didn’t mind. For one week in 1999, I called him multiple times for “follow-up questions”. That was a front: I wanted to keep talking. He understood things I was only beginning to grasp.

I wondered what I would be like in middle age, and I decided that if I was like Gunnar Hansen, I’d be doing just fine.

* * *

He could have cashed in early, but he didn’t care. When Chainsaw brought him fame, Hansen — the only Melville scholar to have his own action figure with a detachable severed head — quit acting. Inspired by the John McPhee essay “The Survival of the Bark Canoe,” he moved to the Maine woods to live in seclusion. He left university life behind as well. Hansen was wary of academia and Hollywood, describing them as industries where you’re expected to give pat answers to please bad people. He sought creative freedom above all.

“I wanted to write,” he told me. “That’s all I ever really wanted to do. If I was going to struggle and suffer and starve to try and develop my skill, I’d rather do it as a writer than as an actor.”

Over the next two decades, Hansen wrote five books, including poetry and travelogues about ecologically vulnerable regions of the United States. When I spoke to him in 1999, his most recent book, Islands at the Edge of Time, about East Coast barrier islands, had received a glowing review on a new book vendor called Amazon. The title of the review was “Leatherface Goes Island-Hopping.”

Hansen got used to being typecast. It never deterred him from his intellectual pursuits, and he did not view those pursuits as separate from his background in horror. When we spoke after the Columbine shootings, I asked him about media accusations that horror films fuel real-life murder. Hansen sighed. He said he’d been getting this question for decades from people who didn’t like the answer.

“People go after horror films not because they’re violent, but because a lot of times horror films have values that contradict normal values,” he said. “That’s why people are so outraged. When Raiders of the Lost Ark came out, it was much more explicit than Chainsaw Massacre. No one raised a complaint about the explicit violence in a film that, to some degree, was aimed at kids. But when Chainsaw came out, Johnny Carson gets on TV and says that he’s offended that it didn’t get an X rating for its violence.

“What’s happening is that we’re going after these films not because of their violence. We see the violence as something we can hang on to. We’re offended by horror movies because we’re middle Americans who don’t want to see things in which the values are not the same. The vision in horror films is often very dark. We want to have a movie that tells us that everything’s okay.

“A horror film does not pretend that death is not horrifying. It does not pretend that violence is not bloody, grotesque, and painful. What’s irresponsible are the films that show violence with no ramifications.”

Hansen saw Texas Chainsaw Massacre as a rule-breaker: a movie of “impolite horror” that refused to offer clarity or resolution. He saw a similar ambiguity in his favorite book, Moby Dick, which he encouraged me to read once a year.

“There’s the deep unconscious that the sea represents, if you want to be Freudian about it,” the Texas Chainsaw Massacre star explained. “Or, as Jung said, the lake in the valley of the unconscious. At the same time, it’s a tragedy about Ahab. There are so many different things going on but what worked particularly for me was that it was dipping into the idea that there was this mass of unknowability. It’s this huge book that has all these seams in it.

“Sometimes you read something and you feel that everything is polished as smooth as a stone. I never had that feeling with Moby Dick. The book was bigger than the author. It was like he had lost control over it, and that’s what I loved about it.”

When I used a quote from Moby Dick as an epigraph in my book They Knew — a book I structured as a non-fiction horror story to convey the pain of the political moment in a palatable way — I thought of Gunnar Hansen.

* * *

He told me to see the wilderness before it was too late. In 1999, I had barely traveled, and he encouraged me to explore the country, to visit his beloved Maine, to cherish fragile lands. He worried about the future my generation would inherit. When I look back on our chats, we were two people obsessed with death because we loved life.

Gunnar Hansen made me feel normal. It was normal to love Moby Dick and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It was normal to abhor violence and watch horror for entertainment, in the hope that somehow the entertainment would convey the grief in the American air, even in that glorious illusion of 1999, the sole year I could be called an optimist.

I never spoke to him after that week. Sometimes you have a brief encounter and it shapes your life without you realizing it. A gentle man famed for playing a serial killer taught me I never had to choose one way to live or to be. I could be of the world, and that was enough.

You’re not a contradiction in terms when you’re the one writing the terms. It’s a lesson I wish younger people — sorted into boxes not only by social pressure, but by panopticon data miners — understood through experiences beyond life as prey.

If the seas shall rise, let the mass of unknowability rise too.

