What We Can Do, And What We Can Help Our Leaders Do-

Linked on TenBears’s blog.

A key point: Josh Marshall has been writing about how to leverage the separate sovereignty of the states against Trump. “Strategic depth,” he calls it, from military studies:

Understanding the critical role of the sovereign powers of the states as a redoubt beyond the reach of Trump’s increasingly autocratic power is really the entire game right now, at least for the next 18 months and, in various measures, almost certainly through the beginning of 2029. People can march, advocate, campaign, donate to candidates, all the stuff. But in many ways the most important thing right now is both communicating to and demanding of state officials that they act on this latent power.

There are key areas where Democrats in Congress may have moments of power, the ability to slow a few things down. But to a great degree, the battle is already lost within the federal government until the next election. It’s only in the states where opponents of Donald Trump hold executive power outside the reach of and the hierarchies of the federal government. That’s where the whole game is. It is strategic depth not in extent or remoteness of territory but in the structure of government and the state. And states have vast amounts of power, far more than we tend to realize because we’ve never been in a position where the mundane daily activities of state and local government have become so critical — its taxing powers, its policing powers, the ways in which the federal government actually struggles to effectively extend its powers to the local level at scale without the active participation of local government.

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As Real As It Gets

Published by Tom Sullivan on August 25, 2025

Something Jason Sattler wrote yesterday needs repeating this morning:

Everything we do makes it easier for our neighbors to stand up or sit down for this regime. We all know there’s a crisis coming that will force all who pay attention to make a choice that could define the rest of their lives.

Will people do it? In most cases, it depends on what they see us doing next.

SEE us doing. That’s the key.

How the less-engaged make up their minds about political matters, Anand Giridharadas observed (based on Anat’s work), is more akin to how they decide to buy pants: What’s everyone else wearing this year? What are normal people like me doing? Not in one-and-done big rallies but every day. Your resistance must be visible and persistent for that to work and give the less engaged permission to join the resistance movement. Calling your senator five days a week is fine, but which of your neighbors sees that?

Plus, if you want people to join your party, throw a better party. We’re out in the streets multiple times a week now. I bring dance music.

A friend pointed to this TikTok by someone going by @logicnliberty. She advocates a unified front by blue-state governors with trifectas. It’s not that they are not already unified, coordinating, and suing. They are. Govs. Gavin Newsom, JB Pritzker, Kathy Hochul are speaking out and holding press conferences. (State AGs too.) But not necessarily as a team. Are they leveraging their trifectas proactively to erect firewalls in their states against Trump’s gutting of the Constitution? They should.

(snip-TikTok video embedded on the page)

Would the press cover it if they did? We are already in the slow civil war Jeff Sharlet described. The blue and the gray meets the blue and the red. Run with it. The press loves controversy. Generate more, blue state governors.

Josh Marshall has been writing about how to leverage the separate sovereignty of the states against Trump. “Strategic depth,” he calls it, from military studies:

There are key areas where Democrats in Congress may have moments of power, the ability to slow a few things down. But to a great degree, the battle is already lost within the federal government until the next election. It’s only in the states where opponents of Donald Trump hold executive power outside the reach of and the hierarchies of the federal government. That’s where the whole game is. It is strategic depth not in extent or remoteness of territory but in the structure of government and the state. And states have vast amounts of power, far more than we tend to realize because we’ve never been in a position where the mundane daily activities of state and local government have become so critical — its taxing powers, its policing powers, the ways in which the federal government actually struggles to effectively extend its powers to the local level at scale without the active participation of local government.

Understanding the critical role of the sovereign powers of the states as a redoubt beyond the reach of Trump’s increasingly autocratic power is really the entire game right now, at least for the next 18 months and, in various measures, almost certainly through the beginning of 2029. People can march, advocate, campaign, donate to candidates, all the stuff. But in many ways the most important thing right now is both communicating to and demanding of state officials that they act on this latent power.

And those actions must be not only public, but in-your-face public. Their actions and yours.

Update: Read it. It’s where your neighbors are.

