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Trump Didn’t Just Break Politics—He Broke Truth

Imagine living the tortured, self-loathing charade that is Donald Trump’s life. Having to create the pleasant fiction that you possess even average intelligence. That you’ve been a successful businessman. That people like you. That you’re glamorous.

We don’t have to imagine. Because it was proven yet again by whatever the hell happened at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner Saturday night. That we’re all living in Donald Trump’s demented daydreams. The constant need for drama. The finding fights everywhere with everyone. Always on edge because of what the next moment may bring.

Donald Trump has lied so endlessly, gaslighted so constantly, shared disinformation so effortlessly, on everything from his election loss in 2020 to winning his club golf tournaments (🤣) to “they’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”

With Trump’s perfidy on tap—plus algorithms deployed by his broligarch, multi-billionaire buds, FoxNews, talk radio, even once semi-reliable media now run by his predator pals—like The Washington Post or CBS News—does anyone feel like they can truly know the truth in the same way we all could just two years ago?

Get The Facilities Out (GTFO) ICE!

We saw it from day one with ICE.

Families ripped apart. Babies separated from parents like America was suddenly auditioning for a dictatorship with flag pins. People snatched off streets, deported into legal black holes, violence normalized in broad daylight while blowhards argued semantics.

The America we thought was our reality, if imperfect—constitutional republic, rule of law, basic moral assumption some things are too grotesque to consider—was shot 10 times on the street in broad daylight in Minneapolis.

It’s why Miles Taylor of DEFIANCE.org and Steve Schmidt of The Save America Movement (SAM) joined me on Amped Up to discuss their newest project, GTFO-ICE—or Get The Facilities Out, ICE. A campaign to organize local residents from communities across the country to prevent the sale of warehouses to ICE, and prevent construction from being completed if already begun.

Because the real goal is, by any means necessary, to prevent these facilities from being transformed into actual concentration camps. I never dreamed I would write that sentence in America.

First Instinct: Don’t Trust Trump

To return to Saturday night, if we’d had a President Reagan, Ford, Bush, hell even a Nixon say someone tried to assassinate them, it wouldn’t cross my mind anything else occurred. Yet with Trump my very first thought was “did he fake it because his polling’s crashed out like Kash Patel after a bad break-up with Jim Beam?”

And as “staged” was trending across social media much of that night, it would seem I’m far from the only one to wonder about the veracity of the official story…because it’s Trump.

Look, Trump is sinking everywhere—politically, morally, historically. His economy is a carnival ride operated by a drunk raccoon, his legal record reads like a mob boss who accidentally left his day-planner at a crime scene, and even his own allies treat him like that guy at the wedding everyone just prays doesn’t grab the mic.

And yet, for all his failures, he’s achieved the ultimate dictator’s goal: he has murdered reality itself. Because once truth is dead, everything else is negotiable. Facts can be vibes. Evidence is just new branding.

The diapered dirigible who lies like most people breathe gets a very strong say in what is real simply by repeating it louder and more often than everyone else.

So what do we know about what really happened? A gunman reportedly stormed security with a shotgun, Secret Service tackled him, a federal agent was shot in his bulletproof vest, and Trump was rushed out. Federal prosecutors have now charged the suspect with the attempted assassination of the president. But, again, here’s the problem: Trump is such a compulsive liar, such a career con man, such a convicted fraudster—with his fingerprints all over everything from January 6th to the Epstein files—nobody knows what to believe.

That’s not because we’re crazy. It’s because he is. And we’re currently stuck living in that cavernous, cretinous, crater of cock-up and cacophony called Trump’s cranium.

Trump’s turned public life into what I call a distraction Ponzi scheme—every bit of bad news requires another manufactured news event even bigger to obscure it. If you appear more times in the Epstein Files than Jesus in the Bible? Start a war with Iran! If your war in Iran is predictably a disaster? Fire Pam Bondi! And on and on we go.

Eventually the entire country’s trapped in a pyramid of bullshit and nobody knows where the foundation is anymore.

Trump is a man who tried to overturn an election he lost, incited January 6th, and according to prosecutors and witnesses, operated like a cheap authoritarian thug buying loyalty by the pound. He lies about things that are literally on tape. He lies when there’s no reason to lie. He lies the way sharks swim—because it’s just their way.

Yes, folks, the “Militarily Top Secret Ballroom” is so top secret Trump just told you everything about it. And it would’ve stopped a shooter! So Trump will travel everywhere in the Militarily Top Secret Ballroom? Will it be like one of those houses on wheels you see on the highway?

Trump’s own biographer has said Trump “creates his own reality,” bending truth to fit whatever protects him in the moment. And once you understand that, you get the real danger: it’s not just corruption, it’s epistemological terrorism. He doesn’t merely want power—he wants to destroy a shared understanding of what power is accountable to.

Trump’s greatest achievement as a would-be dictator hasn’t been January 6 or the pardons or the grift. It’s been convincing millions of people that objective truth itself is multiple choice. That’s how democracies die—not only when the strongman grabs power, but when people can no longer tell whether the fire is real because the arsonist has spent ten years insisting smoke has a liberal bias.

It’s the part corporate media still refuses to confront. Trump isn’t just another corrupt politician, another scandal machine, or another loud authoritarian with woefully inadequate hair and worse instincts. He is the culmination of a decades-long, right-wing project to destroy shared truth so thoroughly that accountability itself becomes impossible.

That’s why independent media matters right now more than ever.

If you’re tired of watching the tech-billionaire broligarchy sanitize this madness, if you’re done with both-sides nonsense while reality itself is being set on fire, become a paid subscriber today. That support makes the deeper dives, the live conversations, and the blunt truth-telling possible.

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This article was originally published on Lawrence Winnerman’s Substack on 4/17/26. It is republished here with permission.

Cliff’s Note: Friends, difficult acts of truth-telling, like this piece, are a key reason BAM exists. (Be prepared, it’s hard reading, as truth often is).

Only you can ensure our truth-telling won’t stop—by subscribing to BAM for $5/month. Join us, and we’ll all make this a more perfect union.

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by Lawrence Winnerman, Blue Amp Media COO

I was eight years old the first time a man decided my body was his to use.

He was a stranger. Some old man in a JCPenney dressing room at a shopping mall. My mother didn’t know him. Nobody knew him. We never caught him. I was a child, and I learned something that afternoon that no child should have to learn: that there are men in the world who see a smaller body and feel entitled to it, and there is an entire civilization prepared to look the other way.

I’m fifty-six now. Five-ten, two-sixty, built like a lumberjack. Nobody looks at me and thinks victim. And yet. I’m an openly gay man. I bottom—and if that word makes you uncomfortable, good, stay with me, because your discomfort is a fraction of what I’m about to talk about. I know what toxic masculinity sounds like from the inside, because it pervades the gay community too—the hierarchy of tops over bottoms, the sorting of men into who penetrates and who receives, the quiet assumption that receiving makes you less. I’ve lived in that hierarchy my entire adult life. I know exactly how the gears turn. The same machinery that sorts men in a bedroom is the machinery that sorts women in a legislature, that sorts bodies in a culture, that produces—reliably, generationally—the system I’m about to describe.

I have standing to make this case. And I mean that in a way that goes deeper than opinion.

Eric Swalwell was arrested by no one. Four women came forward—one of them a twenty-year-old intern who says he raped her—and within a week he resigned from Congress, abandoned his campaign for governor of California, and vanished into the fog of the next news cycle. By May it will be a footnote.

I read the allegations and I didn’t feel outrage. I’m past outrage. What I felt was recognition. The machine that produced what happened to me in that dressing room is the same machine that produced Eric Swalwell, the same machine that protected Jeffrey Epstein for decades, the same machine that right now—today, this week, while you’re reading this—is grinding through legislatures and courtrooms and algorithm-fed rabbit holes to ensure that women, half the human species, remain controllable, available, and silent.

