Good morning. I’m Thom Hartmann. Before getting into today’s news, take a few seconds to click the ❤️ and restack this newsletter so we can break through the algorithm and reach new readers who are stuck getting their news from billionaire-owned outlets.
The Army’s top civilian leader just quit after warning that Pete Hegseth’s purge of top generals has left the military in a significantly weakened position. A whistleblower is now revealing that the U.S. Postal Service is scrambling to build an error-ridden mail voting system that could disenfranchise millions of Americans this fall. Billionaires are pouring money into a PR campaign designed to drown out the voices of Americans who don’t want data centers in their backyards. And Michigan Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed just delivered a perfect response to Vice President JD Vance, who called him “evil” at a Republican rally.
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Former Army Secretary Dan Driscoll didn’t resign quietly. Before he quit his post as the top civilian overseeing the U.S. Army, he reportedly sat down with Donald Trump and laid out just how bad things have gotten at Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon.
According to people familiar with the meeting, the president was caught off guard by how many generals and senior officers had been fired, forced out or passed over for promotion since Hegseth’s confirmation. Driscoll told the president the Army simply can’t modernize itself when it keeps losing its most experienced leaders.
Driscoll isn’t wrong. The Army now has fewer generals than at any point in recent history. And with Driscoll headed for the exits, the largest branch of the U.S. military is now without a Senate-confirmed top general, a confirmed officer running operations or a confirmed commander for American troops stationed in Europe.
Hegseth came to the Pentagon as a former part-time Fox News weekend host with a mission to root out what he called “woke” ideology in the military. But instead he’s created a massive leadership vacuum. Hegseth has ended the careers of dozens of Army leaders without any clear explanation. Officers deemed insufficiently loyal to the Trump administration got pushed out, regardless of their combat records or experience.
Driscoll and Hegseth actually had a lot in common. Both are Iraq War veterans who attended Ivy League schools and have quietly harbored presidential ambitions. But their leadership styles couldn’t have been more different. Hegseth was only confirmed with a tie-breaking vote from the vice president, and he’s built his reputation on picking fights with the press and daring his critics to quit. Driscoll took a more diplomatic approach, working with lawmakers on both sides of the aisle and refraining from Hegseth’s culture war fights.
Their differences led to open conflict over personnel decisions. Driscoll tried in vain to protect Army Chief of Staff Randy George from being fired after his name showed up on a list of officers targeted for removal over perceived disloyalty to Trump. George was fired in April of this year.
Now, Army leaders are fretting about Driscoll’s potential replacement. Officials fear Trump will nominate Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell, who is like Hegseth in that he’s a veteran with a combative leadership style and no experience running a large organization. One unnamed official told the Atlantic that handing the Army to someone similar to Hegseth could do generational damage to the institution.
When George Washington walked into that hall at Newburgh in March of 1783, standing in front of officers who were talking openly about marching on Congress, he stopped it cold. What he settled that day is the thing this country has run on ever since, that the Army belongs to the Constitution and not to any one man or any one movement. Strip out every officer who won’t pass a loyalty test and you haven’t built a stronger military. You’ve built a smaller one that’s been taught the wrong lesson about who it serves.
A new whistleblower report should cause significant alarm for anyone who plans to cast a ballot by mail this November.
Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut released a statement Tuesday from an unidentified whistleblower who is warning that the U.S. Postal Service is scrambling to build a massive new mail-in ballot system in just three months when a project of this magnitude typically takes at least a year.
This all stems from Trump’s recent executive order putting new restrictions on mail voting, and the legal fight over it has been raging for weeks. U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani, who was appointed by Barack Obama, blocked several parts of the order in June. The MAGA Supreme Court majority lifted that block on August 24, but only on narrow grounds without ruling on its legality.
A few days later, the U.S.P.S. published its final rule, and Talwani imposed a new restraining order that blocks implementation for now. She refused to lift that order on Monday. This Thursday, there’s another on making the block last through November, though the Supreme Court could still weigh in before then.
The most alarming part of the whistleblower report is that the system uses a zero-tolerance rule in that if there’s a single scanning error anywhere in a batch of tens of thousands of ballot envelopes, the entire batch could be rejected.
Election officials have already warned that this system can’t be ready before mail ballots start going out this Friday in the critical battleground state of North Carolina. But the administration seems determined to force it through anyway ahead of the midterms where Republicans are expected to take a beating.
Blumenthal said Trump’s Postal Service has effectively created a system tthat will disenfranchise millions of American voters, and that the administration seems determined to make it harder for Americans to cast ballots all for craven political gain.
Let’s all remember that Trump himself has used mail voting himself plenty of times, even while spreading debunked conspiracy theories for years while falsely claiming it cost him the 2020 election. A Brookings Institution report found mail voting fraud happens in about four cases out of every ten million ballots cast. That’s nowhere near enough to change the outcome of any election.