The human heart hangs on to hope until there’s no other choice. People will not fight back in the ways that will work, until they realize there is no other choice, until the only other choice is their own imprisonment or death, or that of someone they love. For many of us, that moment is already here. But for most of us, it’s not.

* * * * *

Have you fought dicktatorship today?

50501 – Labor Day events
May Day Strong Labor Day Events
No King’s One Million Rising movement
The Resistance Lab
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink – Search on Labor Day events near you
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions
Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense

The first video shows how the israeli lobby is buying the US government and teh second shows how being Jewish means more than stopping child sexual abuse. This is politics in the US now.

Josh Johnson Making Sense

Nat Turner, Prague Spring, Benigno Aquino, & More, In Peace & Justice History for 8/21

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryaugust.htm#august21

And From Lit Hub, “This Week In Literary History”

(It’s a newsletter I receive, and I don’t have a link for what I’ve copied and am pasting, but there are links within the piece. Enjoy.)

AUGUST 17 — AUGUST 23

Angela Davis debuts on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List.
In 1969, the legendary author and activist Angela Davis was a newly minted assistant philosophy processor at UCLA. But she was also an avowed Communist, and as a result, then-Governor Ronald Regan tried to have her fired before she’d begun any actual teaching. No luck: Davis’s dismissal didn’t hold up in court, and her first class had to be moved to a bigger classroom to accommodate the 2,000 students who had signed up for it—but she would finally be fired again nine months later, for “inflammatory rhetoric” in public speeches. Davis was an outspoken supporter of the Black Panthers and was fervently against the Vietnam War, but arguably her most scandalous activist activities at the time were in defense of the Soledad Brothers, three Black inmates imprisoned in Soledad, CA, who were accused of killing a white guard. In 1970, guns registered to Davis were used in an attack on the nearby Marin County Civic Center; the perpetrators hoped to take hostages to bargain for the inmates’ release, but instead left four casualties. Davis, despite not being at the scene, was charged with murder, kidnapping, and criminal conspiracy charges. She couldn’t be found, and so on August 18, 1970, by order of J. Edgar Hoover, Davis became the third woman ever to be included on the FBI’s Most Wanted List. Eight weeks later, Davis was finally arrested in a New York motel; the trial that followed catapulted her to international fame—and turned her into a revolutionary icon—as her supporters, who viewed her as a political prisoner, chanted “Free Angela!” across the globe.In 1972, after 16 months in prison, she was acquitted of all charges by an all-white jury. “It took a worldwide movement of people to acquit Miss Davis,” noted one of her attorneys, Howard Moore Jr., but it shouldn’t have. “Justice should be the routine of the system,” he added.

MORE WHERE THAT CAME FROM
Angela Davis on Black Lives Matter, Palestine, and the Future of Radicalism

Angela Davis on International Solidarity and the Impacts of Black Radicalism

Angela Davis on Protest, 1968, andHer Old Teacher, Herbert Marcuse

THIS IS WHY THEY BAN IT:
“Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensely social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation. ”
–Angela Davis

It’s Not Only The One Or Two, After All-

More than 2.8m people in US identify as trans, including 724,000 youth, data shows

Exclusive: largest data analysis of its kind counters Trump’s aggressive efforts to deny trans minors’ existence

View image in fullscreen A protester is silhouetted against a trans pride flag during a pro-transgender rights protest outside of Seattle children’s hospital on 9 February. Photograph: Lindsey Wasson/AP

More than 2.8 million people now identify as transgender in the US, including an estimated 724,000 youth, according to a new data analysis that is the largest of its kind to date.

Researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Williams Institute used federal surveys and data from state health agencies to identify the size and demographics of the trans population in each state.

The analysis, shared with the Guardian and released on Wednesday, documented thousands of trans youth living in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The findings counter Donald Trump’s aggressive efforts to deny the existence of trans minors, as his administration removes references to trans people across federal agencies and widely erodes protections and programs for LGBTQ+ communities.

