2026-05-15 04:00:00
One of the biggest assholes in the Trump regime is Russell Vought — and that’s really saying something; it’s a fierce competition. He’s the guy who said in 2023 that he wanted to put federal workers “in trauma”. ProPublica produced a video in Oct 2025 about how Vought is acting as a shadow president in his drive to dismantle the US federal government.
Russell Vought is one of the most powerful people in the Trump administration. For almost three decades, he worked in Congress and held prominent roles at conservative think tanks. But he was little known outside of political circles. He’s now the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget and the chief architect of President Donald Trump’s campaign to radically reduce the size of the federal bureaucracy.
In this video, ProPublica reporter Andy Kroll tells the story of Vought’s rise from a young staffer for Texas Sen. Phil Gramm to his role as the driving force behind Trump’s plan to dismantle the so-called “administrative state.” Vought declined to be interviewed. Kroll’s account is drawn from dozens of interviews, thousands of pages of documents and hours of videos and recordings of Vought’s briefings to supporters, including one where Vought says he wanted to put federal workers “in trauma.”
ProPublica and the New Yorker co-published a lengthy companion article as well.
During the Biden years, Vought labored to translate the lessons of Trump’s tumultuous first term into a more effective second presidency. He chaired the transition portion of Project 2025, a joint effort by a coalition of conservative groups to develop a road map for the next Republican administration, helping to draft some 350 executive orders, regulations and other plans to more fully empower the president. “Despite his best thinking and the aggressive things they tried in Trump One, nothing really stuck,” a former OMB branch chief who served under Vought during the first Trump administration told me. “Most administrations don’t get a four-year pause or have the chance to think about ‘Why isn’t this working?’” The former branch chief added, “Now he gets to come back and steamroll everyone.”
Tags: politics · Russell Vought · usa
2026-05-15 02:35:00
Omg, Amazon Prime inserted an ad for Febreze in the midst of the most famous match cut in the history of cinema (in Kubrick’s 2001, when the ape-thrown bone turns into a spacecraft). I don’t know whether to laugh or cry (rn, it’s both).
2026-05-15 01:49:00
A very good, very 2026 headline: Japan Runs Out of Robot Wolves in Fight Against Bears. “Starting at around $4,000, each bespoke Monster Wolf is now equipped with battery power, solar panels, and detection sensors.”
2026-05-15 00:54:00
This is a smart piece about where we are in America right now, post-Citizen’s United, post-Voting Rights Amendment, post-Dobbs, mid-MAGA: The VRA Was the Nice Version (archive).
First, let’s be honest about what the Voting Rights Act actually was, because everything here on out flows from it. It wasn’t a gift, not charity, and definitely not some magnanimous extension of democracy to people who’d been waiting their turn.
It was architecture. Lyndon Johnson, who had few illusions about how power actually worked, understood something the current Court either doesn’t know or doesn’t care to.
The bargain was simple: your participation produces results, so stay in the game.
That deal wasn’t made for the benefit of Black Americans alone, though it was Black blood that paid for it. It was made for the benefit of a country that needed a working, peaceful way for people with every reason in the world to burn the whole thing down to instead choose to work within it. The VRA wasn’t just the nice move — it was the smart one. Its purpose was to keep legitimate grievance inside the system rather than outside it.
Now they’ve put it back outside.
And what happens when you can’t work within the system to effect change? People want to route around it (emphasis mine):
The question is whether this country holds or comes apart, and coming apart doesn’t mean a stern editorial in The Atlantic. It means what it has always meant, every time a society told a critical mass of its members that their participation was decoration. It means blood. It means whole regions of this country deciding that the social contract is a piece of paper the other side already burned, and they’re under no obligation to honor a corpse.
That’s the alternative. Not inconvenience, not even a bad news cycle. That.
2026-05-15 00:12:00
“I believe in myself. That’s why I commit.” A young skater doesn’t give up trying to land a three-stair kickflip.
2026-05-14 23:12:00
Zendaya co-created a new collection for On, the Swiss fashion company, and Spike Jonze directed this cool promotional video starring the actress. I’ve always loved his aesthetic — along with Michel Gondry, no one makes these types of videos seem “hand-crafted” (in a way that is hard to articulate) more than Jonze.
Tags: Spike Jonze · video · Zendaya