It's Emptywheel Friday, and Marcy Wheeler of emptywheel.net is back to help us wrap up another ridiculously absurd and awful week. We cover the Supreme Court's TPS ruling — which strips protection from hundreds of thousands of Haitians and is dressed up by Alito as something other than what it plainly is: racism with a legal fig leaf. This ruling has a human cost that people need to understand.

Marcy breaks down who's actually running things in the White House right now — Bill Pulte, illegally installed as acting DNI and already firing analysts; Natalie Harp, the gatekeeper to the president's social media diet- and quite likely a whole lot more (eew); and a man who, as Marcy puts it, is rotting in plain sight, mentally and physically, doing whatever the last person in the room tells him to do.

We spend serious time on what I think is one of the most important and under-covered stories going: DOJ's systematic effort to criminalize protest. The Prairie Land sentences — up to 100 years — are shocking. The new Minnesota indictment is terrifying in a different way: it sweeps up organizers, AFL-CIO members, DSA members, and 50501 activists by trying to make "Antifa" into an actual organization on par with the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers. It is not. There is no membership, no dues, no leader, no headquarters. Marcy has an extensive post at emptywheel.net breaking the Minnesota case down in detail. Read it.

We also get into Todd Blanche being ordered by a judge to follow the Epstein Transparency Act, Kushner and Witkoff's suspected cut of the $300 billion Iran reconstruction deal, JD Vance's Nixon rehabilitation tour, the reflecting pool con and manufactured "Antifa vandalism" narrative, Tulsi Gabbard's cult history, and Elon Musk's brief, already-over trillionaire moment.

Buckle up, it a rough and rocky one.

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