Open Windows, Clay Jones

Trump Think

Donald Trump is not thinking about you

Donald Trump is not thinking about you. Don’t take my word for it, take his.

“I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody. I think about one thing: We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon. That’s all.” Trump told us last June that he obliterated Iran’s capability to build a nuclear weapon. Of course, this wouldn’t be a problem if he hadn’t torn up the nuclear agreement that Iran had with the United States and five other nations, which the Obama administration had crafted.

Trump said this to reporters as he was boarding a plane to China. And on that plane were billionaires like Tim Cook, Elon Musk, Jensen Huang, Stephen Schwarzman, Larry Culp, and Larry Fink. Other executives on the trip included Meta’s Dina Powell McCormick, Cargill’s Brian Sikes, Micron’s Sanjay Mehrotra, Qualcomm’s Cristiano Amon, Visa’s Ryan McInerney, Mastercard’s Michael Miebach, Illumina’s Jacob Thaysen, and Coherent’s Jim Anderson.

Trump said on Truth Social that he would ask Xi to “‘open up’ China so that these brilliant people can work their magic.” Their financial situations, he thinks about. Your financial situation, not so much. (snip-MORE)

Speaker Johnson sees nothing

which isn’t surprising, given where he is.

Ann Telnaes May 13, 2026

It’s easy to only be focused on Trump’s ever increasing unhinged behavior but his Republican enablers in Congress haven’t changed their tune. And they are the main reason he’s still in office.

Ryan Walters News!

Look what he’s up to now! (Gotta laugh. Well, I had to, for a minute or so; they have kids, also I worry for Mrs. Walters, but they’re likely all safer now. Interestingly, he is who filed, not she. Of course, poor behavior of prominent husbands is how no-fault divorce came about to begin with.)

Christian Nationalist Ex-Oklahoma Schools Chief Ryan Walters Is Getting No-Fault Divorced

Congratulations to his family on getting to spend less time with him.

Robyn Pennacchia

Former Oklahoma Schools Superintendent Ryan Walters is one of the holiest men in all the land. He worked tirelessly for many years to use the power of the state to convert children to Christianity, without care or regard to how “unconstitutional” that was. A Bible in every classroom! Every wall straight up papered with the Ten Commandments! State funding for Catholic charter schools! Forcing kids to watch videos of him praying to Donald Trump! Sure, many of his initiatives failed, but he did ultimately succeed in one thing: spending over $100,000 in taxpayer funds to pay PR firms to promote his “personal brand” and secure over 400 media appearances for him.

To be fair, he was also really good at sending and showing porn to his colleagues.

And now he is about to be very good at being alone.

Last Friday, Ryan Walters filed a petition to divorce Katie Walters, his wife of 15 years and mother to his four children. In the filing, Walters’s attorney cited “a state of complete and irreconcilable incompatibility” as the reason for the divorce, claiming that this “destroyed the aims of the marriage of the parties and rendered its continuation impossible.”

In other words, a no-fault divorce.

If you haven’t been paying too much attention to the worst people in the world, you may not be aware of the Right’s hysteria over “no-fault divorce” these last few years, which they claim has just ruined everything by allowing women to leave their shitty husbands without needing to prove abuse or adultery.

Sure, it’s also significantly decreased suicide rates in married women, decreased domestic violence across the board and led to far fewer men being fed arsenic-laced ham sandwiches by wives with no other recourse for getting out of a bad marriage. But it’s really inconvenienced men who would like to force the women they feel they own to stay married to them, as God intended.

While all states now allow for no fault divorces, Oklahoma allows for both no fault and fault divorce, which means he had the option to have a divorce of which his Christian Nationalist pals might have approved, but he decided against. One of the benefits, we might note, of no-fault divorce, is that people don’t end up having their dirty laundry made public in court records. Does Walters have something to hide? Did he send porn to too many people? Were there not enough Ten Commandment posters in their home, causing him to lapse and break the sixth?

Of course, it doesn’t actually seem as though Christian Nationalists are that mad at no-fault divorce when it’s the man who files, so perhaps that is the difference here? They haven’t been too clear about how they want this New Gilead to work beyond just, you know, women giving up all of their rights so that they can be happy.

