ICYMI: The Week in "Wait, They’re Doing WHAT Now?"
Musk's bad week, Trump and Putin's bromance, and a few other stories you might have missed
Hey comrades, fellow doomscrollers, and people who swear they’ll take a social media break but never do—welcome back to ICYMI, where we round up the stories that got buried under the usual political chaos.
Did you miss some incredibly important news while mainstream media obsessed over whether Trump was serious about his latest dictator cosplay? While Biden has vanished into the ether and Schumer is licking the budget boots of the GOP, Republicans are wasting no time remaking America in their image.
Here’s what you may have missed:
1. Elon Musk’s No Good, Very Bad Week (And the Convenient Distraction)
Billionaire genius or petulant man-child? The debate rages on, but this past week didn’t exactly help Musk’s case. From Tesla’s stock plummeting to more embarrassing failures at X (formerly Twitter, now just a flaming pile of bird feathers), Musk has been struggling.
But in a truly chef’s kiss moment, just as all of this was going down, he conveniently pivoted attention to an alleged “deep state” conspiracy. Almost like a distraction! Almost like a pattern!
2. The Supreme Court Keeps Giving Cops a Free Pass
Good news: If you’re a police officer who violates someone’s rights, the Supreme Court has your back! If you’re, you know, anyone else, not so much.
This week, SCOTUS once again upheld qualified immunity, the legal doctrine that basically says, “Oops! We didn’t clearly establish that cops shouldn’t do that specific bad thing, so they’re off the hook.” The latest case? A horrifying police shooting that left an innocent person dead—without justice for the family.
For a court that loves “original intent,” they sure don’t seem to care that the Founders definitely didn’t write the Constitution as a “Get Out of Jail Free” card for law enforcement.
Qualified Immunity: The Supreme Court’s Shield for Bad Cops
Imagine waking up to the sound of your front door being battered down. Armed SWAT officers storm in, shattering windows, detonating flashbangs, and aiming guns at you and your family. Minutes later, they realize—oops—they hit the wrong house.
3. Trump’s Authoritarian Playbook: Rewriting History in Real-Time (Paid Subscriber Perk!)
For a guy who claims to hate “cancel culture,” Trump sure is on a mission to erase reality. His latest moves include:
📝 Executive Order 14190, which forces schools to teach “patriotic education” (a.k.a. propaganda).
🎭 Defunding the arts because creativity and independent thought are dangerous to authoritarians.
📖 Manipulating language to reframe social justice issues, attack marginalized groups, and rewrite the past.
🚨 Expanding executive power, including pardoning insurrectionists and replacing top government officials with yes-men.
We dug into all of this in an exclusive post for paid subscribers—one of the perks of supporting our work! Subscribing gets you access to our full archive, occasional exclusive content, and sometimes even early access to big stories.
Trump’s Authoritarian Playbook: Rewriting Art, Education, and Media
Throughout history, authoritarian leaders haven’t just seized political power; they’ve seized control over culture.
4. Trump & Putin: Just a Couple of Guys Plotting Over Ukraine
In another totally normal, not at all suspicious move, Donald Trump is apparently in talks with Vladimir Putin to discuss how to divide up Ukraine’s “assets” (ahem, land and power plants). You know, just a former U.S. president casually discussing the dismemberment of a sovereign country with an authoritarian war criminal. Totally fine.
Meanwhile, Trump’s envoy to Russia came back empty-handed from ceasefire negotiations, and European leaders are not amused by Trump’s habit of playing foreign policy like a high-stakes real estate deal. But hey, what’s a little international destabilization between friends?
5. Tennessee GOP’s Master Plan: Ban Books, Block Kids from School
In yet another installment of “conservatives love freedom (except when they don’t),” Tennessee Republicans are going all in on censorship and discrimination:
📚 Banning LGBTQ+ books and curriculum because acknowledging gay people exist is apparently too radical.
🚸 Trying to block undocumented kids from going to public school, a direct challenge to a Supreme Court ruling that guarantees all children an education.
⚖️ Making school board elections partisan, because injecting more political toxicity into education worked so well already.
It’s all part of the GOP’s effort to turn public schools into far-right indoctrination centers—while claiming they’re the ones fighting “ideological agendas.”
That’s it for this week! If you read all of this, congratulations—you’re now more informed than most cable news anchors. Stay angry, stay engaged, and maybe touch some grass before diving back into the chaos.