Iowa KWQC morning anchor Dustin Nolan announced his departure from the station Friday in an emotional message that made clear he does not intend to remain in the news industry. Nolan told viewers he believes “that we as a local news station have to be more than trends or sanitized news” and added, “That’s why the facts matter and that’s why we do what we do here.”
Nolan was near tears from the beginning of his message. “I’ll try to get through this. Well, before we go this morning, I have an announcement. Today is my last day here at KWQC TV6. I have chosen to step away from the news industry,” the Emmy Award winning anchor began. “Before I say goodbye, I just want to say, I hope everyone of you that’s allowed me to be a part of your mornings know just how important that I have taken this job. How much it means to me that you’ve trusted … that you’ve trusted me these past few years to bring you the news in the morning.”
He continued: “I promise you I’ve given you everything I have. I’ve never tried to be perfect or what many think a newsman is supposed to be. But I’ve always done my best to be transparent, bring you the facts, and I’ve always been myself. I’ve loved being able to provide a public service to this place we all call home, the Quad Cities.”
Nolan then made it clear he wasn’t leaving to pursue a role at another station. “When it comes to this job, all I’ve ever wanted to do is report on the issues that really matter. I’ve always believed that we as a local news station, owe you, the viewers, the best that we can do because without you, none of us would be able to do this job,” he explained. “I also believe that we as a local news station have to be more than trends or sanitized news because it makes people feel uncomfortable. That’s why the facts matter and that’s why we do what we do here. We have to take people out of their bubbles and comfort zones and make them think about the world we all live in.”
Nolan began working at the station in November 2022, according to his LinkedIn. profile. He is married to his former co-anchor, Jenna, whom he thanked on the show.
Stephanie is a reporter at TheWrap. She has been covering news, politics, entertainment, media, and sports (mostly women’s basketball) for over 15 years. Her experience includes The Guardian, People, the BBC, SB Nation and more.
Emma Vigeland welcomes Ken Klippenstein, an independent journalist covering security and US politics at KlipNews, discussing the 15 anti-ICE activists indicted by the Justice Department.
Every autocracy has a central ideological mission. The current United States government wants to transform America from a multiracial democracy into a White Christian male-dominated ethnostate. This fanatical mission is increasingly influencing the administration’s policies, propaganda, and visuals produced by this United States government.
Their goal is to change who counts as an American, who can have leadership roles in government and society, who can vote, and who can walk the streets without fear of being imprisoned or deported.
This agenda of authoritarian transformation is the connective tissue binding the many news stories we see each day, whether it is the Trump administration deporting an estimated 17,500 immigrants to countries they have never visited, to White Christian Holy Warrior Pete Hegseth blocking promotions by female and Black Navy officers, to the wrecking of the Voting Rights Act.
Remember that Nazi salute given by Elon Musk at Trump’s Inauguration festivities, and that other Nazi salute given soon after by Steve Bannon at CPAC? They were not aberrations or provocations, but rather the opening shots of a race war now unfolding.
That war seeks to remove agency and mobility and rights and freedoms of non-Whites, while implementing schemes of population redesign, reducing the numbers of immigrants by disappearances, mass detentions, and deportations by government authorities.
MAGA is now a potent project of White race hegemony that feeds on several vectors: the long and tragic history of violence and legal and other effacements of Black people in America, the history of anti-immigrant xenophobia, and the example of authoritarian racial utopias that promoted some while cleansing society of others.
Foreign Policy, National Security Policy, and Elections
Transforming a multiracial and multifaith democracy into a White Christian ethnostate requires a holistic approach, and for months I have been tracking the attempts to achieve greater cohesion of government policy around this goal.
In a recent speech, Secretary of State Marco Rubio defended “Western civilization” as the shared identity of the United States and Europe and depicted mass migration as a threat to that civilization.
I have also examined how suppressing free and fair elections fits into this scheme.
Here I add the tool of population reengineering, which is embraced by White House policy advisor Stephen Miller, Musk, and many other MAGA luminaries. A throughline of the far-right from Benito Mussolini to Musk is Great Replacement Theory, the idea that Whites are being outperformed demographically by non-Whites, necessitating measures to save “civilization” from “erasure” and Whites from annihilation.
The Fascists provided the template. “Cradles are empty and cemeteries are expanding,” Mussolini declared in 1927. “The entire White race, the Western race, could be submerged by other races of color that multiply with a rhythm unknown to our own.” In a speech that year, Il Duce cast himself in the role of a “clinician” who undertook “necessary hygienic actions” to defend Italian people from criminals, leftists and other political dissidents. “We remove these individuals from circulation just like a doctor does with an infected person,” he concluded chillingly.
A vast network of penal colonies, confinement zones, and prisons appeared to “quarantine” the “abnormal.” This “therapeutic” approach to governance, as official Giuseppe Bottai called it, was later applied to Italian Jews, and in Italian Ethiopia the regime experimented with apartheid-style racial segregation to stop the wrong kinds of babies from being conceived.
This idea of state action to protect White Christian civilization and the “natural family” –one man, one woman, and both white–continues among the far right today, as does the attachment to Great Replacement theory.