Sure, it’s also significantly decreased suicide rates in married women, decreased domestic violence across the board and led to far fewer men being fed arsenic-laced ham sandwiches by women

Take females rights away before they take ours away. This is the only solution. - Abolish No Fault Divorce - Abolish marital rape laws - Abolish the 19th amendment - Abolish HR departments - Abolish all government aid services for females - Abolish and shut down all pro-female private charities - Establish harsh taxes for females 25+ who aren't married and mothers (amnesty given for widows and infertile females, and those with health complications).

After all, they seem to be pretty okay with all of Trump’s divorces in pursuit of younger women (though perhaps, in their world, it is a more valid reason than escaping domestic violence).

Sculptor Behind Gold-Leafed Trump Statue: ‘This Was Chaos’

Sculptor Behind Gold-Leafed Trump Statue: ‘This Was Chaos’

The techbro-funded, gold-leafed, skinny Trump was a “clusterfuck” to make, the sculptor tells New Times.

By B. Scott McLendonMay 8, 2026

Doral Trump statue sculptor Alan Cottrill says no other commission has been as chaotic.Golden statue photo by Orlando Ramirez/Getty Images; overlaid photo from Alan Cottrill. New Times photo collage.

A towering, gold-leaf statue of President Donald Trump was unveiled with great fanfare on Wednesday at Trump National Doral golf course, in a dedication ceremony that included a prayer from a MAGA-aligned pastor who put the president on speakerphone. But the artist behind it had choice words when asked about the two-year creation process.

“This was a clusterfuck,” Ohio-based sculptor Alan Cottrill tells New Times.

From his foundry in Zanesville (about an hour east of Columbus), Cottrill has worked on hundreds of commissioned statues now standing across the country, including multiple at the Ohio State University. But never has a commission been as chaotic as the crypto bro-funded, gold-leafed, looksmaxxed Trump unveiled this week at Trump’s golf club, he says.

“I usually deal with people that have everything organized. From the start, this was chaos,” Cottrill says. “I have 400 life-size or larger statues around the country. The patron sets a date when they want it installed, and I have it installed on that date. And almost never, anytime whatsoever, does anyone miss a payment, because I always do what I say I’ll do, and the patron always does what they say they’re going to.”

That wasn’t the case with the 15-foot (22 feet when you include the platform) Trump statue. Demands to nix the turkey neck and make the model skinnier, missed payments, and calls to install the statue last-minute — no Cottrill commission has been as complicated as the statue dubbed “Don Colossus.”

The statue in question, seen near the ninth tee during the first round of the Cadillac Championship 2026 at Trump National Doral Miami on April 30 in Doral.

Photo by Orlando Ramirez/Getty Images

Tech bros Ashley Sansalone (a cryptocurrency developer based in Canada) and Dustin Stockton (a Republican strategist) teamed up with a group of other crypto bros to pay Cottrill $500,000 for the creation of a Trump statue based on the fist pump he gave after the July 2024 assassination attempt in Pennsylvania. If Stockon’s name sounds familiar, it’s because authorities raided his property in connection with allegations that he was involved in defrauding donors of former Trump advisor Steve Bannon’s effort to crowdfund the southern border wall in Trump’s first term.

Sansalone and Stockton didn’t respond to New Times‘ requests for comment. But Stockton told the U.K paper The Times that the group did not agree with the sculptor’s description of what happened.

From Clay Clump to 15-Foot Trump

Cottrill, an Army veteran and founder of an international pizza chain, was in his late 30s when he touched clay for the first time and declared, “This is the mistress I’ve traveled the world in search of,” as he puts it in his website bio.

“Well, I tell people it’s kinda like the first time I kissed a girl. The minute I did that, man, that’s all I wanted to do,” Cottrill tells New Times.

From there, Cottrill built a business that’s attracted more than 500 commissions, with most standing in public places throughout the nation. In 2024, he got the call about making a giant Trump statue. The group of cryptocurrency acolytes, Stockton told The Times, was to highlight “one of the most iconic moments and to show our appreciation of his embrace of crypto.”

He said the group was in agreement: “If we are going to do this, we had to make it Trumpian.” Also, it had to look like gold.