So let me make a case.

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• • •

Count 1: The Predator Class

Every few months, another name surfaces. We perform the ritual—shock, denial, investigation, consequences for some, impunity for most—and then we move on, and we never once talk about the ecosystem that keeps producing the names.

Eric Swalwell. Four women. Sexual misconduct including rape, sexual assault of intoxicated women, unsolicited explicit messages sent via Snapchat. One accuser started interning for him in 2019 when she was twenty years old—hadn’t even graduated from college. The House Ethics Committee opened an investigation; approximately forty-five minutes later, Swalwell announced his resignation. He was a Democrat. He sat on the Intelligence Committee. He went on cable news and talked about accountability.

And here’s the thing about Swalwell that nobody wants to say out loud: Democrats forced him out in a week. As they should have. Al Franken was gone in days. Anthony Weiner, gone. Katie Hill, gone. The left holds its own to account because that’s what accountability looks like. But Matt Gaetz faced a sex trafficking investigation involving a seventeen-year-old and was nominated for Attorney General. Jim Jordan was accused of ignoring sexual abuse of wrestlers when he was an assistant coach at Ohio State and went on to chair the House Judiciary Committee. Donald Trump was found liable for sexual abuse by a civil jury and was elected president. Again. The right doesn’t hold its people to account—not because it can’t, but because it won’t. And the result is a perverse optical illusion: Democratic names dominate the headlines about sexual misconduct because Democrats are the only ones generating consequences. Republican predators stay in office, stay quiet, and stay powerful. In the court of public opinion, it starts to look like the problem belongs to one party—when what’s actually happening is that only one party treats it as a problem at all. The asymmetry isn’t a bug. It’s the strategy. Hold no one accountable, and you never have to explain anything. Let the other side do the right thing, and weaponize their integrity against them.

Jeffrey Epstein. Three million pages of files released in January 2026—two thousand videos, one hundred eighty thousand images. The Department of Justice acknowledged that six million pages may ultimately qualify for release. Communications between Epstein and a vast web of figures in politics, academia, and business continued after he registered as a sex offender. Both parties. All industries. A December 2025 poll found that 91 percent of Democrats, 78 percent of independents, and 74 percent of Republicans wanted the files released. The only people who didn’t want sunlight were the people in the files.

And then there’s the one that should have stopped the world and didn’t. In March 2026, CNN published the results of a months-long investigation into what they called a global “online rape academy”—a pornographic website called Motherless.com hosting more than twenty thousand videos of “sleep content,” which is the sanitized term for footage of men drugging and raping their unconscious partners. A linked Telegram group called “Zzz” had nearly a thousand members actively teaching each other the craft of it. How to select the drug. How to dose it. How to avoid detection. A man in Poland was arrested as a direct result of the reporting.

A thousand men in a chat room, workshopping rape. Twenty thousand videos. Hundreds of thousands of views.

Swalwell, Epstein, the men in that Telegram group—they are the visible tips of something that goes all the way down. A system that produces predators reliably, at scale, and then provides them with legal, cultural, and technological infrastructure to operate. The predator class isn’t a conspiracy. It’s an output.

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• • •

Count 2: The Pipeline

If you have a son under twenty-five, he is one algorithm away from the top of this funnel. I’m not being dramatic. That is what the research says.

It starts with looksmaxxing—a trend in which young men use apps to score their facial attractiveness on the PSL scale, a rating system invented in incel communities that ranks faces using terms like “low-tier normie” and “chadlite.” One looksmaxxing influencer alone racked up more than a hundred million views in 2025. The apps are in the App Store right now. Your kid can download one during lunch. And in case you think this is just vanity with a weird name: looksmaxxing communities actively encourage boys to strike themselves in the face with hammers—to fracture their own facial bones so the bones will, supposedly, grow back stronger and more masculine. Boys are hitting themselves in the face with hammers to meet a beauty standard invented by incels. That’s where the pipeline starts.

The Alan Turing Institute’s Centre for Emerging Technology and Security published a study titled “From Looksmaxxing to Mass Shootings: Radicalisation and Online Misogyny.” The title tells you everything. The pipeline works like this: a boy downloads an app that scores his face. The app uses language and frameworks created by incels. The algorithm feeds him more content. The content gets darker. He moves from TikTok to Discord to Telegram. The communities he finds there are actively directing young men toward incel ideology, neo-Nazi content, and material that glorifies mass shooters and suicide.

All of this is documented. OFCOM—the UK’s communications regulator—published a sixty-five-page report on young people’s engagement with the manosphere. Research in Wiley’s Child and Adolescent Mental Health journal found the manosphere encouraging sexist attitudes in schools, deepening existing inequalities, spreading dangerous messages about mental health. The University of Alabama’s Institute for Human Rights mapped what they call “modern sexism” from its digital roots to its violent endpoints.

The pipeline is designed. It has an architecture. It has an on-ramp that looks like self-help and an off-ramp that looks like a manifesto. And every man who built it is counting on you—personally, specifically you—to assume your son is too smart to fall for it.

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• • •

Count 3: The Legislative Assault

In August 2025, Doug Wilson—pastor of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, a growing denomination with approximately a hundred and fifty congregations—told CNN that the Nineteenth Amendment granting women the right to vote “was a bad idea.”

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth attends a CREC church. His Pentagon spokesman confirmed the affiliation and said Hegseth “very much appreciates many of Mr. Wilson’s writings and teachings.” Democratic congresswomen, several of them military veterans, demanded his resignation.

That’s the Secretary of Defense of the United States, aligned with a church whose leader wants to repeal women’s suffrage. And here’s the part that should keep you up at night: another CREC pastor admitted the quiet part out loud. “I don’t think Christians should make repealing the Nineteenth Amendment their main issue right now,” he said, “because it’s not a winning issue yet.”

Yet.

The word “yet” is doing all the work in that sentence. The strategy is to make fringe ideas seem plausible enough that less extreme shifts toward theocracy and patriarchy seem reasonable by comparison. Move the Overton window so far that taking away a woman’s right to vote sounds radical, but taking away her right to control her own body sounds like a compromise.

Meanwhile, in state legislatures across the country, a study by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace found that 11.85 percent of state legislators belonged to far-right Facebook groups. That small minority sponsored 66 percent of all anti-abortion bills and 62 percent of all anti-LGBTQ bills introduced in their legislative sessions. A fraction of the political class is driving the overwhelming majority of the legislative assault on bodily autonomy—and they’re doing it in gerrymandered districts where their positions are wildly out of step with public opinion.

And the economic data is unambiguous. Women in states with robust reproductive health care access—contraceptive coverage, expanded Medicaid, public funding for medically necessary procedures—have higher earnings, face less occupational segregation, and are less likely to be trapped in part-time work. Every dollar spent on contraceptive services saves three dollars in pregnancy-related care. Reproductive access is the economic foundation on which women build independent lives. Strip it away and you strip away the independence. That’s the point. That has always been the point.

And then there’s Project 2025—the Heritage Foundation’s nine-hundred-page blueprint for the next Republican administration—which proposes treating gender education as a sex offense and makes zero reference to the rates of violence targeting LGBTQ people. Nine hundred pages. They had room. They chose silence.

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• • •

Count 4: The Structural Failure

In April 2024, the New York Court of Appeals overturned Harvey Weinstein’s landmark sexual assault conviction on a 4–3 vote. The technicality: testimony from “prior bad acts” witnesses shouldn’t have been admitted because it served “only to establish defendant’s propensity to commit the crimes charged.”

Sit with that for a second. A court ruled that evidence showing a rapist had a pattern of raping was too prejudicial to the rapist.