The report builds on federal data collection efforts that the White House is now eliminating. The authors warn their study could be the last comprehensive portrait of the nation’s trans population for a decade or more as trans people are erased from vital US surveys, including health reports and crime data analyses.

The Williams Institute primarily relied on data from 2021 to 2023 from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) surveys and records disclosed by state health agencies. Some of the key findings include:

1% of the total US population ages 13 and older identifies as trans, including 0.8% of adults (more than 2.1 million people) and 3.3% of youth ages 13 to 17 (roughly 724,000 people).
Young adults ages 18 to 24 are significantly more likely to identify as trans (2.72%) than those 35 to 64 (0.42%) and those 65 and older (0.26%).
Of the 2.1 million trans adults, 32.7% (698,500) are trans women, 34.2% (730,500) are trans men and 33.1% (707,100) are trans non-binary people.
The trans populations are fairly consistent across regions, with 0.9% of adults in the west, midwest and north-east identifying as trans, compared with 0.7% of adults in the south.
Minnesota had the highest rate of adults who identify as trans (1.2%), and Hawaii had the highest rate of trans youth (3.6%), though the ranges were similar across states.

“Trans people live everywhere and are represented in every state,” said Dr Jody Herman, senior scholar of public policy at the Williams Institute and co-author of the report, noting the total US trans population was greater than the individual populations of more than a dozen states. “This is a substantial population that has unique concerns and barriers to getting their needs met, and lawmakers need to keep that in mind.”

The Williams Institute, a leading LGBTQ+ policy research center, has published national trans population counts since its 2011 report, which was the first of its kind as state-level data on gender identity became available. The estimates are considered the best available data and were cited by the US supreme court in its recent majority opinion upholding Tennessee’s ban on trans youth healthcare.

The quality and sources of the researchers’ data have improved from one report to the next, the researchers said, making it difficult to assess changes over time. But the researchers noted that the overall estimates of trans adults have remained relatively steady, while the latest data shows how younger people are now significantly more likely to identify as trans than older groups.

There are many factors contributing to youth identifying as trans at higher rates, including that younger people are more likely to answer these kinds of survey questions, said Dr Andrew Flores, Williams Institute distinguished visiting scholar and associate professor of government at American University.

“Younger people are growing up among other younger people who already hold more accepting attitudes toward LGBT and transgender people more broadly,” said Flores, a report co-author, citing increasingly visible signs of support, such as student walkouts in Florida in protest of anti-trans policies. “In this generation, they might be more willing and safe to identify that they are transgender, because they don’t see as much of a harm or threat as older generations.”

While some conservatives and anti-trans advocates have presented a reported rise in trans youth as a “social contagion”, suggesting youth are copying their peers, “the growth comes as people are now in an environment that allows them to fully express who they are,” Flores said.

Shifting language also affects generational differences, he said, noting how older groups were more likely to identify as lesbian or gay while younger people are more likely to identify as bisexual or pansexual. And while older trans people are more likely to identify as men or women, younger trans people more frequently identify as non-binary.

The report also found that the race and ethnicity of trans people was largely similar to broader US demographics, with Indigenous, Latino and multiracial adults slightly more likely to identify as trans than other groups.

The Trump administration, which has widely attacked data collection efforts across government, has moved to remove trans identity questions from two critical CDC behavioral health surveys and from Department of Justice surveys on crime victimization and sexual violence. The US Census Bureau has also taken steps to exclude gender identity from multiple surveys, according to the former director who resigned in February.

Those efforts followed Trump’s day-one executive order “restoring biological truth” to the government, which suggested that trans identity was “false” and directed the state department to deny trans people accurate passports.

The data loss will make it impossible for the Williams Institute to continue its analyses in their current form, and even if the next administration restored the surveys, the public would still be losing up to 10 years of data, which would be a devastating erosion of knowledge, the researchers said.

“We didn’t really have decent national data until around 10 years ago, so we just very recently got a grasp on how many people identify as trans in the US and what their characteristics are,” said Herman. “For these data sources to just suddenly disappear, it is a major setback. The population is not going to go away; we’re just not going to know more about them than what we have from our current sources.”