“I think there is a deliberate plan to erase everything that identifies us: culture, Nation, family are under attack,” stated Giorgia Meloni, a neo-Fascist, in March 2019. As Prime Minister, Meloni champions White motherhood as an antidote to population changes caused by non-White immigration.
Having the right kinds of babies in the right numbers and keeping out undesirable races and births was a mainstay of the former Viktor Orban government. “Europe has become the continent of the empty crib,” said Hungarian Family Minister (and future President) Katalin Novak in 2019, echoing Mussolini. Novak had to resign from the presidency after she pardoned a pedophile, but she continues to advocate for “saving nations” from “a collapsing global birthrate,” this time through x-y, an organization she founded in 2024.
Musk, Meloni, and Novak at the launch of x-y.
X-y has been supported by Musk, who shares Novak’s preoccupation about Whites being replaced and civilization ending. A Washington Post investigation found that Musk posted 850 times in recent months on the topic of population and Whites being “a rapidly dying minority,” which triples his posting rate on these subjects in the previous 2 years.
An Optics of White Supremacy
We can expect X and other MAGA-friendly social media platforms to increase their messaging about a supposed race emergency, and we’ll likely see the Trump administration become more aggressive in its attempts to create an optics of White hegemony in government spaces.
This idea of an all-White governing class was tested in Trump’s first term, as I warned in a 2018 CNN essay on White House interns.
There will also be a ramping up of removals of non-White immigrants from the public sphere, as the massive Amazon-style warehouses ICE is repurposing for people would indicate.
Our Identities Cannot Be Erased
This administration will never succeed in wrecking our multiracial and multifaith society, no matter how much damage it does to our democratic political system. It is who we are. Our identities cannot be taken away from us. And the attempts at mass disenfranchisement will backfire; a new civil rights movement is already starting.
In trying to create a homogeneous society and ban talk of diversity, this government is merely drawing attention to what makes the United States special, and the power of our roots, identities, and traditions. These will serve us well in the coming years as we pursue peaceful resistance to restore our democracy.
On Friday, the Trump administration declined to submit a court-requested sworn declaration to a federal judge, noting that the $1.8 billion so-called “anti-weaponization” fund was officially obsolete. Instead of solidifying that claim in writing, the DOJ wrote in a notice to the court, “Such declarations are unnecessary and the compelled testimony of senior officials from the Executive Branch implicates serious separation of powers concerns.”
The host points out that despite the rhetoric coming from the White House and tRump there have been only 100 cases of non-citizen voting in 43 years. That is an incredibly small number. But the tRump administration wants to decide which citezens can vote and who can not. It is minority rule over the majority, it is single party rule like in dictatorships such as China. It is the end of democracy. All so tRump and republicans can stay in charge so the wealthy can raid the treasury and the entire wealth of the country leaving the people as slave labor to the upper class. Hugs
New reporting from Axios offers a window into just how far the White House is willing to go to pursue baseless claims made by President Trump for years. The group Democracy Forward obtained new records showing ICE agents went directly to local officials in Texas and North Carolina to obtain voter files. “We need to be very vigilant and we also need to be outraged,” says Skye Perryman, President and CEO of Democracy Forward. “It’s going to be incumbent upon every single American to make up their mind that we’re not going to have our voices silenced.”
Texas Democrats have spent decades trying to flip the state blue. Now, Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico says this may be their best chance yet. In a wide-ranging exclusive sit-down with The Weekend’s Eugene Daniels, Talarico responds to President Trump’s attacks on his campaign, Republican efforts to make masculinity central to the race, and why Democrats think Texas is in play. Talarico also responds to attacks from Republican nominee Ken Paxton and shares his own definition of what it means to be a “real man.”
In this on Sam and crew show clips of tRump talking sexually about other world male leaders and make jokes about tRump’s sexuality. They also mention how he rambles disjointedly and his dementia seems worse. Hugs
Emma and Ken discuss the new memorandum on terrorism that targets activist, protestors, and people who post online. It is an attempt to stop people from expressing a negative opinion of the tRump administration and the horrific actions they are doing. They talk about how the administration really believes that just talking badly about ICE actions is doxing them and any doxing is terrorism. The administration feels that no one has 1st amendment rights and that anything done to protest the administration is terrorism. The fear it inspires is discussed along with the cost incurred by the defendants. Hugs
Sam and Emma are talking about how the tRump administration is using the FBI to attack and interfere with democratic voting groups who work to get voters to the polls, raise funds for democratic candidates, investigating civil rights some times with out warrants showing up on the doorsteps of volunteers implying they had committed a crime. The agents are demanding publicly sometimes in front of family members that people answer questions, give them communications, the agents are on fishing missions and intimidation. As Brian says telling people about an election is fraud. Hugs
I post this last one by Matt Binder filling in for Emma and Sam showing how Riley Gaines will say anything for money and just how stupid she really is. She has made money hand over fist using her hatred for trans people get right wing contracts and show deals talking about any talking point the right wing wants to push and emphasize. Hugs
Dustin Nolan (Credit: KWQC TV6)
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