Judge Madeline Singas wrote in dissent that the decision continued “a disturbing trend of overturning juries’ guilty verdicts in cases involving sexual violence” and perpetuated “outdated notions of sexual violence” that “allow predators to escape accountability.” In the retrial, Weinstein was convicted on one count, acquitted on another. Partial justice for a man dozens of women accused over decades. The system working exactly as it was designed to work.

And look—between 2016 and 2022, state legislatures across the country introduced more than three thousand bills aimed at gender equity and workplace safety. They passed 382 of them. Pay equity, harassment training, reporting procedures, leave policies, elimination of the nondisclosure agreements that protect predators. Real progress, passed by real legislators who fought for every vote.

The legal system still cannot reliably convict a rapist.

Me Too changed the culture. It changed who we believe, how quickly we respond, what we’re willing to say out loud. But it did not change the machine. The machine still runs. The courtrooms still fail. The statutes of limitations still expire. The burden of proof still falls on the body that was violated, not the body that did the violating. And every time a conviction gets overturned on a technicality, every man in that Telegram group, every lobbyist drafting an abortion ban, every influencer teaching boys to score women’s faces on a numerical scale receives the same message: the system is yours.

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• • •

Count 5: The Global Playbook

Everything I’ve described so far has been American. The dysfunction, the polarization, the broken institutions. But the playbook is global, and if you don’t see that, you’re looking at the trees and missing the forest that’s on fire.

In November 2024, RAND published a study concluding that “regressive ideas on gender and gender equality can be a useful proxy metric for democratic backsliding and authoritarian rise.” The United States government’s own Women, Peace, and Security strategy recommends treating misogyny—online or codified in policy—as an early indicator of authoritarian consolidation.

Read that again. Our own government’s own framework says: when misogyny shows up in law, authoritarianism is coming. Every time. Without exception.

Russia: Vladimir Putin positioned himself as the guardian of “traditional Christian values,” told women their place was at home raising children, and systematically rolled back domestic violence protections. Turkey: Erdoğan withdrew from the Istanbul Convention on gender-based violence, reversed secular marriage requirements, and opened the legal door to underage marriages and polygamy. Hungary: Orbán moved to ban abortion and restrict LGBTQ rights as cornerstones of his “illiberal democracy.” Poland: the Law and Justice party packed courts with political allies, then used those compromised judges to eliminate abortion rights—against the clear will of the Polish majority. Brazil: Bolsonaro wasn’t even particularly religious before his campaign, but evangelical churches powered his 2018 victory. Once in office, six of his twenty-four cabinet members were evangelical Protestants who restricted LGBTQ rights, banned gender discussions in classrooms, and cast doubt on the need for gender equality policies altogether.

The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace published the definitive analysis in November 2024: patriarchy and authoritarianism are “mutually reinforcing political projects.” Their research demonstrated that voters with sexist attitudes are significantly more likely to support authoritarian leaders—even after controlling for political ideology. A 2017 European study found that traditional gender views predicted support for radical-right parties across twenty-three countries.

Harvard Kennedy School researchers put it plainly: authoritarian leaders seek to “displace democracy with hierarchies controlled by male elites and to re-confine women in traditional roles.” They minimize women’s equal rights, frame equality as niche identity politics, and they do this because patriarchy is the structural foundation on which authoritarian power is built. The hierarchy of men over women is the load-bearing wall. Pull it out and the authoritarian project collapses.

Which is why every one of these regimes came for women’s rights first. Or simultaneously with the power grab. Never after. The sequence is the tell.

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• • •

Count 6: The Foundation

Now the data. And I need you to stay with me here, because this is where the floor drops out.

Georgetown University’s Institute for Women, Peace and Security studied the relationship between women’s status and democratic health—free elections, free association, checks on government power—across dozens of countries and found them strongly correlated. The Varieties of Democracy project, spanning a hundred countries over four decades, demonstrated that women’s political empowerment directly strengthens democratic participation. When women lead, cooperative governance increases, peacemaking improves, social welfare expands, economies grow. This is not ideology. This is the data set.

The economics alone should end every argument anyone has ever had about this. McKinsey projected a one-trillion-dollar gain for the global economy from closing gaps in women’s health care, including reproductive health. One trillion. The UNFPA documented that every one-percentage-point increase in gender-based violence in sub-Saharan Africa correlates with up to an 8 percent decline in economic activity, driven primarily by drops in female employment. Intimate partner violence costs the global economy an estimated 5 percent of GDP—five trillion dollars, every year, hemorrhaging out of civilization like an open wound that we just keep walking past.

The Brennan Center for Justice found that more than 40 percent of state legislators have experienced threats. Women legislators are three to four times more likely to face explicitly sexualized abuse. Women are being threatened out of public life. And the threats are working. And the men making the threats know the threats are working. And the rest of us are watching it happen.

Women’s freedom is the foundation on which democratic societies are built. Every piece of data confirms it. Every country that has tried to build democracy while constraining women has failed. Every authoritarian who has consolidated power has done so by attacking women’s autonomy first. The correlation is so strong, so consistent, so thoroughly documented across decades of research and dozens of countries that to deny it at this point is to deny gravity.

If women are not equally free—equally free, with the same control over their bodies and their futures and their participation in civic life—then this whole experiment in self-governance is bullshit. I mean that word precisely. I mean it as a factual assessment of the evidence I have just laid in front of you. Democracy that does not include the full freedom of women is a word with nothing behind it—a promise made to half the species and broken every single day.

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• • •

The Verdict

Six counts. Predators at the top. A radicalization pipeline feeding boys into the machine from the bottom. A legislative apparatus stripping rights in the middle. A legal system that fails to convict. A global playbook that repeats the same pattern on every continent. And a mountain of data proving that when you attack women’s freedom, you are attacking democracy itself—at the foundation, at the load-bearing wall, at the thing without which the whole structure is a lie.

I’ve made my case. Now I’m talking to men.

Women already know all of this. They’ve been living it. They’ve been screaming it. They are exhausted from explaining it to men who nod sympathetically and go back to their lives. I am done watching that happen.

I’m talking to you. The man reading this right now. The husband, the father, the brother, the son, the friend, the colleague, the guy who considers himself one of the good ones.

Are you fighting for the women in your life? I don’t mean performing allyship on social media. I don’t mean the pin on your jacket or the post you shared that one time. Are you intervening when the joke gets told at dinner? Are you calling your state legislator when an abortion ban hits committee? Are you monitoring what your son is watching, who he’s following, what pipeline is pulling him toward a chat room full of men who think consent is optional? Are you showing up at school board meetings? Are you voting in every single election—every one, including the ones that bore you—like your daughter’s freedom depends on it?

Because it does.

Are you risking something? Losing something? Spending social capital, burning a friendship, making yourself uncomfortable in a room full of men who expect your silence? Because if you aren’t doing those things, you aren’t fighting. You’re watching. And watching is a choice.

I know what the machine does. I learned it when I was eight years old, in a dressing room in a JCPenney, from a man no one ever caught. I’ve lived inside the toxic masculinity that sorts men into hierarchies of dominance and submission and calls it natural order. And I am telling you—from inside the experience, from inside the evidence, from inside the cold fury that comes from knowing both at once—that the time for choosing sides is practically over.

The forces arrayed against women’s freedom are organized. They are funded. They are global, patient, and strategic. They have a legislative agenda and a judicial strategy. They have a radicalization pipeline that starts with a face-scoring app and ends with men in a chat room teaching each other how to rape. They have a Secretary of Defense who attends a church whose pastor wants to repeal women’s suffrage. They have Project 2025. They have three million pages of Epstein files proving that the most powerful men in the world operated a sexual abuse network for decades with functional impunity. They have momentum.

What do you have?

If the answer is good intentions and a vague sense that things will work out—then I need you to hear me very clearly.

You are a coward. You are a stupid, selfish, ugly, mean, small, weak, cowardly coward.