When asked by New Times about his political leanings and whether he was excited by the commission request, Cottrill says, “No comment.”

The process of molding skinny Trump began with a life-sized clay model that wasn’t quite to the liking of Cottrill’s patrons, he said.

“I had him even skinnier than he is, a little bit. I knew they’d want that,” Cottrill said about the first model. “They said, ‘Oh, he’s too big.’ I’m close enough to his age, and I got some turkey neck going on, and I knew what that was. That’s what happens when you’re almost 80.”

Perhaps the only photo you’ll ever see of Trump fist-pumping in front of a pride flag. Photo from Alan Cottrill

Cottrill says it actually only took him four-and-a-half months to make the 50 pieces he’d put together to make the giant Trump. It took another year and a half, however, for the installation at Trump National Doral to happen because it took weeks for Sansalone and Stockton to make their final $90,000 payment.

The tech bros in 2024 paid an initial $300,000 for the initial statue, then paid another $60,000 a year later for the gold-leaf plating, and another $150,000 to use imagery of the statue to promote a crypto token, Cottrill said. But getting the payment was easier said than done.

“‘You were supposed to make these payments nearly a year ago. I can’t trust you to do that,’” Cottrill recalls telling his patrons. “So I held the statue. I put it in an undisclosed location and said it won’t be delivered until the final payments have been made.

“Like I told the crypto guys from the beginning, I said, ‘Hey, I don’t fuck around, so you don’t fuck around with me.’ And, like my daughter said, ‘They fucked around and found out.’”

After months of holding the statue hostage, the final payment finally came on April 22 with a phone call saying Cottrill had to have the statue installed the next day, ahead of the 2026 Cadillac Championship that ran April 30 to May 3.

“So I got in a truck with my foundry manager and we drove straight down and when we got to dropoff, we were told that we need this installed and all the gold leaf touched up by dawn tomorrow,” Cottrill said. “We usually would take three days to do all that, so we worked through the night till 4 a.m., and we finally finished. Then we slept two or three hours, got in the truck, and drove 18 hours straight back to Zanesville.”

Cottrill high-tailed it out of South Florida because he wasn’t actually invited to the unveiling and dedication ceremony that followed (another first for the sculptor).

When asked if Cottrill would ever work with the crypto bros or Trump’s team again, specifically for the upcoming Trump Presidential Tower in Miami, which, according to renderings, will include a large, gold-leaf Trump statue, he didn’t need to hear the full question before responding, “Fuck no.”

“Once somebody has shown that they can’t be trusted to do what they say,” he adds, “you don’t work with them anymore.”

Trump himself appeared to be pleased, writing on his platform Truth Social, “The Real Deal – GOLD – At Doral in Miami. Put there by great American Patriots!!! President DJT” However, the sculptor tells New Times, “don’t forget it’s just a normal bronze statue with a coating of gold leaf over the entire thing.”

A lot of gold leaf: “There were over 3000 3in.² leaves of 23.75 carat gold attached to the surface to cover the entire 15 foot statue,” he adds.

Gas is $4.56 a gallon

Let's check in on what the president is working on today: pic.twitter.com/G2lCx8Vup5

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 7, 2026

B. Scott McLendon joined New Times staff in 2025. A national award-winning journalist, he previously covered education, crime, courts, and local government for daily newspapers in Alabama, Louisiana, and Texas. He holds a bachelor’s in journalism from Troy University.

Appropriate Behavior

Blue language within.

Justin Jones Burning The Confederate Flag In The TN State Capitol. That’s It, That’s The Post.

White racist Tennessee Republicans think they birthed a nation yesterday. Looks like they birthed something else instead.

Evan Hurst

Democratic TN state Rep. Justin Jones burns a Confederate flag in the state Capitol, Thursday, May 8, 2026, video screengrab

Yesterday, the Ku Klux Klan, we mean Tennessee state Legislature, rushed through new maps to eliminate the state’s last remaining Democratic congressional seat in Congress, and racist pigfuck Governor Bill Lee signed them, because that’s what white supremacists do when Donald Trump’s partisan hack Supreme Court says it’s unconstitutional for them not to hurt Black people by gutting the last remaining piece of the Voting Rights Act.

