RIP The Atlantic.

They just hired an Epstein Files guy, which tells you The Atlantic isn’t in the journalism business anymore.

It’s in the billionaire reassurance business.

Apparently they pulled David Brooks in as the best in the industry at telling intellectual elites that mounting catastrophes aren’t their problem. No, he spins tall tales about the liberals being at fault for refusing to empathize with the needs of fascism. It’s a teenage girl’s fault if she refused to “massage” Epstein and his clients. It’s Ukraine’s fault they refused to give away their land to Putin.

An exposé of this awful man by The Nation is the best thing I’ve read in weeks.

The Smug and Vacuous David Brooks Is Perfect for The Atlantic: The former New York Times columnist is a one-man cottage industry of lazy cultural stereotyping.

Apparently Brooks’ brand rose from Weekly Standard (neocon war propaganda) to New York Times (elite consensus maintenance) to The Atlantic (people who think they’re too smart for the Times). All of it has produced little more than intellectual cover for the consolidation of power, while pretending to be a critic.

Brooks’s entire game is the false alibi: look what the victim made the abuser do.

Liberals bring fascism upon themselves by being smug. Ukraine made their own invasion happen by not accommodating Putin. And when the Epstein files dropped? Brooks dismissed them as conspiracy bait for MAGA while being in those files himself. His defense when exposed was essentially: “Some of my best friends are billionaires I can’t keep track of which ones are known sex traffickers.”

That’s the architecture. Total elite impunity, fraudulently painted as reasonable centrism. How dare the children being sex trafficked accuse Epstein of exactly what Epstein was doing?! Brooks being a journalist while saying he can’t keep track of who around him does what crimes, is peak asshat hypocrite.

He punches down, way down.

He wants us to believe he can track anything, because that lets him blame downward. Yet anything that comes up to implicate billionaires? Suddenly this journalist can’t be expected to know the most obvious things. The thing about Epstein is that he operated with impunity as if above the law, not that he wasn’t known for sex trafficking children.

You can read Brooks and come away thinking the problem is teenage girls having confidence, not that institutions you trust are systematically captured by predators who face no accountability.

The news about Bill Gates gets weirder by the day. He cheated on his wife through Epstein, caught a disease and then tried to cover it up with secret antibiotics?

Microsoft founder asked for antibiotics to ‘surreptitiously give to Melinda’, according to newly released email

To be fair, the convicted blackmailer wrote himself a memo making these claims, perhaps designed to create leverage over Gates.

Except there’s a wrinkle. Melinda Gates hired divorce lawyers in 2019 after learning about her husband having repeated meetings with this pedophile.

Text messages from 2017 released by Congress last year suggested Bill wanted to maintain contact with Epstein over and despite Melinda’s objections. An adviser wrote to Epstein that Gates “wants to talk to you but his wife won’t let him” and “he loves you.”

Yeah, that’s not exactly straightforward blackmail. Epstein typically worked from true compromising material, because total fabrications are easily disproven. Epstein’s utility was precisely his ability to facilitate the criminal things powerful men wanted to hide.

Here’s the real news that should be reported: Gates Foundation controls billions in global health funding yet may be ethically compromised.

The foundation’s spokesperson calls the claims “absurd” without addressing why Gates maintained affectionate ties to a convicted child sex trafficker for years, against his wife’s explicit objections. That’s the documented fact they didn’t explain. And it comes with such specific detail, unlikely to be false. Gates allegedly caught an STD from Russian girls and sought to prophylactically dose his wife without her knowledge or consent. Look again at what the Gates Foundation controls and where.

Coverage is treating this as celebrity scandal rather than asking whether the world’s largest private health foundation should face heavy scrutiny. A man allegedly willing to medicate his wife without her knowledge, while chasing a relationship with the most infamous man convicted of trafficking minors, runs a foundation that operates medical interventions on populations with limited ability to refuse or verify what they’re receiving.

Hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars are being poured into hiring stormtroopers who report only to Trump, so they can fill concentration camps with people arrested without due process.

The cost for acquiring two warehouses alone was $172 million. A third in El Paso, Texas, could be among the largest jails of any kind in the country if completed as envisioned, with 8,500 beds. The deals mark the latest turn in [Trump’s] plan to use as many as 23 warehouses for detaining thousands….

The latest numbers suggest nearly a billion dollars will be burned in 2026 for Trump to politically target and occupy urban areas with his troops, to detain hundreds of thousands of innocent voters in these camps.

Journalists also now face federal retaliation for any reporting, even without charges. In one high profile case a journalist was detained despite it being a direct violation of a judge who refused to allow it.

Lemon, now an independent journalist, was taken into custody by federal agents on Thursday night while in Los Angeles covering the Grammy Awards, according to his lawyer Abbe Lowell. …a magistrate judge who reviewed the evidence… [excluded] Lemon. The government challenged that decision, but an appeals court suggested prosecutors take the case to a federal grand jury – a panel of citizens that evaluates if there is enough evidence to charge someone in a case.

The Trump social media account grotesquely celebrated this by posting shackle/chain emojis next to the Black journalist’s name.

Concentration camps growing, detaining and censoring the press, pushing memes about shackling innocent Black men with chains. That’s Trump.

This is how Fox News reported the tragedy.

“Mentally, I have never been worse,” Wael said in the video. “My father was always my hero, my safe place. He did everything for me, 24 hours a day, and ICE took him for no reason.”

Wael was pronounced dead at the hospital, having never been reunited with Maher.

“Up until Wael’s last conscious moment, he continued thinking and talking about his father.”

The father had done nothing wrong, had no crimes, had no missed papers or appointments. He had been checking in with the ICE field office in Dallas every year to retain his legal status. For thirty years, he was compliant. Then ICE suddenly criminalized him as an “alien”—with foreseeable lethal consequences for his disabled son.

His son died a preventable death while his father was detained. Now ICE refuses to let the father attend the funeral.

What happened to Wael Tarabishi is Hannah Arendt’s concept of Nazi administrative murder: death caused not by direct violence but by bureaucratic machinery operating with deliberate indifference. ICE didn’t shoot Wael. They simply removed his 24/7 caregiver, detained him through an interminable process, and let the obvious and predictable biological consequences unfold.

Trump is announcing that disabled people’s lives are contingent on state approval of their care relationships. Under Hitler’s T4, the state decided disabled people were unworthy of the resources required to sustain them. What’s structurally identical is that Wael’s life depended entirely on a care relationship the state could sever at will, with full knowledge of the consequences. The Trump machinery didn’t pull a trigger in this case, it applied deadly paperwork.

The denial of funeral attendance is a further cruelty-as-function. It demonstrates Trump wields power beyond death, that he controls grieving itself.

The beatings will continue until morale improves.

The Minneapolis killing of Pretti, an ICU nurse for veterans, fits within this pattern. Pretti was trying to help a woman who had been violently knocked to the ground by federal agents.

Pretti was kind, he helped others. ICE killed him for it. Wael was cared for; they detained his kind father so he would die. The enforcement pattern reliably destroys care relationships.

Care workers are more likely to intervene to protect others—exactly what Pretti did, what Wael’s father did. The gratuitous cruelty serves the same function that Nazi bureaucratic cruelty served: demonstrating total power over victims to deter others through witnessed suffering. The pattern of posthumously transforming victims into aggressors through disinformation—Miller called Pretti “an assassin”—served Nazi SA/SS operations similarly. It’s beyond cover for crimes; it’s a warning to others who might dare to intervene or show compassion.

What distinguishes fascism from ordinary state violence is the systematic quality and ideological targeting. The pattern isn’t random. It’s the well-known tactic of destroying social bonds and care networks to replace them with loyalty to the dictator alone.