You are watching a war—a real war, fought every single day on the bodies of women and girls and queer people—and you are choosing comfort over duty, passivity over action, your own ease over someone else’s survival. History will judge you. Your daughters will judge you. And they will be right.

Every generation plants the seeds of the fights the next generation will have to wage. The fights we will be having for the next hundred years are being seeded right now. In legislatures. In courtrooms. In algorithms. In churches. In chat rooms. In the silence of men who know better and do nothing.

Pick up a weapon. It doesn’t have to be a literal one—make it your voice, your vote, your time, your money, your willingness to be uncomfortable, your refusal to let one more joke slide, one more policy pass, one more boy disappear into the pipeline while you tell yourself it won’t happen to your kid.

The war is already here. It has been here. Women have been fighting it alone for long enough.

What side are you on?

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David Shuster is back with his Weekly Update—and folks, this just might be the funniest one he’s done yet. The internet handed us five absolute gems this week: AI parodies, song spoofs, and the kind of viral satire that reminds you the funniest people in America right now aren’t on cable—they’re on your phone.

Iranian AI even found a way to make fun of Trump for his threat to “annihilate” them.

One clip alone has racked up 11 million views. Another is a song parody so cutting it should come with a warning label. And the targets? Let’s just say a certain FBI director is having a very, very bad week.

We’re not going to spoil the countdown. But the top two are both song parodies, and one of them might actually ruin a beloved comfort-food delivery service for you forever. The number one entry? A musical farewell to a high-ranking federal official whose only crimes were absenteeism, fine wines, expensive steaks, and watching too much hockey.

Hit play. Laugh out loud. Then send it to the most wound-up person you know.

Cliff’s Note

Hey folks! Shuster’s one of the sharpest minds out there, and he’s here because you keep us in the fight. So we dropped our subscriptions to $60 a year/$5 a month—less than a sandwich to save democracy!

If you can’t do a paid subscription, how about tossing us a few $ at Ko-fi? Every dollar’s another broken story or gripping Live w/ a great guest!

Subscribe. Donate. Share. We’re here because of you.

— Cliff

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Cliff’s Note: Quick word from me before you read this.

Ellie Leonard’s sees what corporate media avoids and covers it. She’s poised to be one of the greats—and you’re reading her here first.

We can only publish Ellie with your support. We dropped our rate to $60—$5/month—or less than a bad sandwich. Or toss us some $ on Ko-fi. Every dollar funds work that’ll expose Trump, Bezos, & their cronies.

Read Ellie. Back her. We’re only here because you are.

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— Cliff

by Ellie Leonard, Blue Amp Media Contributing Editor

Since his 2015 Presidential campaign Donald Trump has made no secret about how he feels about mainstream media, otherwise known as “legacy media,” outlets like CNN, NBC, CBS, the New York Times, et al. He taught us the phrase “fake news” and often refers to the “lamestream media” and the “failing New York Times.” As our country rose up post-George Floyd he sic’d the police on Black Lives Matter protestors and blamed the media for false coverage, leading to threats against journalists and news agencies.

“Sir, I am a journalist covering this,” Ms. Davidson turned to walk away, and the officer shoved her in the back, causing her to trip and hit her head against a fire hydrant, she said. She was not hurt, she added, because she was wearing a helmet she had bought while getting skateboarding equipment for a nephew.- The New York Times

In 2022, filmmakers Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, along with journalist and producer Ronan Farrow, released “Endangered,” a documentary that focused on the threats of violence against journalists in the U.S. and abroad. These were the same journalists that Trump was calling the “enemy of the people” shortly after entering office in 2017.

These weren’t hollow threats, and they never have been. In 2002 Daniel Pearl, an American journalist who worked for the Wall Street Journal, was kidnapped by jihadist militants while he was on his way to what he had expected would be an interview with Pakistani religious cleric Mubarak Ali Gilani in the city of Karachi. He was beheaded.

Jamal Ahmad Hamza Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist and dissident who worked for the Washington Post, was assassinated at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018 by agents of the Saudi government at the behest of the Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Donald Trump recently secured a “historic” $600 billion investment commitment in Saudi Arabia. Bin Salman was never charged.

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In Russia, there is even a Wikipedia page dedicated to all the journalists killed in the line of duty, many under suspicious circumstances, including multiple contract killings, being beaten to death in the streets, kidnappings, and murder in their own beds.

It isn’t uncommon for journalists to be threatened, for their families to be threatened, but being threatened by a Presidential administration is something new. But despite everything, we stood by our news media, who seemed to present a stalwart take on current events.

Fast-forward to 2026.

We live in a time unrecognizable by our 1990s and early 2000s predecessors, when true and unbiased news media like PBS and NPR are the “enemy,” when major journalists are losing their jobs for speaking the truth, when academic institutions like Harvard and Columbia Universities are forced to teach “only just so,” and to “only just you, but certainly not you.” News media like the Associated Press are banned from White House press briefings, a public platform meant to be available to the American public in an informative and unbiased setting, for taking a stance on calling the Gulf of Mexico...the “Gulf of Mexico.”

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Major news outlets like the Washington Post, owned by billionaire Trump supporter Jeff Bezos, are pulling their presidential endorsements (they’ve endorsed Democrats only since 1976) and declaring that the Opinion section will now cover only “personal liberties and free markets,” leaving viewpoints that oppose these pillars to be “published by other authors.” This is a clear stance that aligns with the new administration.

Both the Washington Post Opinions Editor, David Shipley, and Associate Editor, David Maraniss resigned immediately. Maraniss had worked at the Post for more than four decades.

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But unfortunately for the American people, money speaks louder than truth, and we’re starting to see a shift in the news media that we relied on and trusted. It’s not the “fake news.” It’s not the “lamestream media” or “MSDNC” that Trump touts. And despite what he claims, the New York Times has more subscribers than ever. But in order to stay in that briefing room, in order to please an administration that threatens to pull funds and dismantle journalistic infrastructure left and right, corporate newsrooms are ceding to authority, if only to survive.

We saw this with Jake Tapper’s recent book Original Sin, a Tonya-Harding-like kneecap to an administration that let us rest and gave us our jobs and livelihoods back post-COVID. And for what? We just spent four years complaining that the Right wouldn’t let the 2020 election and claims of “stop the steal” go. And now here we are, Jake.

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We’re seeing major journalists of color let go from legacy news media, people like Joy-Ann Reid and Katie Phang at MSNBC, in greater numbers than their white counterparts, as corporations dismantle their diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) departments to bootlick Washington.

Which brings me to the point of this essay, and why we’re all here in the first place. In the wave of threats, and ass-kissing, and money, and CEOs guiding the headlines that land on our proverbial breakfast tables on Sunday morning: we’ve all become the journalists we want to see in the world.

Pardon the cliché: we became the change.

Now it’s all of us, including the major anchors and journalists banished by legacy media—Katie Phang, Jim Acosta, Don Lemon, Rick Wilson and the Lincoln Project, Aaron Parnas, Joy-Ann Reid, Scott MacFarlane, Blue Amp Media, Wajahat Ali, Zev Shalev—along with authors, media personalities, comedians, politicians, and voices big and small, who are telling the stories. And we’re not just telling them, we’re actually a part of them, on the ground, talking to people, hitting record, and showing news as it happens.

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This weekend is the annual White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, a lush, black-tie affair filled with the biggest names in journalism, along with a long list of iconic hosts, though notable that only four of those were women. Donald Trump has made it a point to never attend. Though not the only one—Reagan skipped to heal from an assassination attempt—Trump’s absence was met with relief, comic and otherwise. This year, however, he plans on attending for the first time, a decision met with ire and a rash of boycott-led alternative events, one of which yours truly plans on attending. The sycophants will stay, adorned in Mar-a-Lago chic, atop My Pillows, and wading through Alex Jones’ tears that smell slightly of onion.

