Good afternoon. I’m Ryan Rose, and this is AlterNet America.
Trump has signed an executive order renaming Lake Ontario as “Lake America.” A former staffer for Georgia Senate candidate Mike Collins posted KKK and Nazi imagery online. Senior U.S. officials intervened in a criminal investigation to protect a Venezuelan oilman working for the Trump administration. And more than 1.2 million Texans have had their voter registrations suspended ahead of the midterms.
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Good luck to every third grader whose Great Lakes quiz just got harder.
On Thursday, Trump signed an executive order to rename Lake Ontario as “Lake America” on all federal maps and databases. The order is a follow-through on a threat he issued earlier this week when he posted an altered map on social media showing the lake’s name crossed out and replaced with “Lake America” in gold lettering next to an American flag.
The order comes amid a rapidly escalating trade war with Canada. Talks in Washington over three days last week ended without a deal as Trump slapped tariffs of 50 percent on $20 billion of Canadian goods including dairy, alcohol, electronics and building materials on August 22.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said at a press conference that retaliatory tariffs on more than 700 American products will take effect September 8. “You’re at war when you get attacked,” Carney told reporters. “We got attacked.”
Lake Ontario is an international waterway between the province of Ontario, Canada and New York State. The president has no power to change the name, and Canada has already said it will not recognize the change.
Trump also renamed the Gulf of Mexico on his first day in office. Mexico refused to accept the new title, so now he’s found something smaller.
Mike Collins goes through white nationalists the way most campaigns go through interns.
Preston Parra, 24, a former aide to Rep. Mike Collins, posted images of swastikas and himself in what appeared to be Ku Klux Klan robes. Parra, who interned in Collins’s congressional office in 2024 and later worked as a contractor for the congressman’s leadership PAC, also repeatedly posted racial slurs, the phrase “White Power,” and Nazi-associated phrases in German.
Parra claimed the KKK image was generated using Grok, the AI feature on Elon Musk’s X, and that most of his posts were meant to be satirical. But the photo was just one of many posts that showed him using racial slurs, writing “White Power,” and describing himself as a racist and a “twink fascist.”
Collins’ spokesman called the posts “vile” and “completely unhinged,” and said Parra has no present affiliation with the congressman or his campaign. But it’s not the first time someone in Collins’s orbit has been associated with white nationalism. Last month, it was revealed that Collins’s son-in-law, David Alan Scheer II, is a white nationalist influencer who promoted the hate group Patriot Front. His former chief of staff Kip Talley was fired in July after reports he was in a group chat with Nick Fuentes and Richard Spencer.
Apparently nobody in his office has ever been Googled before their first day of work.
Alejandro Betancourt cannot go to Switzerland without risking arrest, but he can walk into the White House any time he wants.
Senior U.S. officials intervened in an international criminal investigation into Betancourt, a Venezuelan businessman enlisted by the Trump administration to help assert control over Venezuela’s oil industry. The officials lobbied to resolve the case in Switzerland in a way that would avoid criminal charges and end travel restrictions against Betancourt.
Betancourt, 46, has been the subject of several investigations over the past decade in Switzerland, Spain, and the United States for alleged money laundering. Instead of being treated as a suspect, he has been allowed to enter the United States repeatedly for meetings with the administration.
The businessman reportedly controls Venezuela’s leading independent oil producer, which pumps about 200,000 barrels of crude per day. Fortune described him as the Trump administration’s go-to guy in Venezuela who is helping identify energy assets for smaller American wildcatters after major U.S. oil companies declined to invest.
When even Chevron and ExxonMobil walk away from a deal, something is seriously wrong with it.
The fastest-growing Democratic counties in Texas are also the ones losing the most voter registrations.
More than 1.2 million Texans have had their voter registrations suspended ahead of the midterms, accounting for more than 6 percent of the state’s 18 million registered voters, and most won’t find out until they show up to vote.
A voter’s registration is put in “suspense” when official mail, such as a voter registration card or jury summons, is returned as undeliverable. That usually just means a voter moved and didn’t change their address. Voters on the suspense list can still vote once they fill out a “statement of residence” form.
The counties hit hardest are all in the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area, which has been shifting Democratic in recent years. Dallas County, which is about 26 points Democratic, has more than 129,000 suspended registrations. Tarrant County is trending blue, and has over 73,000. Collin and Denton counties, where Democrats have been closing the gap with Republicans in recent primaries, each have roughly 56,000.
The registration deadline for the November election is October 5, and voters can check their status on the Secretary of State’s website. It is probably worth checking, since Texas is clearly not going to tell you.
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** Federal Judge Rules Trump Administration’s Farmworker Wage Cuts Are Illegal.** A federal judge in California ruled Wednesday that the Trump administration illegally cut the pay of migrant farmworkers in the H-2A visa program by as much as $7 an hour. The administration pushed the rule through last fall without any public comment period, claiming it would save farmers $24 billion over the next decade by making foreign labor cheaper. The Economic Policy Institute estimated that lower rates will actually cost farmworkers $3 billion a year, including U.S. citizens whose wages go also down.
** House Democrats Open Investigation Into Donald Trump Jr.’s Venture Capital Firm.** Rep. Jamie Raskin said Thursday he is investigating Donald Trump Jr. and 1789 Capital, the venture capital firm he joined soon after his father won the 2024 election. In less than two years, the firm had grown from a few hundred million dollars in assets to some $3 billion, a rate Raskin attributed to an “almost clairvoyant” ability to invest in companies right before they landed huge federal contracts. At least four of the companies in the firm’s portfolio have received more than $735 million from the government since Trump took office.
** California Lawmakers Pass Bill to Legalize Plug-In Solar Panels.** In California, slashing your electricity bill may soon be as easy as buying a few solar panels and plugging them into a wall outlet. SB 868, which passed the state legislature Wednesday with bipartisan support, will replace the expensive permitting process for rooftop installations with a free online form for small solar systems up to 1,200 watts. The concept is already mainstream in Germany, where tenants are putting panels on balconies and patios. An average 400-watt system will pay for itself in about three years and then save about $250 a year.
Volunteers Collected 1.3 Million Plastic Bottles in a Single Day. The Ocean Conservancy’s International Coastal Cleanup mobilized 486,000 volunteers worldwide in 2025 to collect 1.3 million plastic bottles, 885,854 bottle caps, and over 7.4 million pounds of trash from beaches and waterways in a single day. Since the program began in 1986, about 20 million volunteers have hauled more than 405 million pounds of trash from coastlines in more than 150 countries. The cleanup also feeds into the world’s largest marine debris database, which has informed hundreds of scientific studies and helped spur policy changes like plastic bag bans.