* * *

In 2013, Hansen, who started making horror cameos in the late 1980s but kept his movie persona separate from his writing, published an amusing tell-all called Chain Saw Confidential. Chapter One begins: “Call me Leatherface.”

But his description of Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s ending sounds like a 2025 news report, if 2025 still had news:

“The monster goes unpunished. He is still there, still capable of returning. The normality, the predictability of the world is gone. There is no punishment. There is no relief of suffering. There is no justice. There is no order. Without justice and order, how can we have meaning? It is all nothing. This is the real horror.”

Hansen died of pancreatic cancer before Trump took office, autocracy spread worldwide, and climate catastrophes devastated the lands he loved. He died before a technofascist belief in human disposability became mainstreamed into global politics: an extinction racket that shuns even the pretense of valuing life.

He died before Trump started talking up Hannibal Lecter. Trump ignored fellow cannibal Leatherface: Leatherface is too impolite, too raw in his menace. Gunnar Hansen feared the polished villains. I don’t need to wonder what he would think of the plutocrats who destroy the natural world to build an AI facsimile.

On our last night in Texas, my husband and I drove the same Austin streets that Hansen did a half century ago in an America that had hit its peak without knowing it. Texas Chainsaw Massacre mocked the idea that Americans were free, but the film felt free — ruthlessly, frantically free, like it was gathering a dark truth before the means to share it were foreclosed.

The sequels and remakes that followed heralded the narrowing of vision that led to our current dystopia: movies made by robots to pander to the unimaginative.

Near the Congress Avenue Bridge, a crowd was growing. We joined them as dusk fell. I liked the night because I couldn’t read the QR codes. I liked the night because I could pretend Austin was old Austin, and it was 1999, and the future lay before me instead of behind me.

Then it happened: hundreds of thousands of bats emerged from under the bridge. The bats were resolute in flight, impervious to tech lord transformations. The crowd cheered. Here was nature, unrepentant. Here was a timeless symbol of horror stories engendering our shared humanity. Austin felt good again, alive again.

There’s a crack in the dystopia. That’s how the night gets in.

* * *

Thank you for reading! I would never paywall in times of peril. But if you’d like to keep this newsletter going, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. That ensures every article in the archives remains open to everyone. This newsletter is the main source of income for my family of four, so I appreciate your support!

Thank you for reading! I would never paywall in times of peril. But if you’d like to keep this newsletter going, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. That ensures every article remains open to everyone. This newsletter is the main source of income for my family of four, so I appreciate your support!

Sarah Kendzior’s Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Soul Stripping

by

 

Against AI, again

By Sarah Kendzior | Aug 7, 2025
 

An AI created a podcast of your paper,” the email said. I blinked and read it again.

The paper was a work I had written in graduate school and uploaded to the website Academia. The subject was digital freedom and social control in authoritarian states.

I uploaded it in 2010 to thwart the paywalls that blocked academic research from the public. I wanted people to grasp the digital dangers of surveillance, censorship, and impersonation. I wanted them to understand that no one was safe from the future.

It did not occur to me that in 2025 a robot would steal my words and make a podcast out of them and try to charge people, including me, $170 to listen.

I don’t know what the podcast says. I ain’t paying no doppelganger ransom.

In 2010, I sought to debunk the widespread belief that the internet was an inherently democratizing force. In that halcyon era, when Google’s “Don’t Be Evil” motto did not yet prompt bitter laughter, this was a controversial take. It came from researching the internet in authoritarian states, where dictators used it to monitor dissidents and torpedo their rebellions.

* * *

I miss those days, because the people were real: the dissidents, the government, the infiltrators. The latter two were liars — but real liars. They had not yet been replaced with AI. When someone ruined your life, they had to make an effort. There was more “human” and less “inanity” in the “inhumanity”. (Am I doing it right, AI? We’re supposed to shove woods into a virtual woodchipper and mimic coherence, right?)

No one should feel nostalgic for this time. It’s a sign of ours that I do. Now the journals are defunded, the programs where I got my degrees have been cut, and I live in a semi-authoritarian state where podcast-producing robots steal my speech.

My research was on dictatorships of the former Soviet Union: countries where no one trusted anyone. Their political culture is now indistinguishable from that of the US. How can we trust anybody when anybody might be nobody? We no longer tilt at windmills but shoot at the wind. Shoot the breeze, shoot in the futile hope that the robots don’t take the shells and piece them into a funhouse facsimile of conversation.

