Paying ‘Patriots,’ Dodging Wars, Erasing the Receipts
Some weeks in this country don’t feel like “normal politics.”
They feel like watching insanity work its way through policy, one pardon, one slush fund, one quiet little war at a time.
This last stretch was one of those weeks.
On paper, it’s just a blur of headlines: a 1.776 billion dollar “patriot” fund, pardoned insurrectionists reoffending, including against children, war powers votes quietly canceled, and federal agencies deciding which parts of recent history deserve to stay online.
But if you zoom out a little, there’s a pattern here. And it’s not subtle.
This isn’t random chaos. It’s a project.
Who gets paid to be a “patriot”
Let’s start with the number that should make your stomach drop: $1.776 billion.
No, that’s not a typo.
We’re talking about a fund, backed and defended by the same crowd that calls themselves “tough on crime”, that stands to shovel money toward a pool of “patriots” that just so happens to include convicted insurrectionists and even convicted child predators.
We’ve already watched Donald Trump wipe out a mountain of restitution and fines with his second-round pardon spree, including for January 6 offenders and assorted white‑collar and violent criminals.
That alone should have been enough to end the “law and order” cosplay.
But it didn’t stop there.
Some of those freshly forgiven “patriots” went right back out and reoffended, up to and including child sexual abuse and the possession of child sexual abuse material.
And instead of saying, “You know what, maybe these aren’t the people we should be rewarding,” Republicans are defending a fund that would still cut checks in their direction.
If you grew up being told that victims deserve justice and accountability, let me translate this week’s message for you:
The “real victims” are the people who stormed the Capitol.
The “real patriots” are the ones who beat cops and hunted elected officials and then went home to abuse kids or go back to fraud.
And the role of the federal government, apparently, is to absolve their debts, refill their pockets, and call it freedom.
That’s not “tough on crime.”
That’s state-sponsored moral rot wrapped in an American flag.
How you sleepwalk into war
While all of that is happening on the “patriot” side of the ledger, there’s another track running in the background: the slow, boring, procedural surrender of Congress’s war powers.
You’ve probably heard some of the noise about Cuba lately, Trump and his allies cranking up the rhetoric, flirting with the idea of open confrontation, and treating a decades‑long blockade like it’s just the baseline cost of doing business.
What’s gotten less attention is what Congress is quietly doing, and not doing, around any of this.
On Cuba, a group of Democratic senators pushed a war powers resolution to say, in plain English, that the President doesn’t get to drag us into a new conflict without a vote.
Pretty reasonable if you remember things like Iraq, Afghanistan, or any of the “we’ll be in and out in six weeks” adventures that somehow turned into your entire adult life.
And then there’s Iran.
We are well past the 60‑day mark that the War Powers Resolution is supposed to mean something, and yet the bombing, the “limited strikes,” the “ongoing operations” keep rolling.
Congress knows exactly what the law says. They also know exactly what’s happening on the ground.
They are choosing, on purpose, not to enforce their own rules while the President runs an obviously illegal war and calls it everything except what it is.
Meanwhile, over in the House, leadership has been playing the same old game:
Schedule a vote, float a resolution that might actually limit Trump’s ability to start or continue something, and then, whoops, suddenly cancel it when it’s time to put names on the board.
Cuba, Iran, pick your theater, different flags, same cowardice.
If your Speaker‑of‑the‑Moment refuses to even hold a vote on whether this country should be at war, that’s not gridlock.
That’s complicity in slow motion.
It’s the oldest trick in the book:
Let the President talk big and flex.
Let the “limited operation” quietly become an ongoing war.
Make sure Congress never actually goes on record.
Then act shocked when bombs keep dropping, and you’ve “somehow” slid into another conflict nobody remembers authorizing.
We’ve done this dance before.
We know how it ends.
The only new twist is that this time, everyone involved is pretending the War Powers clock doesn’t exist while they tell you this is what “strong leadership” looks like.
Erasing the receipts
And because all of this would be a lot harder to sell if people had a clear, searchable record of what’s been happening, the bureaucracy has started doing what bureaucracy does best: curating the past.
The State Department has already decided to start deleting pre‑Trump posts from its official accounts, including on platforms like X.
Instead of a continuous public record, we’re moving toward “you can file a records request if you want to see what we said back when this was called an insurrection instead of a ‘tourist visit.’”
Layer that on top of the quiet shifts in language and emphasis in how federal agencies talk about January 6 in public-facing spaces, downplaying the word “insurrection,” reframing events, burying emphasis, and you get the picture:
First they pardon them.
Then they pay them.
Then they blur the record so your kids have to go digging to figure out what actually happened.
If you grew up being told “the truth will set you free,” this is what the opposite looks like.
You’re not crazy; you’re awake
So if this week felt heavy, you’re not being dramatic.
You’re paying attention.
On one side, we have a government that is willing to wipe away restitution, hand out slush-fund money, and rehabilitate the image of people who tried to overturn an election and went on to hurt more people, children included. On another, we have a Congress that refuses to do the bare minimum of voting on war, even as the rhetoric toward places like Cuba gets hotter and more reckless.
And hovering over all of it, we have institutions quietly deciding which parts of our recent history deserve to be easy to find and which parts should be slowly airbrushed out.
MAGA keeps telling you this is about “weaponization”, “righting injustices,” “patriotism,” and “law and order.”
Look at the actual behavior:
“Patriots” getting paid.
Predators getting pardoned.
Wars being kept on standby.
Receipts being quietly shredded.
That’s not the beginning of something noble.
That’s the last desperate wheeze of an old system that never fully let go of white supremacy, Christian nationalism, and the idea that some people’s violence is “freedom” while everyone else’s existence is a threat.
You don’t have to swallow that.
You don’t have to pretend this is normal.
You’re allowed to name it for what it is and decide you want something different, for yourself, for your kids, for whoever comes after this mess.
Because if “MAGA is the last breath of the Confederacy,” then our job isn’t to help it catch its breath.
It’s to make sure it’s the last one.