The data has frequently been cited by journalists, school boards, public health experts, civil rights lawyers, advocates fighting discriminatory legislation and lawmakers expanding trans rights. The researchers had hoped federal data could help illuminate how trans people were moving within the US as some have fled red states due to anti-trans laws, but that will be hard to track without national surveys, they said.

“In some policy circles, they say if you can’t be counted, you don’t count,” Flores added. “And for members of the LGBTQ+ community, to be able to see numbers that reflect their lived experiences is quite important.”

Imara Jones, founder of news organization TransLash Media, said there was no easy fix for the loss of national data backed by federal resources.

“It is meant to erase, and that erasure is meant to have real-world impacts, making it harder for people to be who they are,” Jones said.

Flores said the institute and others were discussing ways to fill the gaps and continue data collection without the federal government: “We’re not just going to close up shop. We’re going to try to find a way to keep telling these stories and be persistent.”

Clay Jones, Open Windows

Eat Mor Bulshirt by Clay Jones

Trump takes advice from Putin Read on Substack

Taking advice about how to run free, fair, and democratic elections from Vladimir Putin would be like taking advice from Donald Trump on how to make a steak.

“What you want to do is purchase the most beautiful cut of meat possible, preferably from Walmart, but with a “Trump Steak” sticker on it. Then, you’re gonna put that steak on the stove and cook it for about 45 minutes until it’s nice and charred. Then you will want to bury it in ketchup to the point that you can’t even see the steak. Then, have someone else cut it for you, but make sure it’s in tiny pieces so you don’t have to chew so hard. You gotta eat your ketchup steak in tiny bites if you’re like me, and your dentures keep popping out.”

I read that when he had meetings with his campaign people during the 2016 race, he’d serve hot dogs. The anonymous source said that Trump eats like an 8-year-old. He will serve his guests a scoop of ice cream while he gets two, so they know who the big boy is. I bet that bastard puts ketchup on his hot dogs, that sonofabitch.

Trump is taking Putin’s side again. Not just in the war that Putin started against Ukraine, but in the war he started against American democracy. On Monday morning, Trump posted on ShitSocial that he’s getting rid of mail-in voting and voting machines. Disclaimer: I haven’t read his entire post because…damn. (snip-MORE. Seriously, go see it, it’s worth the click!)

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The wannabe Dictator by Ann Telnaes

It’s a Trump show Read on Substack

Trump sees himself as an emperor summoning his kingdoms to flatter him and bring gifts.

First Enslaved Africans Arrive in VA, & The Equal Opportunity Act Is Signed, In Peace & Justice History for 8/20

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryaugust.htm#august20

Talking Points Memo Reports:

A good place to pick up important info quickly; all linked/cited for sourcing.

Ed Martin Confirms Ed Martin’s Witch Hunt Against Elected Democrats by TPM

INSIDE: Pam Bondi … Adam Schiff … Letitia James Read on Substack

A Classic Example of Political Corruption

Ed Martin had no prior experience as a prosecutor when he became acting D.C. U.S. attorney earlier this year. And it shows.

Since his nomination to the permanent position was aborted because of lack of Senate GOP support, Martin has been triple-hatting at Main Justice as (i) U.S. pardon attorney; (ii) the chief of Attorney General Pam Bondi’s “Weaponization Working Group” — the unintentionally revealing name of the outfit that’s charged with politicizing the Justice Department; and (iii) most recently as Bondi’s “special attorney” overseeing the politically motivated mortgage fraud investigations of Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA) and New York Attorney General Letitia James.

It was in that third role that Martin was apparently serving when he went on Fox News and admitted that he’s using the pretext of the clearly bogus mortgage fraud probes to conduct an open-ended witch hunt into Schiff and James. “We’re also gonna look at everything else they’ve been doing,” Martin said on air:

https://embed.bsky.app/embed/did:plc:4llrhdclvdlmmynkwsmg5tdc/app.bsky.feed.post/3lwm6otyddp2f?id=6254561201210245

Most legal experts think the mortgage fraud claims don’t amount to anything on the facts or on the law. But don’t underestimate the potency of ongoing criminal investigations hanging over anyone, especially elected officials, particularly when the investigations are used as justification for a wide-ranging probe of unspecified other wrongdoing.

