Episode Details

Welcome back to This Week in Tyranny. While you were watching Trump kiss the authoritarian ass of China’s Xi Jinping, and US troops in dress uniforms got down on their hands and knees to smooth his red carpet, Homeland Security’s hunt for illegal voters in Nevada came up empty, the US and Russia gutted a UN rule keeping humans in charge of AI weapons, China got its hands on F-35 parts, hackers broke into the FBI, the Park Service went scouting for a ballpark in Grand Teton, ICE hid record arrests, and you paid for a Trump ad. Plus the war that’s officially over, Trump TV and Kid Rock.

Let’s start with Nevada.

In Nevada, DHS Finds 15,903, 185, 0 Noncitizen Voters

In July, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin announced he’d found 15,903 noncitizens on Nevada’s voter rolls. Then DHS sent Nevada an actual list, and it had 185 names on it. Nevada checked every one. All citizens. So the math went 15,903, then 185, then zero, which is less a fraud investigation and more a countdown to a rocket that never leaves the pad. When Nevada asked whether the big number had ever been vetted, a DHS official said,

“I probably wouldn’t use the sentence, ‘It hasn’t been vetted.’”

Great. What sentence would you use? Word of the day? To produce this pile of nothing, DHS pulled hundreds of agents off human trafficking and terrorism cases for about three weeks. That’s three weeks of trafficking and terrorism cases sitting on a desk so agents could go knock on citizens’ doors and ask if they’re really American.

Conservative SCOTUS Justices Dine With Xi, Rule for Trump

Then on Friday, the Supreme Court said DHS can keep running that same citizenship database against state voter rolls. It’s called SAVE. States feed in their voter lists, and if it flags you, you’re the one who has to prove you’re a citizen. The night before, the Chief Justice and two other conservative justices were at the White House, eating dinner with Trump and Xi. Here’s why you should care. This is the machine that just called 185 citizens fake voters. Federal law blocks mass purges this close to the midterms, but nothing stops it from flagging you one at a time. Check your registration. Then check it again.

US and Russia Agree Killer Robots Don’t Need Supervision

At the UN, the Trump administration teamed up with Russia to strip out the rule that a human being has to review a target an AI picked before anybody fires. They did it in a closed-door session, with the UN cameras switched off and the civil society observers kicked out. Nothing builds public trust in robot warfare like turning off the cameras. Tuesday I told you Hegseth’s AI targeting system picked a school in Iran off an old file, after he’d cut the people whose job was to double-check, and 123 kids died. They watched AI kill children because nobody checked it, and their fix is to make sure nobody has to check it next time. I’ve been downrange. The human in the loop is the only part of the loop that can say, “wait, that’s a school.” Now the US and Russia, two countries famous for their deep mutual trust, have agreed the software can sort it out. Great news for the software. Terrible news for the next school.

US and Russia Agree Killer Robots Don’t Need Supervision

Speaking of trust. The plane was Australia’s, but the stealth tech is ours. In May, UPS was shipping the cockpit canopy and weapons-bay door off one of Australia’s F-35s back to the US for inspection. The package stopped in South Korea, then took a scenic detour to Hong Kong, where the Chinese government took possession of it and just kept it. Both parts are coated in classified radar-absorbing material, which is the stealth part of the stealth fighter. The Pentagon briefed congressional staff in June and then sat on it until Politico broke it this month. So the most expensive weapons program in American history ships with the same carrier as your phone case. Secretary of Defen