The rest of us? We’ll dance a little, eat some tiny food, probably go out for the real drinks somewhere after. But in the meantime, we’ll be suspect of Trump’s “new media,” purposely cultivated and sculpted in the halls of Project 2025. But not because they once weren’t telling the truth. Not because what we saw on TV and in the newspaper didn’t align with the biggest heads in Washington once upon a time. But because Trump and his cabinet got to all of them, with threats of dismantling the fourth branch of government, the free press, what makes America really great, meant to inform the public and hold those in power accountable.

And that’s just what we’re doing.

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Broadcasting live from the floor of the Cincinnati airport — yes, Cliff was sitting on the terminal floor at CVG—Cliff Schecter and David Shuster sit down with legendary Democratic strategist Joe Trippi for the kind of conversation you only get to have when the ground under the political map is shifting so quickly you think you’re experiening an earthquake.

• Tucker Carlson apologizing live for “misleading” people into voting for Trump.

• Marjorie Taylor Greene calling for the 25th Amendment.

• Alex Jones wants Trump removed, he thinks he’s “crazy.”

• Ohio Lyft drivers rant against Trump unprompted—or, Cliff’s trip to the airport!

The MAGA coalition isn’t cracking — it’s coming apart in public, in real time, and the question is no longer if it collapses but how far it takes the Republican Party with it.

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Trippi brings the receipts that turn the vibes into a political earthquake. Trump’s approval with independents has cratered to 27% — a number not seen since Nixon was resigning. The “double haters” who normally sit out midterms are voting 58–20 for Democrats, an unprecedented break. Latino support is moving at a scale veteran strategist Mike Madrid calls the largest he’s ever measured. Iowa is in play in ways the Beltway hasn’t caught up to. So is Ohio, Maine, Alabama — and even Mississippi is in single digits.

Trippi, who’s been running national campaigns since 1979, has a one-sentence verdict: “I have not seen anything like this in the entire time I’ve been doing this.” What he says next — about how big the 2026 wave actually can get, how Trump tries to steal it anyway, and which 2028 candidate is already running the right play — is the reason you need to watch the whole hour.

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By David Shuster

American capitalism has long been exceptionally greedy. Rapaciousness, after all, is as old as commerce itself. But in the United States under Trump, even the faintest pretense of embarrassment has been obliterated. What was once done with a wink is now performed with a trumpet.

Consider the latest performance at the Magic Kingdom. The newly anointed chief executive officer of the Walt Disney company, Josh D’Amaro, has been awarded a compensation package worth $45 million a year.

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At the same time, D’Amaro just signed off on the firing of 1,000 company employees, as if they were defective bolts rattling loose on Space Mountain.

Disney leadership is speaking solemnly about “efficiencies,” the most elastic of modern corporate euphemisms.

But let’s not stop there. Disney has contrived, by perfectly legal means, to pay an effective federal income tax rate of zero. Zero! It is a figure that would have astonished even the most creative accountants of the Gilded Age. Meanwhile, Disney last year accepted 4.7 billion dollars in U.S. government rebates—public money, extracted from the very citizenry now asked to applaud the firings and layoffs.

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And now, to reassure analysts and investors on Wall Street that Disney’s relatively anemic stock performance is getting a boost, Disney is planning to spend $7 billion buying back its own stock. The chief virtue of this maneuver will be to inflate Disney stock prices, further lifting the fortunes of Disney stockholders and executives.

If this is not greed, then the word has lost all meaning.

Conservative corporate apologists, of course, are already clearing their throats. They insist, with the enthusiasm of Maurice from Beauty and the Beast instructing his daughter Belle, that each of these acts is defensible in isolation.

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The pay is “performance based.” The layoffs are “strategic.” The taxes are “optimized.” The buybacks are “value-enhancing.” Thus Disney, like other modern corporations, gets to disassemble its conduct into a series of bloodless abstractions, each scrubbed clean of consequence.

But many Americans, despite our nation’s embrace of obscene leaders and corporate greed, still have the vulgar habit of considering the whole of our society. And we can see that at Disney and countless other corporate icons, the game has been rigged. The winnings flow upwards, the losses downward, and the Disney financiers and speculators congratulate themselves on their skills and dexterity.

Ironically, there was once was a time in America, improbable as it now sounds, when captains of industry exhibited some restraint. Take Mitt Romney’s father George Romney, who ran American Motors in an era when the word “millionaire” still retained a whiff of astonishment.

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Romney voluntarily declined $268,000 in pay over five years—roughly a fifth of what he might have taken—and in 1960 refused a $100,000 bonus on the grounds that it would push him above a self-imposed ceiling of $225,000. He had previously informed his board, in what today would be diagnosed as moral derangement, that no executive needed to earn more than that.

George Romney was no monk. He lived well, ate well, and doubtless slept soundly. But he labored under the conviction that there existed some relationship—however tenuous—between what corporate leaders took for themselves and the general health of the society around them.

Such thinking has since been annihilated.

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At the Magic Kingdom, and throughout American capitalism, we have erected and embraced a system in which excess is not just tolerated but celebrated, in which the ability to extract the maximum possible sum is regarded as a mark of genius, and in which any appeal to proportion or fairness is dismissed as the whining of the liberal left.

And it’s not just about CEO pay, worker layoffs, and obscene corporate tax rates. Most Americans who have visited Disney World in recent years will tell you that the park has become exceptionally expensive. A Mickey’s Chocolate Covered Ice Cream Bar now costs $6.50 each. That’s more than twice the price from 15 years ago and far exceeds the rate of inflation.

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A Mickey pretzel has gone up by 118% and now costs $8.25. And never mind giving your kid a soft pretzel or ice cream treat, a basic “Mickey Ears hat” has also soared well beyond inflation. 15 years ago, it was $11.95. Now, the mouse hat will set you back $20 plus taxes.

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Just getting into the theme park has outpaced inflation. Over the past ten years, the price of admission has doubled.

The price gouging and corporate profit taking at Disney is obscene. And this similar corporate strategy across America has a long term cost on our basic humanity. The U.S. labor force is perpetually on edge. Mental health challenges and diagnoses have risen significantly—reaching historic levels in the U.S.—in particular due to distress among young people and working-age adults. Meanwhile, the U.S. treasury keeps being treated as a trough for the billionaire class. And the gulf grows between those who make government and business decisions, and those who endure them.

Trust, that fragile and necessary lubricant of any functioning democracy, is evaporating. Cynicism is rushing in to take its place.

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And still the show goes on, brighter than ever, the music louder, the costumes more extravagant. One is reminded of that famous Disney commercial with the music of “When you wish upon a star,” in which a grinning victorious, famous NFL winner is asked, “You’ve just won the Super Bowl—where are you going next?” The answer, delivered with rehearsed jubilation, is always the same: “I’m going to Disney World.”

Today, in this era of unabashed greed, the question and answer should be altered. “Corporate CEO, you’ve just shed a thousand workers, paid no taxes, and secured yourself a king’s ransom—where are you going next?” The answer, stripped of its confetti, would be just as predictable: “straight to the bank, by way of Disney World.”

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RFK Jr.’s “Re-Parenting” Fantasy Is As Dangerous As It Sounds

by Cliff Schecter

There are bad ideas, there are worse ones seemingly produced by that monster truck filled with congealed month-old-cheese-whiz Donald Trump calls an IQ, and then there’s RFK Jr. Here he goes again, he’s talking, so he’s saying something racist or stupid or ignorant or conspiratorial—usually all four!

I mean, JFC, has anyone not reached a point where they’d like to duct tape the guy’s mouth shut to just not hear the noise anymore? And, no, I’m not talking about the nails-on-a-chalkboard voice caused by inherited spasmodic dysphonia. I mean the idiocy exiting Jr.’s pie-hole on a seemingly quotidian basis.