The lawsuits are already being filed, and to be sure, Republicans don’t even understand the war they started yesterday. As we wrote, it’s useful to remember that Republicans always, 100 percent of the time, overplay their hands.

We quoted Tennessee state Rep. Justin Pearson, who until yesterday was running in a primary against long-serving Congressman Steve Cohen to represent what was the Ninth District, in Memphis. We guess how exactly that will end up is undetermined at this exact moment, but Pearson said earlier this week at a rally that “[I]f we keep marching, if we keep pressing, if we keep fighting, the future that our descendants will live into will be a better one than this one. And our message to the Republican Party, our message to that racist, white-supremacist president Donald Trump is that we will fight.”

Pearson, if you remember, is one of the two Black men in the Tennessee Three, back when the grand wizards of the Tennessee Lege first bent over and showed everybody their Klan-hood-shaped buttplugs, expelling the two men from the state House for taking to the House floor to try to defend their constituents against gun violence. Also for being Black men, because they didn’t expel the white woman, Knoxville Rep. Gloria Johnson, for being part of the same protest. (Voters of course sent the two Justins right the fuck back to the Legislature.)

Both Justins were of course present yesterday to witness what white supremacist Tennessee Republicans really think was the Birth of a Nation. And there were many protests in the Tennessee state Capitol yesterday. Justin Jones of Nashville set a Confederate flag on fire, or at least a paper version of it.

And then he stomped that sad loser little bitch of a flag — a flag the greatest losers who ever lived died defending, and their family legacies are less valuable than dried dogshit because of it — right on out.

And what are people saying about that, and about iconic pictures photographers captured of that? “Hang it in the Louvre.”

Oh, it’s gonna be in museums and history books all right.

Rep. Jones, “Brother Jones” as he refers to himself on Instagram, posted videos and images of the already iconic moment.

View this post on Instagram

And he typed:

The South will not rise again, until it’s paid for all its sins of racism and white supremacy.

Today, I left the Capitol Klan Rally, where my white Republican colleagues took off their white hoods and dismantled Black political power in our state. It’s shameful, it’s immoral, and it will go down in the history books alongside the legacy of George Wallace and Bull Connor.

Tennessee has shamefully become the first state to pass a new, racist congressional map following the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which dismantled the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

When I walked into the building it was 2026, and when I walked out it was pre-1965. This racial power grab against Black voters is purely rooted in control and elimination of their voices in our democracy. Today’s Jim Crow laws passed in our legislature spit on the graves of our Civil Rights martyrs who bled and died for the right to political power and representation.

They are dragging us backwards in history but we refuse to be moved.

I burned the Confederate flag, because the neo-Confederate caucus that assembled today will be defeated again. Their vision of the South, rooted in plantation politics and racial division will not win. Instead we must use this moment to ignite our rebellion and movement even more towards real justice and multiracial democracy. We must build towards a South that can RISE ANEW.

We will not go back!

“Burn it, young brother,” said Joy-Ann Reid in response. So say we all.

Burn. That. Shit.

The Word Of The Term Is Corruption

I’d run across this article linked somewhere earlier this past week. But, I couldn’t read it or post it, because it was behind a paywall. Well, thanks to Punctuated.Equilibrium over on MPS Friday night, here it is! Well, a goodly snip of it. Give ’em a click to read it all, because they lifted the paywall so that everyone who wants to know can read it.

The everything, everywhere, all at once corruption story.

I’m pleading with you to look at the president’s self-dealing.

1 May 2026 Written by: Isaac Saul

(snip-skipping a bit at the top)

During President Joe Biden’s term, the Department of Justice could say, at least, that it had investigated the president’s son. Republicans in Congress also conducted a yearslong investigation into the Hunter Biden business ties and how they might link back to the president. Here, though, we have nothing; every story I’m about to point to has not produced even a unified statement of concern from, say, a half dozen Republican senators worried about government corruption.

Remember, Hunter’s story was about drawing a $50,000/month salary while his dad was vice president and then allegedly trying to arrange some business ventures he might cut Joe Biden in on once he was out of office. Republicans’ yearslong investigation never turned up any hard evidence of the latter, though there was enough smoke I still think the story was plausible.