“In America, bad news breaks you!” Yakov Smirnoff’s voice whispers as I close my laptop. This is a joke I invented for a fake Yakov Smirnoff, a Yakov Smirnoff that only lives in my mind. I give my fake versions of real people privacy. I wish others would extend me the same courtesy.

Like many technologies, AI is designed to kill humans, but in the most soulless way possible, stripping away even our ability to own and express our pain.

In 1938, the poet Bertolt Brecht, living in exile from Nazi Germany, wrote “In the dark times/ Will there also be singing? / Yes, there will be singing/ About the dark times.”

AI steals even that option. When I was discussing the Brecht poem, a commenter wryly noted that AI could write a song about its own thievery. But it can’t. A song written by AI isn’t a song any more than dust is skin.

AI wins not when it becomes more human, but when humans become more like AI: disengaged and devoid of original thought.

What began as a threat to creativity and critical inquiry has moved into tragic terrain. Sacred rites are being outsourced to machines. AI is used to write obituaries and for pundits to profit off murder by pretending to commune with dead children. Chatbots give cold comfort to real grief, exploiting an empathy deficit that has soared since covid appeared.

Meanwhile, AI spits lies, steals jobs, and destroys the natural environment. Tech companies sell it hard so it can be integrated into daily life before buyers realize they have purchased their own replacements. Extinction is being marketed as ease of life.

I used to be frustrated by people’s lack of imagination. Now I’m frustrated by their rejection of it and replacements for it.

Imagination is nothing to take for granted. It is one of the main qualities that fascist regimes attempt to outlaw. But they do not need to outlaw what is surrendered.

AI is soul stripping.

* * *

In 1990, the Kyrgyz writer Chinghiz Aitmatov popularized the term “mankurt” in his novel This Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years. A mankurt is a Central Asian zombie who, due to imperial domination and war, has lost touch with his history, his family, and himself. He is a former person with an enslaved mind.

“They can take your land, your wealth, even your life,” wails the agonized mother of a mankurt in the novel, “but who ever thought, who ever dared to attack a man’s memory? Oh God, if you do exist, how did you give such power to people? Isn’t there evil enough on earth without this?”

In interviews, Aitmatov explained that a mankurt did not recognize himself as a human being. The term spread across the USSR as it crumbled and citizens from colonized nations like Kyrgyzstan tried to rediscover their culture, religion, and roots.

The mankurt is the sort of topic I wrote about in my graduate school papers now being vomited up by AI. That is the terror of the post-existence age: I have taken pains to avoid this fate, but it got me anyway.

I have never used ChatGPT. I have never streamed music, used a QR code, or taken an Uber. I leave home without a phone and boycott cashless establishments. I avoid apps, including the Substack app. I am behind the times and determined to stay there.

Historically, this mindset hasn’t worked out well for Polish-Americans with last names beginning with K who live in states beginning with M and write books about conspiracy theories. But don’t worry, I don’t use bombs either.

It is easy for me to live an analog life in Missouri, which tends to be about twenty years behind the rest of the country. But we’re at about 2005 now, the last year the internet was good, and big tech has come to make me its mankurt.

AI articles with fake Sarah Kendziors are all over the internet. In the past month alone, I was fake-quoted about Jeffrey Epstein in an AI publication purporting to be a Haitian newspaper; about Trump being crazy in Dean Blundell’s AI slopstack; and most distressingly, about how Americans should leave the country in an AI-generated rag called Canada Resists. I found out that Trump was in Scotland from an AI article in which Fake Me was asked for comment.

I never said these quotes, nor would I tell people to leave the US. One reason I keep this newsletter unpaywalled is because my views on topics like that are clearly stated and can be used to debunk my AI doppelgangers. My own words are my best weapons — so long as people recognize they are mine.

An irony of my AI ubiquity is that I am sometimes banned from what’s left of mainstream media, thanks to my books about the mafia, the government, and Jeffrey Epstein. But AI doesn’t know. AI cannot tell fact from fiction or the popular from the pariah — or what to do with someone who is both.

I am used to people making up quotes from me and repeating them. It happens out of malice or to distract from what I actually said. For example, when I brought up Nancy Pelosi’s corrupt finances and disturbing proclamations of loyalty to Israel over the US, a brigade of bots appeared to falsely claim that I called her a “Russian agent”, when I stated point blank that she is not. The goal was to make me seem unreliable and discredit my accurate claims.