More than 29 percent of Americans voted by mail in 2024. If this error-prone system goes into effect, Blumenthal says he wouldn’t even recommend anyone vote by mail in the midterms.
Article I, Section 4 of the Constitution says the times, places and manner of holding elections get set by the state legislatures, and that Congress can alter those rules. The president isn’t in that sentence. He isn’t anywhere in it. That wasn’t an oversight by the framers, it was the design, because they’d watched what happens when the man in power gets to decide how the votes come in. Route the nation’s ballots through an agency the White House controls and you haven’t secured an election. You’ve moved the machinery of self-government into one man’s hands.
A group calling itself Build American AI is now launching a multimillion-dollar ad campaign in major battleground states like Kansas, Ohio, and Wisconsin aimed at countering public anger over data center development. The group is backed by the super PAC called Leading the Future, which gets its funding from tech billionaires like Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz of the firm Andreessen Horowitz, along with OpenAI president Greg Brockman.
The anger against data centers is very real, and shared by Americans on both sides of the political aisle. A survey from the Annenberg Public Policy Center found 61 percent of adults now oppose new data center construction in their community. That’s a 12-point increase from earlier this year. A separate Gallup poll found 75 percent of Democrats and 63 percent of Republicans don’t want data centers built anywhere near them, along with a whopping 74 percent of independents.
Most Americans associate data centers with rising utility bills, frequent power outages and the sheer amount of water these facilities require. In Ohio, Democratic Senate candidate Sherrod Brown has made his opposition to data center development a cornerstone of his campaign against Republican Senator Jon Husted. The National Republican Senatorial Committee is nervous enough about the issue that they’ve warned AI companies the data center industry itself will be seen as a political liability across the country if Husted fails to win reeelection.
Trump is continuing to double down on his support for the politically toxic facilities. He recently posted on social media that any community that opposes data centers is choosing to be, in his own words, “backwards and poor.”
New York became the first state to officially impose a moratorium on new hyperscale data center construction. Texas Republican Governor Greg Abbott has also effectively frozen new data center development. The advocacy group Data Center Watch has found that at least 75 data center projects worth a combined $130 billion got blocked or delayed by local opposition in just the first three months of 2026. That’s a lot of Americans saying no to billionaires. Now, this new propaganda campaign is those same billionaires trying to use their money to drown out Americans’ voices.
We’ve watched this exact play before. In the 1920s the electric utilities ran the largest public relations campaign in the country to convince Americans that public power was radical and un-American, and it worked right up until the Senate passed Resolution 83 in 1928 and sent the Federal Trade Commission in to look. Seven years and ninety-six volumes of findings later, Congress passed the Public Utility Holding Company Act and broke the power trusts apart. That lesson didn’t expire. When an industry has to buy the public’s consent, it’s because it knows it can’t earn it.
At a recent MAGA rally in the Detroit area, Vice President JD Vance called Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed “very, very evil.” El-Sayed — who Raw America interviewed this spring — wasn’t about to let that slide.
In a Monday night interview with CNN, the Michigan Democrat turned the word back around on the vice president, pointing out that true evil is starting wars when there’s already peace. El-Sayed added that evil could also be defined as stripping away poor people’s health insurance just so billionaires can get a tax cut. And he also called it evil to force AI data centers onto community that don’t want them.
El-Sayed has called for abolishing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), ending U.S. military aid to Israel, and passing a Medicare for All healthcare system. He just won his Democratic primary in August despite being outspent by tens of millions of dollars. Now, he’s facing off against former Republican Congressman Mike Rogers for the seat being vacated by Democratic Senator Gary Peters. Michigan has flipped twice in the last two presidential elections.
Rogers has his work cut out for him. Between the fallout from Trump’s war with Iran, high costs of living and Trump’s plummeting poll numbers, it won’t be easy to convince Michiganders to vote for another rubber stamp for Trump.
In 1961 a unanimous Supreme Court told the state of Maryland, in Torcaso v. Watkins, that it couldn’t force a man to declare a belief in God just to serve as a notary public. Not a senator, a notary public. The Court wouldn’t allow even that small a religious test, because once you let government sort citizens into the acceptable and the suspect by what they believe, there’s no natural place for it to stop. So when a vice president stands on a stage and tells a crowd there’s something evil about a candidate while pointing at who that candidate prays with, he’s reaching for a test this country took off the table more than sixty years ago.
The billionaires who are buying up cable networks and major newspapers want you to think they’re inevitable. That’s why they won’t tell you about more Americans rising up against their deeply unpopular data centers, or about the secret effort to disenfranchise millions of Americans who vote by mail. Raw America has no billionaire backer. We have you. That’s why we pride ourselves on covering the stories the oligarchs want to bury.
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