Today, we’re talking about the president’s children launching multi-billion dollar business ventures — several of them — while the president is in office, and then explicitly exchanging all manner of domestic policy victories, foreign policy concessions, and literal pardons in the construction of those deals. Trump himself has all but admitted this is happening. He told The New York Times that “nobody cared” when he tried to separate his family business from his administration during his first term, so he isn’t even trying now.

I have tracked these stories with one of my senior editors for the last year and a half. The list of things that have happened is so long and shocking when you see it all together that I’m not entirely sure how to present it. I’ve gone back and forth; maybe I should build a flow chart? What about a spreadsheet? Should this be a YouTube video, instead of a written piece? Will anyone actually read the entire thing? Can anyone actually process this level of self-dealing, corruption, and shadiness at once?

Ultimately, I decided that the best I can do is try to write all these instances down in an engaging way that might grab your attention and wake us all up from whatever stupor we’re in. So… here goes.

Let’s start with the cryptocurrency.

Perhaps the largest vehicle for Trump’s self-dealing has been his foray into cryptocurrency. This is a complicated space that I will try to make as straightforward and simple as possible.

In 2024, the Trump family launched a crypto company called World Liberty Financial. Trump is listed as a “co-founder emeritus.” By December of 2025, they had profited roughly $1 billion from proceeds while holding $3 billion in unsold cryptocurrency tokens, amassing a fortune larger than their entire real estate portfolio. At the same time the president was pushing his family’s new crypto venture, he was cutting crypto regulation, touting the potential of private digital currencies to help the U.S. economy, and promising to unleash the industry he and his family were simultaneously profiting from.

But the president wasn’t only directly making money in an industry he was deregulating; the Trumps benefitted through intermediaries, too. Last summer, World Liberty Financial bought a publicly listed firm and raised $750 million from investors to buy its own cryptocurrency, WLFI. The Wall Street Journal tepidly described this setup as an “unusually circular transaction with the same party as buyer and seller” that could net the Trump family an additional $500 million.

Essentially, the Trump family launched a cryptocurrency firm while deregulating the crypto industry, then bought a separate firm that it used to buy its own cryptocurrency while also raising three quarters of a billion dollars from investors to buy that same cryptocurrency.

Just days before he was inaugurated, Trump also launched a personal “memecoin” called $TRUMP. Memecoins are cryptocurrencies made about internet jokes, pop culture moments, or viral trends. They have no underlying value or technological purpose; the value of the coin is driven entirely by social hype. Trump created hype for his memecoin by launching it months after being elected and just three days before being inaugurated. He promoted $TRUMP on social media and, while president, even held a dinner for the top 220 holders of the coin at one of his golf resorts in Virginia. He held another one at Mar-a-Lago this past weekend. The initial coin offering released 200 million tokens of its billion-token supply to the public on the first day. The price skyrocketed 300% overnight and hit an all-time high of $74.27 on January 19, right before Trump’s inauguration. $TRUMP has since cratered, losing 97% of its value (for context, if you had bought $1,000 at its peak, your $1,000 would now be worth about $30).

Trump, naturally, profited. The exact figures are hard to pin, but The Financial Times estimated that the scheme netted him personally about $350 million, while Trump’s holdings of the coin through a separate partnership could be worth billions more. It wasn’t just the president, either; First Lady Melania Trump launched her own memecoin, which also skyrocketed in value before a massive sell-off that she profited from (what people in the industry call a “rug pull”). Most of the people who bought and held the coin based on the hype the Trumps created ended up losing most of their money, but the coin’s creators got rich (or, in this case, richer).

This cryptocurrency foray hasn’t just been a vehicle for self-enrichment, but also a vehicle for quid pro quos. Perhaps the most obvious and overt involved Justin Sun, a crypto billionaire who was being investigated by the SEC for fraud. Sun, in the midst of his investigation, bought $75 million of WLFI — the World Liberty Financial coin — and then became an adviser at the company. Shortly after that investment, the SEC backed off its investigation and settled with him for $10 million, a small fraction of the expected penalties he was set to pay (on top of potential prison time). Of course, it’s possible that the SEC, an organization now openly being influenced by the president, just happened to back off its investigation in the weeks following Sun’s $75 million investment into Trump’s crypto firm.