This fake “Russian agent” quote was repeated on social media thousands of times over six years — even though it could be debunked in seconds. I could not understand why it persisted until people told me chatbots were saying it in 2025. Social media repetition was necessary to make the false claim land.

By contrast, my new fake quotes are slop. They are trite statements that often appear in a list of quotes from other writers — with no source links for any of us. I have yet to discern the point, except to destroy the notion of reporting itself. I suspect that the other quotes are also fabricated, since I am not the only person with an AI doppelganger making the fake news rounds.

I had a nightmare recently that I was not admitted into a building because I am not “AI compliant.” I trust dreams more than reality these days, and I fear this is the American future: social credit scores, digital currency, mandatory tech. I refuse. I am AI disobedient, and I will stay that way.

But I will admit to a pang in my all too human heart. A longing for bygone days when nightmares ended when we woke up — instead of just beginning.

* * *

Thank you for reading! I would never paywall in times of peril. But if you’d like to keep this newsletter going, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. That ensures every article in the archives remains open to everyone. This newsletter is the main source of income for my family of four, so I appreciate your support!

Thank you for reading! I would never paywall in times of peril. But if you’d like to keep this newsletter going, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. That ensures every article remains open to everyone. This newsletter is the main source of income for my family of four, so I appreciate your support!

Sarah Kendzior’s Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

ICE recruiters echo the language of Nazis

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

August 6, 2025

Members of the House of Representatives are back in their districts for August, and on Monday, Republican Mike Flood of Nebraska held a town hall in Lincoln. A woman asked what she called a fiscal question. She said: “With 450 million FEMA dollars being reallocated to open Alligator Alcatraz, and 600 million taxpayer FEMA dollars being used to now open more concentration camps, and ICE burning through $8.4 million a day to illegally detain people—How much does it cost for fascism? How much do the taxpayers have to pay for a fascist country?” The crowd cheered wildly. Nicholas Wu, Cassandra Dumay, and Mia McCarthy of Politico reported today that by the end of Flood’s town hall, “chants of ‘Vote him out!’ threatened to drown out his closing comments.”

The Politico reporters also said that Republicans maintain they aren’t worried about their angry constituents and dismiss the town hall pushback as astroturfed and not reflective of real voter sentiment.

Maybe. But with the political tide running strong against the administration, that position sounds like posturing.

Trump’s firing of the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics on the same day that numbers from that bureau showed a dramatic slowdown in the economy seems to have awakened businesspeople who were willing to back Trump to the reality that he’s pulling down the economy. Today Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook expressed concern about the jobs numbers, suggesting that the big revisions in them “are somewhat typical of turning points” in the economy.

At the same time, the administration’s immigration policies are deeply unpopular and unlikely to improve as Americans learn more about them. Today a report by Hatzel Vela of NBC South Florida went national as a former corrections officer for a private contractor who worked at the detention center in the Florida Everglades, dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz” by supporters, said the detainees “have no sunlight. There’s no clock in there. They don’t even know what time of the day it is. They have no access to showers. They shower every other day or every four days…. The bathrooms are backed up because you got so many people using them.”

Florida is running the Everglades detention facility in expectation of reimbursement by the federal government. Immigration advocate Aaron Reichlin-Melnick pointed out that, unlike the federal government, the state of Florida “can be sued for civil rights violations and punished with monetary damages.”

Also today, the GEO Group, a private prison and services provider, reported a better than expected second quarter today, thanks in part to two ICE contracts that, together, it expects will produce $145 million annually. The company announced a $300 million stock buyback, a process that increases the value of the stock held by remaining shareholders.

The Department of Homeland Security continues to echo the language of Nazis, posting today, “Serve your country! Defend your culture.” It does not appear that people are rushing to sign up. The administration has worked hard to recruit new agents, offering a signing bonus of up to $50,000 and help repaying student loans. Today, it eased requirements for new recruits, removing age limits and posting “no undergraduate degree required!” David Dayen of The American Prospect noted today that probationary employees of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) have been ordered to report to ICE within seven days or lose their jobs.

As concerns grow about the economy and immigration policy, which were Trump’s strongest suits, Trump’s open attempt to steal the 2026 election by a rare mid-decade redistricting in Texas to carve out five more Republican seats in Congress has given Democrats a platform to call attention to MAGA’s attempt to stay in power regardless of the will of the voters. And they have seized the opportunity, calling the Republicans out in interviews and on social media.

