Episode Details

Welcome back to This Week in Tyranny, where the President spent Friday insisting that Navy families aren’t worried about their kids, while his administration had its busiest week of actual damage all year.

This week, Treasury deleted the federal record of who owns American companies. The Secretary of Defense put a textbook in military schools that treats Christianity and Western civilization as the same thing. A Trump connected oil company hired Halliburton and Dr. Phil before it applied for a permit. Homeland Security sent undercover agents into Lutheran churches to write down license plates. And the Pentagon told Congress it killed a hundred and fifty three civilians in Yemen, then decided nobody’s family gets a dime. Plus bulldozers in Big Bend and the worst measles year since 1991. All my sources are in the description and the comments, so read, follow, and share. Let’s get into it.

Deleting Cartel Corruption

Tuesday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent finalized a rule ending the requirement that American companies disclose who owns them. Friday it took effect. And FinCEN isn’t just switching the system off, it’s deleting the records it already has.

That’s the Corporate Transparency Act, written by Marco Rubio, called the most significant anti money laundering law in decades. Bessent’s statement calls killing it a victory for common sense.

Common sense for who, my dude. Treasury’s own assessment this year documented cartels laundering money through anonymous American shell companies, and then Treasury set the phone book on fire. This is an administration that says the word cartel nine hundred times a day and just made cartels harder to find on purpose. And nobody’s archiving the data. They’re deleting it. Nobody deletes a database they think doesn’t work.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is putting a Western civilization course into the Pentagon’s schools this fall. A hundred and sixty schools, eleven countries, seventy thousand kids, every one of them the child of somebody serving.

The textbook is The Golden Thread, built with Hillsdale College, the private Christian school in Michigan that writes curriculum for red states and calls it classical education. Historians told the AP it frames Islam as inherently more violent than Christianity. A section called Holy War and Martyrdom in Battle presents the Crusades as Christians protecting Christians, then reaches for 9/11. The introduction warns students that citizens of Western countries are, quote, utterly ignorant of history, and therefore unarmed against the general hostility to their own tradition.

Unarmed. In a book handed to kids whose parents are actually armed.

And in March, Hegseth threw out the schools’ director and replaced her with a man he praised for reorienting the whole system toward patriotic values and classical learning.

Drill Baby Drill

Greenland Energy, a Houston oil company whose chairman appears to enjoy access to Trump’s inner circle, spent this year assembling a complete Arctic drilling operation. February, an ice class cargo ship. March, a Canadian rig. April, Halliburton. Somewhere in there, Dr. Phil, to shoot a documentary.

The one thing it did not do was apply for the permit. This week the company had just started step one, writing a description of the project.

In June a rep told a community meeting in Jameson Land they had permission to land drilling equipment. They didn’t. Chairman Larry Swets explained it like this. Our enthusiasm for the project led us to communicate in a way that created confusion. In July, locals watched a tug drag a barge ashore and unload a dozen containers anyway, and Greenland issued a strong warning.

Wednesday, Greenland said no. Nothing before the winter of 2027. The CEO says operating in the Arctic requires patience, flexibility and a long term perspective. Says the guy who bought the rig before he read the form.

Puppet Master