I never thought I’d see someone publicly pull as many “ideas” straight out their arse as Trump til Jr. got his motor-mouth going. And I met the jack-wit once about a dozen years ago. I don’t know what kind of “cerebral event” struck him in the time since—lightning?—because, sure, he was a weird guy back then.

But just a garden-variety numb nuts. Not a carnival barker on such a titanic level that bats must be searching their caves for all their disappeared feces residing in his dome.

Just like Ashkenazi Jews had a special super-power that protected them from COVID, per the bear-cub-killing, whale-head-chainsawing, dog-eating, and now, apparently, raccoon-penis-wielding doofus. And, no, I didn’t make that last one up—or any of ‘em, for that matter—though I wish I had.

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Well, forget the Jews, now it’s Black folks who are the problem for RFK. Or their kids, to be specific. You see Black parents—per this human marriage-vow apocalypse—have pumped their children with so many chemicals, they now simply must be “re-parented.” Which I guess means raised by White parents? I know, we’ll come back to this sick comment in one sec, I promise.

But it would be a disservice to not point out: A) RFK Jr is wrong, as he’s always wrong (White kids, for example, are five times more likely to use anti-depressants than Black youth). So no final jeopardy for you, canine chewer!

B) Jr. tried to deny he said “re-parenting,” and then his quote was masterfully read back to him—to his face in a hearing—by Rep. Terri Sewell. Once again exposing RFK The Lesser as not only a fraud, but a liar.

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Ok, let’s return to the idea itself, something so grotesque you almost have to check if you accidentally wandered into a rejected plot line of a Black Mirror episode.

Jr. thought “re-parenting” Black children was a good idea to introduce now—or ever. In the year 2026, with the full, ugly weight of American history sitting there like a blinking red warning light—like what he’d see after the smack really kicked in. This echoes some of the darkest chapters in our history of state control over Black families. The kinda comment that makes you do a double take, a triple take, and then wonder how this schmendrick gets his pants on in the morning without complex math.

Worse, RFK Jr. wraps these ideas in the gauzy language of “wellness” and “helping people,” as if slapping a yoga mat and a rosemary mocha smoothie on top of something deeply disturbing suddenly renders it enlightened. It’s a worldview that imagines “wellness farms” and government intervention as a kind of benevolent reset button for other people’s lives—specifically, it seems, lives he doesn’t understand and has no business trying to control.

Mao and Pol Pot had some ideas like this. Worked out just great.

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It’s racial paternalism hiding behind the skirt of compassion, the kind that always leads to policies where those in power decide they know better than entire communities about how to raise their children based on a prejudiced view of…those entire communities.

See Native American “boarding schools.” Or slavery justified as a “public good,” because only Whites could raise their kids right. History tells us where the road leads, and spoiler alert: it’s a helluva lot closer to perdition than healing.

What makes the moment even more telling is how it again exposes the broader rot in the MAGA-adjacent ecosystem of billionaire and generational-wealth predators. A world where self-help pseudoscience, extreme religious hocus-pocus, cult-like conspiracy thinking, and authoritarian impulses blend together into a toxic sludge of heroin and steroids.

Sorry, that last part was RFK Jr.’s diet for 16 years. My bad.

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The idea that government—or any self-appointed savior class—should step in and “fix” families based on the warped, elitist criteria of The Epstein Class and the Epstein adjacent (RFK Jr. cheated on one of his wives so often she committed suicide) isn’t just offensive; it’s dangerous. The same mentality justified everything from forced assimilation to mass incarceration policies that ripped families apart. It’s what leads some to justify attacking Iran to help its people—ya know, the “we had to the destroy the village to save it” types—and cut programs for struggling families because of some bs about “dependency” spouted by drug addicts, child rapists, and lobbyists for mass-murdering companies and countries.

And yet here we are. A man who wields enormous influence over public health casually tossing this garbage out like it’s a TED-Talk idea, instead of the equivalent of something you wipe off your shoe.

They only get away with this if no one stops them.

RFK Jr. didn’t just say something outrageous—he revealed how far some in power are willing to go when they think nobody will fight back.

That’s where we come in.

Paid Community Members make our work possible—the deeper dives, the real accountability, and the kind of blunt truth corporate media avoids. Without the support, sadly, these pieces stop getting written, as we lack the funds to carry on.

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Cliff’s Note: This is one of the most important pieces we've published on BAM. Dr. Eric Lullove’s done something no-one else has—mapped the surveillance architecture Palantir’s quietly built inside US healthcare.

Part 2 drops the other shoe: who owns the companies auditing your doctor's claims, & what private equity gets from each denial. Support us so we can keep doing this crucial work for just $60/yr. A coffee a month.

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Thank you 🙏

—Cliff

by Eric Lullove, DPM Blue Amp Media Medical Contributing Editor

In Part 1 of this series, I mapped how Palantir Technologies—a company born from Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) seed funding—has embedded itself across virtually every level of the federal health data infrastructure, from hospital AI platforms to a $90 million blanket purchase agreement that gives every Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) agency access to Palantir’s Foundry platform through a single procurement vehicle. I documented how Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) used that infrastructure to access Medicaid enrollment records, and how a New York City public hospital system paid Palantir to scan physician notes for missed billing opportunities.

This piece examines the other side of that architecture: the Medicare and Medicaid audit contractor ecosystem—the programs that generate the data Palantir’s platforms are built to integrate. Who are the companies reviewing your claims? Who owns them? And what financial incentives shape their behavior?

These are not separate stories. They are the same story.

Understanding the Audit Hierarchy

Most physicians understand that audits by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) exist and that they are unpleasant. Far fewer understand the specific structure of the audit contractor system, who owns those contractors, and how the financial incentives embedded in each program shape the behavior of auditors reviewing their claims.

Let me build the map from the bottom up.

Photo by Pixabay / Pexels (free license). The clinical documentation that feeds the audit contractor ecosystem.

CMS operates what it calls a layered audit system. At the least severe end sits the Targeted Probe and Educate (TPE) program, administered by Medicare Administrative Contractors (MACs). TPE is nominally educational—it is designed to identify billing errors through focused review and correct them through provider education, not punitive recovery. The mechanism involves up to three rounds of claim review; significant improvement in the first or second round terminates the process. Failure to improve by the third round triggers escalation to 100 percent prepayment review, extrapolation, or referral to a Recovery Auditor.[1][2]

Recovery Audit Contractors (RACs) are the next level. These are contingency-fee contractors—they are paid a percentage of what they recover, historically ranging from 9 percent to 20 percent of identified overpayments.[3] This financial structure is not incidental. It is the mechanism that drove the aggressive, litigation-provoking behavior of RAC contractors in the 2010s, when CMS faced a severe backlog of appeals from providers contesting RAC findings. CMS has since modified the program, but the contingency fee structure remains.

Above RACs in severity are the Unified Program Integrity Contractors (UPICs), which represent the most consequential audit instrument available to CMS short of a criminal referral. UPICs are not primarily concerned with billing errors. They are investigating fraud. They can impose payment suspensions, extrapolate overpayments statistically across your entire claim history, refer cases to the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the HHS Office of Inspector General (OIG), and recommend exclusion from Medicare and Medicaid programs entirely.[4]

Supplemental Medical Review Contractors (SMRCs) operate in parallel, conducting targeted medical reviews on specific billing patterns CMS has flagged. They can and do refer to UPICs when they identify what they characterize as systemic problems.

The newest program—and in many respects the most consequential structural shift in Medicare payment integrity in decades—is the Wasteful and Inappropriate Service Reduction (WISeR) Model, which launched January 1, 2026. I will address WISeR in its own section below, because it warrants particular attention.

Who Are the UPIC Contractors?

The UPIC program divides the United States into five geographic jurisdictions, currently operated by three companies.[5][6] Understanding who these companies are—and, critically, what their corporate lineage looks like—is essential context for any provider navigating an active UPIC investigation.