At least fifty Democrats have left the state to deny the Republicans a quorum—the minimum number of people necessary to hold a vote—that would let them jam through a new voting map. Yesterday Texas governor Greg Abbott asked the Texas Supreme Court to let him expel the leader of the House Democrats, Representative Gene Wu, from the legislature, saying Wu had abandoned his office. According to Eleanor Klibanoff of the Texas Tribune, legal experts disagree. She quotes Charles Rhodes, an expert on constitutional law at the University of Missouri law school. “I am aware of absolutely no authority that says breaking quorum is the same as the intent to abandon a seat,” he said. “That would require the courts extending the premise to the breaking point. It’s inconsistent with the very text of the Texas Constitution.”

Yesterday Republican senator John Cornyn of Texas asked the FBI to find and arrest the Democratic legislators—a wild overreach of federal power—and Trump told reporters the FBI might have to get involved.

David Petesch of Shaw Local, a paper in Illinois, reported that a bomb threat early this morning at the hotel where the Texas lawmakers are staying in Illinois forced them to evacuate. After the threat was cleared, the Democrats said: “We are safe, we are secure, and we are undeterred. “We are grateful for [Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker], local, and state law enforcement for their quick action to ensure our safety.” On social media, one lawmaker blamed Texas Republicans for the threat. “This is what happens when Republican state leaders publicly call for us to be ‘hunted down,’” Representative John Bucy III said. He added: “Texas Democrats won’t be intimidated.”

Nicole Lafond of Talking Points Memo reported today that the administration is now turning to a plan to redistrict Indiana, sending Vice President J.D. Vance to meet with Republican lawmakers there. But, as Lafond notes, Republicans already hold seven of the state’s nine congressional seats. Indiana state representative Matt Pierce, a Democrat, told the Indy Star that the attention to redistricting Indiana shows that the White House is worried about 2026.

Those concerns are unlikely to be relieved by the news today that Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is cancelling at least $500 million worth of awards and contracts to develop mRNA vaccines. These vaccines include those that addressed covid and were being explored for protection against HIV transmission and cancer.

And then there are the Epstein files, Trump’s appearance in them, and the administration’s attempts to change the subject.

Yesterday Democrats on the House Oversight Committee used a legislative maneuver to force its chair, James Comer (R-KY), to issue subpoenas for the Department of Justice records on the Epstein investigation, along with subpoenas for former government officials connected to the case. Representative Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) posted that the DOJ now has two weeks to release the files to the committee. She wrote: “It’s time to find out who’s been protected, who thought they were above the law, and who’s been hiding behind power.”

On Tuesday, Trump defended the fact that Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, his former lawyer, had met with a lawyer representing Ghislaine Maxwell, the convicted sex trafficker who obtained victims for Jeffrey Epstein, as well as with Maxwell herself. “[W]hatever he asks would be totally appropriate,” Trump told reporters. “And I think he probably wants to make sure that, you know, people that should not be involved or aren’t involved are not hurt by something that would be very, very unfortunate, very unfair to a lot of people.”

Meanwhile, outlets reported today that top administration officials, including Vance, Blanche, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and FBI Director Kash Patel, were scheduled to meet at the vice president’s residence Wednesday to coordinate the administration’s Epstein strategy. Notably, they appear to be meeting without President Trump.

The family of Virginia Giuffre, one of Epstein’s victims, issued a statement saying: “We understand that Vice President J.D. Vance will hold a strategy session this evening at his residence with administration officials. Missing from this group is, of course, any survivor of the vicious crimes of convicted perjurer and sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein. Their voices must be heard, above all. We also call upon the House subcommittee to invite survivors to testify.”

After news of the meeting leaked, a source told Nandita Bose of Reuters that the meeting had been canceled.

Today, reporters noticed that the online United States Constitution, maintained by the Library of Congress, was missing parts of Article I, the part of the Constitution that lays out the rights and duties of Congress. Parts of Section 8 and all of Sections 9 and 10 were gone.

Those include Congress’s control over the District of Columbia, Congress’s power to make the laws, the promise that habeas corpus would not be suspended, the stipulation that no money can be used by the government unless Congress has appropriated it, the requirement that no president can accept gifts from foreign countries, and the specification that only Congress can levy tariffs.

Officials said the deletions were “due to a coding error,” and by the end of today the missing sections were restored.