American Doom

For anyone who may have missed it, you can watch my conversation with the Texas investigative journalist Steven Monacelli from Friday’s live Doom broadcast. I also wanted to flag a few things that I wasn’t able to get to during this very busy week. If you appreciate my work staying on top of all of the madness, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription or throwing a few bucks my way. I’m st...

If you want to ante up to a paid subscription or drop a few dollars in the Doom Coffee Fund , I sure would appreciate it. There’s a lot of news lately — I know, it’s summer and we’re supposed to be relaxing — and I’m tracking a lot of things. Election denialism and rampant authoritarianism within the government are combining to present some very real threats to democracy that the seasons care not...

Do you believe Pam Bondi when she says it wasn’t the list she was talking about on Fox News in February, but the Epstein case in general? My bullshit detector started vibrating the whole house when I heard her fib the other day. I laughed. It is laughable! This is the type of stuff — bumbling and obvious lies over gussied-up claims that should have never been made — that you’d see a small town may...

Note: Still got that Fighting Season discount going. Get 20 percent off subscriptions to American Doom so I can buy a steak this weekend. On to the news… *** Good Wednesday morning. Hot as hell here in Savannah. I took a brief cruise through some sources yesterday and after only an hour or two I had enough material to reach an unsurprising conclusion: the Republican party is already hard at work t...

Hey, I’m still running that Fighting Season discount where you can get 20 percent off subscriptions to American Doom. Also, you can throw a few bucks my way at the Doom Coffee Fund so I can stay hydrated while holding the authoritarian right accountable. Now, on to the news… Good Monday morning and welcome back to the show. I spent most of this weekend gloriously offline but pulled up my phone Sun...

It takes a lot of work to put together all the pieces like this. Last March, Rachel Maddow praised my ability to “connect the dots” with my investigation of local election officials throughout the country who support Trump’s election lies. But all this work digging up clues to what’s coming next in our new age of American authoritarianism isn’t easy — and is very time consuming. If you support thi...

We’re in it, folks. I say that with no pleasure, but what no reasonable person would describe as anything other than obvious authoritarianism has arrived in the form of secret police on American streets and military involvement in domestic matters. The system is failing. Much of the mainstream press continues to bury its head in the sand over this reality, so if you have the ability, please consid...

The following was written before we bombed Iran. This development is cataclysmic for a variety of reasons, but for the purposes of this newsletter — which chronicles the frontlines of America’s wars against itself, waged on behalf of right-wing authoritarianism — last night’s military incursion into Iran presents more opportunities for Trump and the authoritarian right to strengthen their grip on...

Kilmar Abrego Garcia is currently — as of the last court filing and the Trump regime’s word — residing in one of the worst prisons in the world in El Salvador. He’s there because of a mistake, lawyers representing the Trump administration have said. It was a mistake in the micro sense, but Garcia’s deportation and confinement in a Salvadoran hellhole are no accident: this is about punishment and p...

Donald Trump is an existential threat not just to American democracy, but to our role as the world’s most prosperous and powerful nation. Many people have known this for a long time—Republicans have known this, as have decorated military generals who are lifelong conservatives. Americans of all political stripes, socioeconomic statuses and educational backgrounds know this. Democrats certainly kno...

Just a reminder that my work here is made possible by the support of paid subscribers. In the last week I’ve covered the militarization of immigration enforcement ; UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s visit to the White House ; the Trump-Zelenenskyy debacle; DOGE’s failure to find a single instance of fraud in the federal government; and DOGE’s work dismantling the Social Security Administration . If...

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy did the best he could, but there’s just no way to win — or even compromise — with American leadership this far afield from reasonable adult behavior. A day before the world watched Donald Trump and JD Vance ambush Zelenskyy in the Oval Office, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer had to negotiate the same environment — albeit one less fraught as the political and...

Legacy media is capitulating to Trump (just Google Jeff Bezos if you haven’t already heard). That’s why it’s important to support independent media like American Doom. The best way to support our work is through a paid subscription. Last week, news came from Texas that an 11-year-old girl killed herself because her classmates were bullying her about being deported. She is a victim of Donald Trump...