Even if charges never come, this is a classic example of political corruption — and of authoritarian capture of the independence of federal prosecutors. Martin has embarked on a fishing expedition and he’ll keep it going for as long as it’s useful to the White House.

Speaking of Letitia James …

New York Attorney General Letitia James’ $500 million civil fraud judgment against Donald Trump has been held up on appeal for nearly a year, apparently because of deep divisions and three dueling written opinions on the five-justice appeals court panel, the WSJ reports.

Thread of the Day

With a new series of edicts, FBI Director Kash Patel is further degrading the bureau and converting into something akin to a national police department (which is NOT what the FBI has historically been):

WASHINGTON, DISTICT OF COLUMBIA, UNITED STATES – 2025/08/17: Activist Nadine Seiler holds a sign that reads “What Trump order won’t you obey” stands in front of a National Guard vehicle as protesters gather at Columbus Circle following President Donald Trump’s announcement to place the D.C. Metropolitan Police under federal control. (Photo by Probal Rashid/LightRocket via Getty Images)

A Recipe for Disaster

Red states are jumping on the bandwagon to send their national guards to the nation’s capital and show plurality Black D.C. who’s boss. West Virginia, Ohio, and South Carolina (still smarting from the last time it tried to overthrow D.C.) are first in line to engage in performative strong-arming of Democratic cities.

But the most alarming news to come out over a generally alarming weekend is that the national guardsmen may be armed, a reversal of an earlier decision that deployed the D.C. National Guard on the streets without weaponry on their persons or in the vehicles.

The ingredients could be in place for a cocktail of violence: federal agents and national guardsmen with little to no training in street policing being sent with guns into a peaceful urban area (that many of them are not even from) and expected to stir up trouble. It puts everyone — D.C. residents, local police, guardsmen, and federal agents — in an impossible situation.

One glimmer of good news was that the Trump administration was hauled into court Friday over its attempt to take over the D.C. police department and, under pressure from a federal judge, backed off its maximalist position.

ICYMI

Religion Dispatches: Latest ICE Recruitment Materials Include Overt Neo-Nazi Reference and Nazi-Nazi Script

Sign of the Times: The New Fascism Comes With Merch

The Florida GOP scrubbed its online store of a new line of merchandise touting the state’s new “Deportation Depot” after Home Depot complained it was an unapproved use of its branding.

Texas Dems Expected Back This Week

With California Democrats proceeding with their own mid-decade redistricting, Texas Democrats are expected to return to the state today, giving Republicans a quorum in the legislature to push through their redistricting plan. Texas Democrats succeeded in blocking the redistricting push in the first special session of the legislature. But when it ended, Friday Gov. Greg Abbott (R) immediately called a second special session, setting the stage for passing a new, more GOP friendly congressional district map to help national Republicans hold their House majority in next year’s midterms.

Quote of the Day

“Trump has completely ceded narrative control to Putin. What Ukraine is just basically getting as a concession is for the Russians to stop fighting. And this is Putin’s way all the way through the 25 years of his presidency, which is: ‘I’m going to beat you up and my concession is that I stopped beating you up.’”–former Trump I National Security Council official Fiona Hill

D’oh!

Guests at a hotel in Anchorage found sensitive documents from the Trump-Putin summit on a public printer, NPR reports.

Trump’s D.C. Circuit Appointees Strike Again: CFPB Edition

D.C. Circuit Judges Gregory Katsas and Neomi Rao, Trump appointees who have had out-sized influence in the first months of the Trump II presidency, cleared the way Friday for the Trump administration to dismantle the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Judge Cornelia Pillard, an Obama appointee dissented.

“The notion that courts are powerless to prevent the President from abolishing the agencies of the federal government that he was elected to lead cannot be reconciled with either the constitutional separation of powers or our nation’s commitment to a government of laws,” Pillard wrote.