CoventBridge Inc. holds the Midwest jurisdiction, covering Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio, and Wisconsin. CoventBridge is not an organically formed program integrity firm. It is the direct successor to AdvanceMed Corporation—which was itself originally a subsidiary of Computer Sciences Corp. (CSC), a major defense contractor. In 2011, NCI Inc., a government IT firm, purchased AdvanceMed from CSC for $62 million.[7] NCI subsequently rebranded to Empower AI, and the UPIC contract was spun out under the CoventBridge name, backed by Harwood Private Equity and J.O. Hambro Capital Management. This matters because a Senate Finance Committee letter to CMS, written when AdvanceMed was still owned by CSC, specifically flagged the conflict of interest in having a contractor evaluate the work of its own corporate parent.[8] That structural tension—private equity–backed firms conducting quasi–law enforcement Medicare audits—has not been resolved. It has been privatized further.

Qlarant Integrity Solutions LLC holds the West and Southwest jurisdictions—twenty states plus territories.[9] Qlarant is structurally more complex than it appears. It operates through multiple legal entities: Qlarant Integrity Solutions LLC (the UPIC and fraud/waste/abuse work), Qlarant Quality Solutions Inc. (formerly Delmarva Foundation for Medical Care, a nonprofit with roots in CMS quality improvement contracting), and Qlarant Commercial Solutions Inc. (formerly Health Watch Inc.).[10] Qlarant also holds the Investigations Medicare Drug Integrity Contractor (I-MEDIC) contract for Parts C and D fraud nationwide, and the Plan Program Integrity MEDIC (PPI MEDIC) contract. A single corporate family, structured through multiple subsidiaries, holds UPIC, drug integrity, and plan integrity contracts simultaneously across the majority of the western United States.

SafeGuard Services LLC (SGS) holds two jurisdictions: the Northeast and the Southeast.[11] SGS is a private company with limited public disclosure. It is, operationally, the UPIC for approximately half the American population.

The RAC Contractor Structure

Recovery Audit Contractors are currently dominated by a single entity with a private equity ownership chain that warrants close examination.

Cotiviti GOV Services LLC now holds RAC contracts for Regions 3, 4, and 5—the majority of the country—following an April 2025 award by CMS.[12] Cotiviti GOV Services is a subsidiary of Cotiviti Inc., which is itself owned by Veritas Capital, in partnership with KKR, following a 2024 recapitalization.[13] To understand what this ownership structure means, follow the acquisition trail: Veritas Capital’s portfolio company Verscend Technologies acquired Cotiviti Holdings in 2018 for $4.9 billion, combining two payment accuracy analytics firms under a single private equity platform.[14] Veritas has previously owned Truven Health Analytics, GE Healthcare’s Value-Based Care Division, and athenahealth.[15] Veritas describes its investment thesis as identifying companies whose products and services are “mission-critical” to government and commercial customers—companies that are structurally difficult to replace once embedded. Cotiviti GOV Services, as the primary Medicare RAC contractor, fits that description exactly.

Performant Recovery Inc. (NASDAQ: PFMT) continues to hold RAC Regions 1 and 2, along with the nationwide Durable Medical Equipment (DME) and Home Health/Hospice RAC contract.[16] It is, in effect, a publicly traded company whose business model is contingency-fee recovery from Medicare providers.

The statistical contractor for Comprehensive Error Rate Testing (CERT) and Payment Error Rate Measurement (PERM) programs is the Lewin Group—an entity that simultaneously produces health policy research used to inform CMS payment policy and serves as the statistical methodology backbone for the programs measuring the accuracy of those payments.[17] The Lewin Group is a subsidiary of Health Management Associates, itself a subsidiary of Optum Health, which is owned by UnitedHealth Group. The single largest private health insurer in the United States owns the statistical contractor that measures Medicare payment error rates.

The statistical contractor that measures Medicare payment error rates is owned by the largest private health insurer in the United States.

The MACs and TPE Infrastructure

The MACs that administer TPE audits are themselves a mixed ownership landscape. Noridian Healthcare Solutions is a nonprofit, functioning as the MAC for the JF jurisdiction (Arizona, Washington) and the JH jurisdiction (Oklahoma, Texas). Palmetto GBA is a subsidiary of BlueCross BlueShield of South Carolina. Novitas Solutions is a public company. WPS Government Health Administrators is a nonprofit based in Wisconsin.[18]

MACs are the ground-level administrators of Medicare fee-for-service. They set Local Coverage Determinations (LCDs) that define what documentation is required to support payment for services in their jurisdiction. An LCD variance between MAC jurisdictions—where the same service requires different documentation depending solely on geography—is not a clinical determination. It is an administrative artifact of a contractor-driven system.

The WISeR Model: Prior Authorization at Scale, with AI and Contingency Incentives

Photo by Pixabay / Pexels (free license). The digital architecture behind AI-driven prior authorization.

WISeR, launched January 1, 2026, and running through December 31, 2031, represents the most significant structural shift in Medicare payment integrity since the original RAC program.[19] WISeR applies prior authorization requirements—previously rare in traditional Medicare—to a defined set of services in six pilot states: New Jersey, Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas, Arizona, and Washington. The services subject to review include electrical nerve stimulator implants, epidural steroid injections for pain management, percutaneous vertebral augmentation, percutaneous image-guided lumbar decompression, knee arthroplasty, and skin substitute grafts for diabetic foot and venous leg ulcers.

CMS selected six technology company “model participants” to conduct prior authorization and prepayment review, each assigned to specific states and MAC jurisdictions. The named participants include Cohere Health Inc., Humata Health Inc., and Innovaccer Inc., among others.[20] Zyter|TruCare is handling the Arizona implementation in partnership with the Noridian MAC.[21]

The payment structure deserves careful attention. WISeR participants are not paid administrative fees. They are paid a percentage of savings generated when services they review are not affirmed and ultimately not paid.[22] This is, structurally, the same contingency-fee model that produced the RAC program’s aggressive denial behavior—applied prospectively to authorization decisions that prevent care from being delivered at all, not retrospectively to claims already paid.

CMS has argued that the incentive structure is designed to reward accuracy rather than denial rates—participants are penalized for inaccurate determinations through quality score adjustments, and claim resubmissions are unlimited. That is a meaningful safeguard relative to the original RAC structure. But the underlying incentive remains: the faster and more frequently a WISeR participant declines to affirm a service, the more Medicare expenditure is avoided, and the higher the savings base from which their contingency percentage is calculated.

Pending legislation—H.R. 6361, the Ban AI Denials in Medicare Act, introduced December 2025—seeks to prohibit WISeR and any future Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI) model using AI-driven prior authorization in traditional Medicare.[23] Whether that legislation advances is uncertain. What is not uncertain is the broader trajectory: CMS describes WISeR explicitly as “a roadmap for incorporating more private sector innovations into CMS operations.”[24] If WISeR’s six-year pilot is characterized as successful, the program’s scope will expand geographically and across service categories.

It bears noting that CMS has not provided clear guidance on whether WISeR contractors must disclose the algorithmic logic underlying their decisions or provide meaningful explanations for denials.[25] Providers operating in WISeR states who receive nonaffirmations will know the outcome but not necessarily the reasoning—a transparency gap with direct implications for the appeal process.

WISeR is not a pilot in the sense of being tentative. It is a pilot in the sense of being the first iteration of a system CMS intends to scale.

The Unified Picture

Let me bring these two threads together, because the connection between the data infrastructure I described in Part 1 and the audit contractor ecosystem mapped above is not merely thematic. It is structural.

Photo by panumas nikhomkhai / Pexels (free license). The physical convergence of data systems that makes cross-program integration possible.