Today I’m speaking with Steven Monacelli , an independent investigative journalist based in Texas. Steven does an incredible job covering right-wing extremism. His latest pieces include an examination of what experts are calling a new form of fascism helmed by the White House, and a more complex understanding of what we’re witnessing called competitive authoritarianism. Steven also just published...

It’s becoming more and more clear that the Trump administration is simply the enforcement and policy arm of an American right that believes in a post-democratic world order. That’s why we see things like Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth speaking the language of autocrats like Vladimir Putin—and more or less doing their bidding. Your subscription dollars help fund...

Good afternoon and welcome to the latest edition of the American Doom podcast. Today I’m talking with Teddy Wilson, a journalist and researcher who runs Radical Reports , a newsletter focused on the far-right. I highly suggest you sign up for Teddy’s newsletter to stay abreast of all the swirling madness of domestic extremism, which is most certainly not going away and whose adherents are not sitt...

Executive orders continue to come flooding from the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office. Donald Trump signed a handful more on Thursday afternoon, his signature black Sharpie pen squeaking as he went. It’s a lot to process — not just for members of the press like myself but for the public, who must then (hopefully) consume and understand scores of news reports on these many executive actions. Courts...

Next week, Donald Trump will be inaugurated as president. The ensuing months and years will bring much chaos and catastrophe. I say that not to scare you but because it’s the truth. Much of the legacy media continues to fail to meet this fraught moment by acting as if this is politics as usual — American life as usual. (See these many examples as well as the general turmoil at the Washington Post....

A week from today, Donald Trump will be inaugurated as president. The ensuing months and years will bring much chaos and catastrophe. I say that not to scare you but because it’s the truth. Much of the legacy media continues to fail to meet this fraught moment by acting as if this is politics as usual — American life as usual. (See these many examples as well as the general turmoil at the Washingt...

Note: I’m out this morning with a very in-depth look at Mother Jones at how election deniers took over Georgia in the last four years. That story has gone live as I am typing this, and I’m incredibly proud of it so I hope you take the time to read it. It’s the culmination of three years’ worth of non-stop work covering the election denial movement in Georgia and elsewhere. It wouldn’t be possible...

Yo. Today I’m in Luke O’Neill’s Hell World with a reflection on the election denier madness I’ve seen over the last four years. You can read it here and support Luke’s work by subscribing to his killer newsletter. Fun fact: I’ve been writing for Luke off and on longer than any other publication I’ve written for. The Internet can still be fun! Also just a reminder that tomorrow night I’ll be hostin...

Today, I’m pleased to share a conversation on that I had recently with DeRay McKesson, one of the young civil rights leaders who was on the ground in Ferguson in the wake of Michael Brown’s death. Since then, DeRay has gone on to become a best-selling author and political force for racial justice among many of his other successes. While we’ve disagreed on some things over the years — primarily wha...

Today on the American Doom podcast I’m speaking with Katie Paul of the Tech Transparency Project (TTP). Katie has been looking into militia groups online over the past four years, and she’s found a lot of right-wing clamoring for political violence — some of which has ramped up in recent months as platforms like Facebook have taken their hands off the reins of content moderation.  Her work is a tr...

My guest today on the American Doom podcast is Steven Monacelli, a writer and journalist in Texas who focuses on right-wing extremism there. Steven and I first met in May of 2021 when I travelled back to Dallas — where I lived for a couple of years while covering immigration and the border — to attend a QAnon conference . The event was actually called, quite ridiculously, the “For God & Country Pa...

Dalton Mattus was arrested a little more than two weeks ago for possessing a pair of handmade pipe bombs. Police found more at his home. What hasn’t been reported in the local press is that Mattus posted prolifically about every right-wing, anti-government conspiracy imaginable. He is a symbol both of the online radicalization toward right-wing extremism that pervades the United States, and the th...