Episode Details

Welcome back to This Week in Tyranny. While you were watching the rest of the planet outvote us one hundred sixty four to one on the shape of the world, this happened.

The Pentagon tells a Gold Star widow there was no war. ICE hands out badges without fingerprints. The Pentagon raids the pandemic money. The State Department answers a thousand dead in Nepal with a bake sale. And Tyson fires twenty five hundred people with the doors already locked.

Let's get into it.

Pentagon Denies Widow Combat Pay Because We’re Not at War

The Pentagon told a Gold Star widow she couldn’t have her husband’s combat pay because Congress never declared a war.

Major Alex Klinner was thirty three. On March twelfth his KC-135 went down over western Iraq and six crew died. He left his wife Libby, a two year old, and seven month old twins. Libby Klinner says the casualty assistance officer told her hostile fire pay and the combat zone tax exclusion didn’t apply, because what her husband died doing was not technically a war.

Combat pay is two hundred twenty five dollars a month. It has never required a declaration of war. The standard is being killed by hostile fire, and dying in a burning tanker over Iraq clears that bar comfortably. Troops get paid twice a month. So the Department of Defense went to the mat with a widow raising three kids under three over a hundred twelve dollars and fifty cents.

They lost that fight to an Instagram post. She put up a picture with her son captioned “six months of a war we can’t call a war,” it went everywhere, and the Air Force suddenly discovered it had been meaning to audit her benefits all along.

Nobody at the top will say the word. JD Vance, on Thursday: “I wouldn’t call it a war.” The President, on Friday, called it “small potatoes.” Eighteen dead. Seven hundred ninety wounded. Six months, no authorization from Congress, and a stack of paperwork insisting nothing is happening. And the family of a man who died in it had to go viral to get his last paycheck right.

ICE Skips Fingerprinting for New Agents

ICE has been handing out badges to people it never fingerprinted.

Those are the words of a seventeen year veteran of the agency, a unit chief inside ICE’s own Office of Professional Responsibility, who supervised more than a hundred people whose entire job was vetting applicants. He’s a Republican. He voted for Trump twice. Last August he told the Homeland Security Inspector General that ICE was making final job offers before security looked at anybody, and clearing applicants with no fingerprints, no identity verification, and no credit checks. He called it an “unprecedented lowering of standards.”

Think about what we fingerprint people for in this country. Substitute teaching. Foster parenting. TSA PreCheck. Selling real estate. Working the front desk at a daycare. Cutting hair, in some states. But putting on a mask, strapping on a gun, and dragging somebody out of a Home Depot parking lot, apparently that one runs on the honor system.

At the academy in Brunswick, Georgia, staff later found a recruit previously charged with strong arm robbery and battery out of a domestic violence incident. They found people six weeks into training with no fingerprints on file. ICE hired twelve thousand people in under a year and dropped the minimum age for some law enforcement jobs from twenty one to eighteen. So the masked man at your neighbor’s door might be nineteen, and nobody ever asked him for ID.

Homeland Security’s answer to a seventeen year employee raising a national security alarm was to interrogate him, threaten him with criminal charges, and park him on leave for ten months without telling him what he supposedly did. He retired. Then in February the Inspector General closed the case. No findings. No referral. No report. What the actual feck.

So he gave the memo to reporters and ABC News published it. It’s public now, which mea