Garbage In, Garbage Out

TPM’s Layla A. Jones: The Trump Administration Is Laying the Groundwork for a Full Takeover of Federal Data

Judge Blocks FTC Probe of Media Matters

U.S. District Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan of D.C. sided with Media Matters in blocking a politically motived Federal Trade Commission investigation of the liberal watchdog group.

“This case presents a straightforward First Amendment violation,” Sooknanan ruled.

Media Matters has been struggling financially under the weight of bogus right-wing investigations into whether its reporting on antisemitic content on X/Twitter amounted to anticompetitive conduct. It also faces related serial lawsuits by Elon Musk.

“It should alarm all Americans when the government retaliates against individuals or organizations for engaging in constitutionally protected public debate,” Sooknanan wrote. “And that alarm should ring even louder when the Government retaliates against those engaged in newsgathering and reporting.”

A Rare Example of Organized Left-Wing Violence?

The purported attack at an ICE detention center in Texas last month caught my eye as an possible example of organized left-wing violence, a relative rarity since the 1970s. When I say “organized,” I don’t necessarily mean well-organized. The ragtag group’s alleged attack seemed especially hapless, even according to the official law enforcement account of the incident. Adding to the weirdness, the alleged perpetrators — among them two transgender women activists — appeared to be from in and around Dallas, which wouldn’t be my first choice for hotbeds of anti-fascism.

The WaPo’s Robert Klemko has dug a bit more into the “secretive network of Dallas anti-fascists” who “initially united around trans and queer identity issues.” He did a jailhouse interview with the group’s alleged ringleader, a former Marine Corps reservist of mixed Japanese and Korean descent who trained “very young, naive leftists,” as one witness put it, in close-quarters combat and large-scale gunfights at his mother’s taekwondo studio in suburban Dallas.

Women Have Had The Right To Vote For 105 Out Of 249 Years & More, in Peace & Justice History for 8/18

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryaugust.htm#august18

Trump Set to Blow Millions on ICE Barbie PR Blitz as Her Roasting Spirals

https://www.thedailybeast.com/donald-trump-set-to-blow-millions-on-ice-barbie-kristi-noem-pr-blitz-as-her-roasting-spirals/

I don’t care if a person can afford to have facial surgery and does to make themselves look prettier than nature did at birth, but this woman who clearly had a lot of work to change her appearance would object to a young adult trans person would do the same thing. But the point is this person is spending millions to cosplay to her heart’s content all over the Northern Hemisphere so she can put a pretty face to the horror her department is inflicting on people. Look she went to the El Salvadorian SECOT prison dressed up for a photo op. But what they are trying to hide is she was living in a mansion paid for by the US taxpayer …. meaning paid by us and so when that got found out she moved into a water front mansion her boyfriend was living in paid for by the US Coast Guard. The grifting and corruption of this administration is unbelievable. They cut every healthcare and food assistance for the poor in the US but they demand every amenity paid for by the taxpayer and think they are due it. Hugs

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BIG SPENDER

The DHS will pour a fortune into its “Stronger Border” ad campaign as Secretary Kristi Noem weathers a relentless storm of mockery.

Tom Latchem
Reporter

Updated Aug. 15 2025 3:16PM EDT Published Aug. 15 2025 1:20PM EDT

Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast/Getty/Reuters

The Trump administration is set to spend up to $50 million on a wave of taxpayer-funded PR amid the torrent of negative coverage dogging his Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.

A planning forecast record posted this week by the Department for Homeland Security (DHS) pledges $20 million to $50 million as an “International Campaign Follow-on” to the “Stronger Border, Stronger America” ads that have starred Noem.

A DHS spokesperson told the Daily Beast that the spending on the campaign is not related to coverage of Noem.

Since being appointed Trump’s DHS secretary, Noem has been skewered over her cosplays and photo-ops promoting Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Trump’s hardline deportation agenda.