It’s also possible that the two events are related.

The crypto story, though, hardly ended there. In late April, CBS reported that Sun was suing the Trump administration’s World Liberty Financial, alleging fraud. That’s right: Sun, whose initial case has since concluded, has now turned around and sued the Trump family, alleging that the president and his sons are illegally blocking him from selling his digital tokens that are worth as much as $1 billion. Sun also claims that World Liberty Financial tried to pressure him into investing in its stable coin, and that the company froze his tokens after he refused to commit more money to the business.

It’s hard to identify the villain.

Sun’s apparent quid pro quo to get out from under government oversight is just one example. Changpeng Zhao, the founder of Binance, was pardoned by President Trump shortly after Zhao helped boost WLFI’s prominence by allowing the currency to be traded on the crypto exchange Binance, which Zhao started. After the pardon, Zhao became one of the Trumps’ business partners, boosting the family’s crypto empire while skating serious charges that he allowed money to flow to terrorists, cyber criminals, and child abusers on his platform.

If that’s not enough, more shocking news broke this week. According to The Wall Street Journal, World Liberty Financial inadvertently partnered with two men the U.S. government had sanctioned a month before for helping run a transnational criminal syndicate that had stolen billions of dollars from Americans through online scams. To repeat: Last fall, the Trump administration announced criminal charges against a transnational criminal syndicate for stealing billions of dollars from Americans in online scams. A month later, two of the men it sanctioned partnered with the Trump family’s crypto company.

The evidence of crypto investments from foreign nationals operating as de facto bribes doesn’t end there. Consider the story of Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the brother of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) president and one of the most powerful politicians in the Middle East (he’s served as the UAE’s national security advisor since 2016). He stewards an empire of wealth worth roughly $1.5 trillion, and a firm closely tied to him secretly signed a deal for a 49% stake in WLFI worth $500 million — including $187 million paid upfront to Trump family entities just days before Trump’s inauguration. Shortly after Trump took office, the administration undid a national security block that would have prevented the UAE from getting up to 500,000 advanced Nvidia AI chips.

Some right-wing writers, like National Review’s Andrew McCarthy, have been brave enough to take this story head-on — but many have ignored it.

Sometimes, the favors happen en masse. The crypto industry as a whole was a top donor to Trump’s 2025 inauguration fund, and the SEC then dropped or paused over a dozen cases against crypto firms, or simply handed them huge access to government-directed crypto entities. Several of those cases, like Sun’s, were tied directly to donations. Coinbase donated $1 million; its lawsuit was dropped. Ripple ($4.9 million) and Solana ($1 million) had their tokens added to the national Digital Asset Stockpile.

I want to pause here to remind people that we spent all four years of the Biden administration talking about Hunter Biden’s alleged $50,000 a month salary while working at an energy firm in Ukraine, and the possibility that he was setting up some business deals for his father after he left the vice presidency. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) introduced articles of impeachment alleging Biden “abused the power of the Office of the Vice President, enabling bribery and other high crimes and misdemeanors, by allowing his son to influence the domestic policy of a foreign nation and accept various benefits—including financial compensation—from foreign nationals in exchange for certain favors.”

Conversely, the final tally of investments from parties with conflicts of interest into crypto assets personally managed by the Trump family safely enters the range of billions of dollars — a scale of thousands of millions, in just one sector and in just over one year, while the president was actually in office.

It’s not just cryptocurrency.

(snip-MORE. It reads just as quickly on the page)

Pete Hegseth’s Far-Right Pastor: “Immodestly Dressed Women Are Sluts Who Just Give It Away To Every Slob”

Pete Hegseth’s Far-Right Pastor: “Immodestly Dressed Women Are Sluts Who Just Give It Away To Every Slob”

The Times of London reports:

A week before the US went to war with Iran, Pete Hegseth, the war secretary, invited the head of his church to lead prayers at the Pentagon. From his pulpit in Idaho, Doug Wilson, a 72-year-old ultraconservative pastor, preaches that homosexuality is a sin, women who dress immodestly are “sluts”, and Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution is the “silliest thing in the world”.

