Episode Details

Welcome back to This Week in Tyranny. While you were watching gas climb past four dollars a gallon and trying to remember which war did that, the Energy Department admitted in federal court that it cancels grants based on how your state voted, the Pentagon located about a hundred wounded troops it forgot to mention, the Secretary of Defense told the Senate he’s out of war money, Marco Rubio published an enemies list of forty three Americans and Congress subpoenaed one of them the next day, and three hundred fifty thousand Haitians lose the legal right to live and work here on Monday. Let’s start with the confession.

Trump’s Energy Secretary Chris Wright told a House committee in June why his department killed seven and a half billion dollars in energy grants. Quote. “No decisions were made on politics. I keep hearing that charge. It’s bullshit. We’re going to say it a million times.” Five weeks later his own deputy general counsel filed a document with a federal judge saying the cancellations were, quote, “based solely on the political identity of the grant recipient’s state.” Two hundred eighty four grants, sixteen states, every one of them won by Kamala Harris. His department flagged three hundred forty more in red states and then funded every single one. The criteria was a map. Battery plants, grid upgrades, hydrogen, killed over how the neighbors voted. And when reporters ran it Friday, Energy said the filing was being misrepresented, that the political part referred only to the timing. My dude. You wrote it down and handed it to a judge.

Over at the Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s department admitted this week that nearly a hundred American troops were wounded in two weeks of Iranian strikes. That was news to the Pentagon’s own casualty database, the one it keeps for Congress and the President, which still lists zero Americans wounded in action for the month of July. Nick Turse at The Intercept has been on this alone for months. He documented five hundred twenty injured as of April first, including two hundred sailors treated for smoke inhalation, none of it announced. He watched the official count drop by fifteen with no explanation. A US official gave him the term for it. Casualty cover-up. Leon Panetta, who used to run that building, called the secrecy shameful. Turse is doing the whole job by himself.

Two days earlier that same Secretary of Defense sat in front of Senate Appropriations asking for another sixty seven billion dollars, because the war he keeps winning has cost thirty seven and a half billion so far. Democrats pointed out the Pentagon still has seventy five billion sitting unspent from last year. He wants more anyway, and at the end of this month the Navy and Air Force run out of operations money, so he’s cutting training and maintenance to cover it. Readiness. The thing that keeps troops breathing. And the Pentagon does have a spending problem. Last September alone it spent a hundred thirty nine thousand dollars on doughnuts, five hundred eleven dollars a box, plus fifteen million on ribeyes and ninety eight thousand on a Steinway grand piano for the Air Force chief of staff’s house. Jonathan Larsen at The Fucking News assembled that receipt.

On July twentieth Marco Rubio’s State Department published a hundred page report naming forty three Americans and organizations as agents of Cuban subversion. Amy Goodman. Hasan Piker. The mayors of New York and Los Angeles. Three sitting congresswomen. The founder of the Amazon Labor Union. Ben Cohen, of ice cream. And George Floyd, who has been dead six years and is now on a federal enemies list. The report holds up the McCarthy purges of the fifties as a model that worked. Rubio said the time has come to crush this evil once and for all. The next day the House Ways and Means Committee subpoenaed The People’s Forum in New York for its internal communications and its member records. Twenty four hours from list to subpoena. K