That mockery has reached a fever pitch with the latest season of South Park, which won record ratings while portraying Noem as a psychotic dog-killer—referencing her memoir admission that she shot dead her own dog—and mocked DHS’s own celebratory sizzle reels.

Noem wore an ICE vest in promotional stunts for the agency—the new tranche of spending comes as she has weathered intense mockery on ‘South Park.’TheDailyBeast/DHS

The PR campaign will be funded from September through March, listing the incumbent as People Who Think LLC—a company with ties to the GOP and Noem’s unofficial chief of staff, Corey Lewandowski, who also served as Trump’s 2016 campaign manager. Noem and Lewandowski, who are both married to other people, have denied longstanding rumors that they are romantically involved.

People Who Think was co-founded by Louisiana consultant Jay Connaughton, who worked alongside Lewandowski—described by some Homeland Security officials as Noem’s gatekeeper—on Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry’s campaign in 2024, according to Semafor. Connaughton also worked on ads for Trump’s 2016 campaign, according to the report.

Federal data shows the company has been awarded $26.7 million this financial year, suggesting it could stand to earn nearly double that in its latest deal. The Daily Beast contacted People Who Think LLC for comment.

The new spending is the latest tranche from a pot that Semafor reported as being worth up to $200 million, which has been budgeted for Noem’s nationwide and international messaging drive. The DHS began rolling it out in February.

Early spots featured Noem praising Trump in front of American flags and warning migrants—depicted as crossing the border en masse and purportedly handing over drugs—with Noem saying “we will find you and deport you,” and “you will never return.”

Images from one of the adverts in the campaign launched earlier this year—the DHS trumpeted the spots as a “nationwide and international multimillion-dollar ad campaign warning illegal aliens to leave our country now or face deportation.”TheDailyBeast/DHS

DHS insisted after the rollout that the buys were “competitive,” but a document posted in a federal database in March shows officials at that time invoked an “unusual and compelling urgency” tied to Trump’s declaration of a national emergency at the border, according to the Los Angeles Times. The measure allows federal agencies to skip a typical competitive process, the outlet reported.

The process sparked alarm from Democrats on the House Homeland Security Committee, who wrote a letter to Noem slamming a “blatant misuse of American tax dollars,” and demanding records by April 4.

As of now, the committee hasn’t posted any DHS response.

Noem is carrying out what Trump wants—and he continues to support her by funding a PR blitz.Evelyn Hockstein/REUTERS

Noem meeting with President of Costa Rica Rodrigo Chaves Robles in June—Lewandowski (second left) and Noem have both previously denied rumors of being romantically involved.Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

Given the time that has elapsed since the previous “tender,” and the fact that tens of thousands of arrests and deportations of migrants have occurred since Trump took power in January, it is not obvious his administration and the DHS can continue to argue an “unusual and compelling urgency.”

It is also unclear whether a competitive process was used this time around.

“Just yesterday, Secretary Noem announced 1.6 million illegal aliens have left the U.S. This data reveals the world is hearing Secretary Noem’s message loud and clear: if you are in America illegally, leave now or face arrest, deportation, and fines,” the DHS spokesperson told the Daily Beast on Friday.

“Following a competitive process with multiple companies competing to deliver the best service, product, and price for American taxpayers, Safe America Media and People Who Think both earned a shared contract for this targeted national and international campaign that warns illegal aliens to leave our country now, self deport, and not to enter our country illegally or face deportation,” they said, adding that multiple “career government officials oversaw this competitive procurement process.”

Noem at the notorious CECOT prison in El Salvador in March—one of her many photo-ops since being appointed Homeland Security Secretary.Alex Brandon/Alex Brandon/Pool via REUTERS

‘South Park’ has been mocking the stunts, achieiving record ratings in the process—Noem has called the parody “lazy” and “petty.”South Park/Comedy Central

The spokesperson also denied that the spending is part of an effort to counter negative coverage of Noem.

“To the Daily Beast’s chagrin, these ads are working, and illegal aliens are leaving in droves,” they said.

Tom Latchem

Reporter

tom.latchem@thedailybeast.com