Despite Hegseth’s evangelising, Wilson says the Trump administration is far from morally pure. He says the president is “not someone I would call a godly Christian man”, and disagrees with Trump’s appointment of a gay man, Scott Bessent, as his Treasury secretary because homosexuality is not just a sin, it is “a bad one”.

Of all his gripes, however, Wilson is most indignant about the 1960s sexual revolution, a moral catastrophe that he condemns frequently in his blog posts, sermons and books. He thinks women should dress modestly. But what is modest dress? “Not what they’re doing now,” he says. “I could pick on yoga pants.” He continues: “Men know what they think of hookers, which is not very much. When you’re just giving it away to every slob on the bus who wants to look, you’re degrading the currency.”

Does that mean Wilson and his followers sympathise with the dress codes enforced by Shia clerics in Iran? “No, because wrapping them up in a bedsheet is another way of degrading them. It is possible to be modest and attractive — attractive without attracting. Bundling them up the way really conservative Muslims do is a different kind of degradation. Like you’re not a person. But for a woman to dress like a slut is a different kind of degradation. Both kinds of degradation play off of each other.”

Read the full article. It’s quite the deep dive.

Wilson appeared here last month when he called for criminalizing homosexuality and outlawing all LGBTQ events.

In March, Wilson declared that under his Christian nationalist theocracy, all non-Protestant public events – such a Catholic parades that venerate the Virgin Mary – would be banned.

Also in March, a separate pastor at Hegseth’s church prayed for God to kill Senate candidate James Talarico.

Pete Hegseth’s pastor: ‘Women who dress immodestly are sluts’

— The Times and Sunday Times (@thetimes.com) 2026-05-05T11:45:51.187Z

Let’s talk about Trump wanting a billion tax dollars for his ballroom….

Political cartoons / memes / and news I want to share. 5-6-2026

Sorry this is not as long as I normally do. Ron found me sleeping at my desk an d only gave me a few minutes to finish before he forced me to bed physically. Hugs

Here’s a last strip from my new book Dating Tips for Trans and Queer Weirdos!

The house below was once owned by Scott Bessent the current Secretary of Treasury under tRump. I would love to own a home like this or at least be able to afford one like it. It is a famous home called the Pink House. Hugs

These are fake The first three were posted by tRump but the left is the one that has to turn down the rhetoric.

This is the real Obama bowing picture.

And this guy posted 86 46 during Bidens term and the post is still up. But Comey is on trial for threatening the cult leader and not Posobiec who did the same to Biden.

And this one is real. tRump suluted an enemy general from North Korea.

And this one is real also.

“The more likely prospect, they say, is that he becomes an independent who caucuses with the GOP, or simply casts his vote to ensure Thune remains majority leader. Ensuring control of the Senate could be especially critical should there be a Supreme Court vacancy http://www.politico.com/news/magazin…

— Randy Fair (@southerngayteacher.bsky.social) 2026-05-04T14:20:49.652Z

81 percent of young Americans say economic conditions are bad or terrible: Survey #TheHill

— #TuckFrump (@realtuckfrumper.bsky.social) 2026-05-04T19:51:39.000Z

NYC reports fewest murders ever through April, violent crime declines in Bronx gothamist.com/news/nyc-rep…

— Gothamist (@gothamist.com) 2026-05-04T15:53:49.333419Z

In many states, election-denying candidates are running to control voting http://www.npr.org/2026/05/04/n…

— Ray Beckerman (@raybeckerman.bsky.social) 2026-05-04T15:08:27.517Z

NEW: A Republican U.S. Senate candidate said he's recruiting off-duty police officers to serve as poll watchers in Detroit for the 2026 midterms — and suggested they could flash their badges at voters.Intimidating voters is illegal. Interfering with someone's right to vote is a federal crime.

