<i>Mississippi Today</i> reported that several officials said the National Park Service attempted to remove museum brochures that described Byron De La Beckwith as "a member of the racist and segregationist White Citizens’ Council.”
American tourism may be permanently debilitated because Trump and the GOP made everyone else around the world realize that there are plenty of other places they’d rather visit than a country run by the biggest antisocial freaks on the planet.
President Trump is holding hostage billions of dollars in funding for a New York infrastructure project, and won’t release it unless he gets New York’s Penn Station and Washington, D.C.’s Dulles International Airport named after him.The Hudson Tunnel project is a plan to construct new and improved rail tunnels connecting New York City and New Jersey, expanding service along the country’s busiest rail route. Trump froze funding for that and $18 billion worth of other important projects in a spiteful move meant to kneecap a blue city during the government shutdown in October.It was last month that Trump offered Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer the deal of a lifetime: Name Penn Station and Dulles Airport—two iconic northeast travel hubs—after him, and he’d unfreeze the funding for the Hudson Tunnel project. Schumer rejected that offer immediately, according to Punchbowl News. With no name change and no funding, the committee leading the tunnel project may have to lay off around 1,000 workers and stop the project.Moments like this remind us that Trump is an egotistic, withering old billionaire first, and president second. His name is still very much his brand, and he wants to plaster it everywhere he can—from the Kennedy Center to TrumpRx, to Trump coin, to Penn Station and Dulles. And like a petulant child, he’ll dangle a landscape-changing project in front of Democrats until he gets his way.
The nation’s top spy agency is already prepping for election season.The FBI called on officials from all 50 states to attend a briefing on midterm election “preparations,” reported Crooked Media’s Matt Berg. The meeting is expected to take place in late February, though exactly what the meeting will be about is still unclear.Berg obtained an email that was issued to various state officials earlier this week offering specifics. He acquired the note via a public records request. “Dear Chief Election Officials,” the email begins. “To prepare for the 2026 US midterm elections, your election partners at the FBI, DOJ, DHS, USPIS, and the EAC would like to invite you to a call where we can discuss our preparations for the cycle, as well as updates and resources we can provide to you and your staff.“The call will be on Wednesday, February 25 (2-3pm EST) and will be for Chief Election Officials,” it continues. “You may designate a proxy to attend in your place if you are not available. On Wednesday, March 4, we will hold a similar call for members of the EAC’s Local Leadership Council.“We look forward to speaking with you in support of the 2026 midterm elections,” it ends.The note is signed by Kellie Hardiman, who refers to herself as the “FBI Election Executive.”A top state election official described the note to Berg as “the strangest thing in the world.”Another unidentified state official told NBC News that the message was “unusual and unexpected,” especially considering Hardiman was a relative unknown prior to her mass email, as was her position.“No one has heard of this person—and we’re all wondering what an ‘FBI Election Executive’ is,” said the official, who was granted anonymity by the outlet to speak candidly.Hardiman titled herself as an intelligence analyst in a 2024 interview with the fashion blog The Style That Binds Us, specifying that she had spent her entire 20-year career at the FBI in that role.A spokesperson for the FBI was unwilling to explain Hardiman’s letter, telling Berg that the “FBI has no comment.” The note has only served to ramp up tension over the upcoming midterm elections. Earlier this week, Trump told former FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino during an interview that Republicans should “take over and nationalize” elections in several states.“The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over,’” Trump said. “We should take over the voting, the voting in at least many—15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.”
President Donald Trump shared a wildly racist video of former President Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama as apes during a late-night posting spree on Truth Social. In yet another erosion of America’s and Trump’s authority on the world stage, the president shared a video on Truth Social late Thursday that ended with a short clip of the Obamas’ laughing heads superimposed on the bodies of apes, while the song “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” plays in the background. The video bore a watermark tag of the same account behind the AI-generated video of Trump dropping a massive load of shit on protesters from a fighter jet.Most of the 62-second video was actually focused on a conspiracy theory that voting machines in certain battleground states had been rigged to favor Joe Biden. It was only the final seconds that contained racist drivel. The Bulwark’s Tim Miller hit back at speculation that Trump hadn’t meant to share the racist clip. “It was intentional and Trump has been making racist attacks on the Obamas for like 20 years now hope that clears it up for you,” he wrote in a post on X.Ben Rhodes, a former speechwriter for Obama, wrote on X: “Let it haunt Trump and his racist followers that future Americans will embrace the Obamas as beloved figures while studying him as a stain on our history.”California Governor Gavin Newsom’s press office also slammed the video. “Disgusting behavior by the President. Every single Republican must denounce this. Now,” a post on X read.White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt dismissed concerns about the video Friday morning. “This is from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from the Lion King,” she wrote in an emailed statement to Variety. “Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public.”Leavitt also shared the full video, which depicted Hillary Clinton as a boar and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries as a meerkat—but those two were noticeably absent from the clip Trump shared.After roughly 12 excruciating hours, Trump deleted the post on Friday. But the damage has already been done.Trump normally uses his Truth Social account to post presidential proclamations, appeals to foreign leaders, or screeds against his enemies. But on Thursday, Trump shared a video of a dog being summoned by a can of whipped cream, and another clip of Bruce Lee from Enter the Dragon (1973). He also endorsed “a true friend, fighter, and WINNER,” Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who has become something of a model leader for those on the contemporary right after he systematically weakened his country’s free press, replacing it with a state-controlled propaganda machine.This story has been updated.
I absolutely cannot get enough of this saga.
We host a debate between two former officials at the human rights organization Human Rights Watch. Omar Shakir resigned this week after more than a decade as the organization’s Israel and Palestine director, over a report on the Palestinian right of return that he says was blocked from publication for ideological reasons. “I’ve lost faith in our new leadership’s fidelity to the integrity of what we do best, which is to publish the facts that we document and consistently apply the law,” says Shakir. Yet HRW’s former executive director Kenneth Roth says the report was “utterly unpublishable” and questions the legal basis of the unpublished report’s claim that Israel’s denial of Palestinians’ right of return is a crime against humanity. “Some Palestinian refugees may have this great suffering required for it to be a crime against humanity, but a lot of them clearly don’t,” he states. Shakir calls Roth’s objections hypocritical in light of similar HRW claims about the rights of Rohingya and Chagos Island refugees. “The right of return remains this third rail even among progressive human rights institutions,” he says.