— Democracy Docket (@democracydocket.com) 2026-05-04T15:48:35.403313056Z

🚨BREAKING: Florida voters and pro-voting group Equal Ground Education Fund filed a lawsuit Monday challenging the GOP’s new congressional gerrymander, urging a court to block the map for violating the state constitution’s ban on partisan gerrymandering. http://www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/…

— Marc Elias (@marcelias.bsky.social) 2026-05-04T18:40:56.248Z

New: A Probe of Trump Foes Upends Justice Department Hub in MiamiDeep dive from Chris Strohm and Michael Smith –>buff.ly/ApWT31g

— Zoe Tillman (@zoetillman.bsky.social) 2026-05-05T16:47:20.073Z

Both headlines are from today.

— Adam Isacson (@adamisacson.com) 2026-05-04T21:27:03.352Z

Mamdani condemns ICE action at Bushwick hospital, says NYPD didn’t coordinate gothamist.com/news/mamdani…

— Gothamist (@gothamist.com) 2026-05-04T17:18:52.774838Z

Judge mulls contempt over DHS’ ‘patently false’ allegation in deportation caseThe Trump administration attacked a judge for releasing an accused murderer, but it withheld existence of the foreign warrant.www.politico.com/news/2026/05…

— Lauren Ashley Davis (@laurenmeidasa.bsky.social) 2026-05-04T21:35:32.535Z

You see this press release from DHS about a federal judge? The agency pushed it out 5 days ago. Today, a DOJ attorney admitted to the judge that it “simply was not true.”(It’s also still online at DHS dot gov as of 540 pm Monday)1/

— Bill Grueskin (@bgrueskin.bsky.social) 2026-05-04T21:43:02.441Z

WASHINGTON (AP) — US military says Iran has launched missiles, drones and small boats at ships the US is protecting in Strait of Hormuz.

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1.bsky.social) 2026-05-04T16:35:18.324Z

BREAKING: UAE says three missiles from Iran intercepted. MS NOW's David Rohde has the latest.

— MS NOW (@ms.now) 2026-05-04T15:43:14.006Z

Trump describes Iran war horrors in Oval Office full of kids: ‘Right between the eyes’

— The Independent (@the-independent.com) 2026-05-05T16:42:02.720027Z

* SOUTH KOREA'S FOREIGN MINISTRY: FIRE AND EXPLOSION HAPPENED ON A KOREAN VESSEL IN STRAIT OF HORMUZ* SOUTH KOREA FOREIGN MINISTRY: CHECKING CAUSE OF FIRE AND DETAILS ON DAMAGE AT THE KOREAN VESSEL* SOUTH KOREA FOREIGN MINISTRY: TO CLOSELY COMMUNICATE WITH RELEVANT COUNTRIES@reuters.com

— Carl Quintanilla (@carlquintanilla.bsky.social) 2026-05-04T14:11:52.060Z

President Donald Trump threatened Iran, saying it will be 'blown off the face of the Earth' if it doesn't stop attacking ships in the Strait of Hormuz.

— The Express US (@the-express.com) 2026-05-04T19:05:50.273Z

More Than 150 Wind Projects Stall as Pentagon Delays ReviewsThe delays, which companies say have worsened significantly in recent weeks, are the latest step in the Trump administration’s efforts to block wind power.www.nytimes.com/2026/05/04/c…

— James Hughes (@dystopian-fashion.bsky.social) 2026-05-05T01:15:37.587Z

Open Windows & Clay Jones

Fugly Passport

Quick! Renew your passport before they start putting Trump’s photo on them!

Clay Jones

You got a new blog yesterday, but you didn’t get a new cartoon. Did you miss me?

From the Department of I-think-I’m-going-to-throw-up comes news that the State Department is going to issue passports featuring Donald Trump’s face. It’s not even his smiling face, either, as he’s grimacing in the photo, much like his mug shot.

Do the heads of all these agencies that’re putting Trump’s face, name, and signature on everything come up with this shit on their own, or is it ordered from the White House? Either way, everyone in the Trump administration is a sick sycophant. Why do they want us to look like North Korea? Why?

But yes, you heard correctly. They are going to put Trump’s face on American passports. If you’re like me, you worry that you won’t have a choice and that Trump’s face will be placed right next to your cheery mug, which would be sure to draw scorn as you go through customs and immigration while traveling internationally. Don’t we have enough to apologize for while traveling as Americans? (snip-MORE)