Palantir holds, through the SHARE blanket purchase agreement described in Part 1, the capacity to serve every HHS agency—including CMS—with integrated data analytics infrastructure. CMS is simultaneously building a national provider directory (for which Palantir received a proof-of-concept award), expanding AI-driven prior authorization through WISeR, and operating a UPIC/RAC/SMRC audit apparatus that generates millions of additional documentation requests per year. The data from all of these systems—claim histories, audit findings, provider billing patterns, clinical notes scanned for missed charges, prior authorization requests and denials—represents an extraordinarily comprehensive dataset of American healthcare.

That dataset, collected across multiple programs with different statutory authorities and different privacy protections, is precisely the kind of dataset Palantir’s Foundry platform is architected to integrate. Not because CMS has announced any intention to use Palantir for cross-program data analysis in healthcare audit functions—it has not. But because the infrastructure that would permit such integration has been deployed, piecemeal, through individually reasonable-seeming procurement decisions.

What we have built, without intending to build it, is the technical precondition for a comprehensive national database of healthcare provider behavior, patient utilization, and clinical documentation—administered through a network of private equity–backed contractors, monitored through AI-augmented audit systems, and integrated through a data platform whose founder has stated openly that Palantir’s goal is to be the operating system for government.

I want to be clear about what I am not saying. I am not claiming that CMS is using Palantir to surveil providers or that UPIC contractors are sharing data with ICE. There is no evidence of that. What I am saying is that the architecture that would permit such uses has been constructed, that the entities holding the relevant contracts have overlapping ownership structures and financial interests that are rarely examined, and that providers navigating audits have almost no visibility into who is actually reviewing their claims and under what data governance frameworks.

That is an accountability gap. And in my view, it is one that the healthcare community—physicians, hospital administrators, compliance officers, and healthcare attorneys—has an obligation to understand before the system scales further.

What This Means for Your Practice

Let me close with something concrete, because I write this for clinicians and administrators, not policy theorists.

Know Your Audit Contractor

Every provider in the United States should know which UPIC covers their jurisdiction, which RAC covers their region, and which MAC administers their claims. These are available on the CMS Review Contractor Directory.[26] SafeGuard Services covers the Southeast and Northeast. Qlarant Integrity Solutions covers the West and Southwest. CoventBridge covers the Midwest. If you receive a records request, the originating contractor matters enormously in terms of timeline—UPICs allow only fifteen to thirty calendar days; MACs typically allow forty-five—consequence, and appropriate response strategy.[27]

Understand the Escalation Ladder

TPE → SMRC → RAC → UPIC → OIG is not a linear progression that every provider follows. Any of these entities can refer directly to the next level if they characterize what they are seeing as indicative of a systemic pattern rather than isolated error.[28] The threshold for that characterization is not defined by statute. It is defined by the contractor.

The WISeR States Face a New Risk Layer

If you practice in New Jersey, Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas, Arizona, or Washington and perform any of the WISeR-covered services, you are operating in a new compliance environment as of January 2026. Prior authorization through a technology vendor—not a MAC, not a clinical reviewer employed by CMS—now precedes payment for those services. Nonsubmission of a prior authorization request triggers automatic prepayment review.[29][30] The operational guide is available from CMS, but the specific algorithms by which WISeR vendors assess medical necessity have not been publicly disclosed.[31]

Data Governance Is Now a Clinical Concern

The integration of AI systems into billing optimization, prior authorization, and audit functions means that the data your practice generates—clinical notes, billing patterns, documentation quality, response rates to audit requests—is being analyzed computationally at a scale and depth that was not possible five years ago. The revenue cycle management firms, the audit contractors, and the federal data platforms are all, increasingly, operating from the same underlying data infrastructure.

You cannot opt out of this ecosystem. But you can understand it.

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Eric Lullove, DPM, is a podiatric physician and healthcare policy analyst. This article reflects independent research and analysis. Nothing in this article constitutes legal, compliance, or clinical advice. Providers facing active audits should retain qualified healthcare counsel.

[1]Frier Levitt, CMS Audits, September 25, 2025. Overview of the full CMS audit escalation ladder from TPE through UPIC and OIG. https://www.frierlevitt.com/what-we-do/healthcare-law/cms-audits/.

[2]MSN Healthcare Solutions, The What and How of Medicare Program Provider Audits, September 16, 2025. Details on TPE audit structure, three-round mechanism, and escalation thresholds. https://msnllc.com/what-and-how-of-medicare-program-provider-audits/.

[3]Art Kalantar, JD, Types of Healthcare Audits and Auditors: RAC, UPIC, and ZPIC, December 8, 2025. RAC contingency fee rates have historically ranged from 9.5% to 12%; new contracts may allow rates as high as 20%. https://www.kalantar.law/types-of-healthcare-audits/.

[4]Applied Policy, Unified Program Integrity Contractors, August 9, 2023. UPIC post-payment reviews in 2020 resulted in $200.2 million in savings to the Medicare program. https://www.appliedpolicy.com/7258-2/.

[5]CMS.gov, Review Contractor Directory—Interactive Map, current as of April 2026. Lists all five UPIC jurisdictions, current contractors, RAC regions, MACs, CERT contractors, and SMRC. https://www.cms.gov/data-research/monitoring-programs/medicare-fee-service-compliance-programs/review-contractor-directory-interactive-map.

[6]MedLearn Publishing / RACmonitor, Understanding the UPICs: Medicare’s Recovery Audit Contractors, August 27, 2025. Full breakdown of five UPIC jurisdictions and contractor assignments. https://racmonitor.medlearn.com/understanding-the-upics-medicares-recovery-audit-contractors/.

[7]Modern Healthcare, NCI Completes $62 Million AdvanceMed Deal, April 4, 2011. NCI purchased AdvanceMed Corporation from Computer Sciences Corp. (CSC) for $62 million, including a data center supporting ZPIC Zone 5 and Zone 2 contracts. https://www.modernhealthcare.com/article/20110404/NEWS/304049989/nci-completes-62-million-advancemed-deal.

[8]Modern Healthcare, NCI Completes $62 Million AdvanceMed Deal, April 4, 2011. Senate Finance Committee letter from then-ranking member Chuck Grassley asked CMS to identify conflicts of interest among contractors; the AdvanceMed/CSC relationship was specifically cited. https://www.modernhealthcare.com/article/20110404/NEWS/304049989/nci-completes-62-million-advancemed-deal.

[9]Qlarant.com, Contracts List, December 9, 2025. Qlarant holds UPIC West, UPIC Southwest, I-MEDIC, PPI MEDIC, and previously served as Medicaid Integrity Contractor across thirty-four states and DC. https://www.qlarant.com/about/contracts-list/.

[10]Qlarant Integrity Solutions LLC (formerly Health Integrity LLC); Qlarant Quality Solutions Inc. (formerly Delmarva Foundation for Medical Care Inc.); Qlarant Commercial Solutions Inc. (formerly Health Watch Inc.). See Qlarant CMS contract award announcement, March 7, 2018. https://www.qlarant.com/about/news/cms-selects-qlarant-unified-program-integrity-contractor/.

[11]Maynard Nexsen, Medicare’s Bloodhound in the Southeast: SGS Gets the UPIC Auditing Contract. SGS was awarded the Southeast UPIC effective June 1, 2018. Southeast jurisdiction covers Alabama, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Puerto Rico, South Carolina, Tennessee, US Virgin Islands, Virginia, and West Virginia. https://www.maynardnexsen.com/publication-sgs-gets-the-upic-auditing-contract.

[12]CMS.gov, Medicare Fee for Service Recovery Audit Program, May 14, 2025 update. On April 28, 2025, CMS awarded Cotiviti GOV Services LLC the RAC contracts for Regions 3, 4, and 5. Performant remains under contract for administrative and appeals support in Region 5. https://www.cms.gov/data-research/monitoring-programs/medicare-fee-service-compliance-programs/medicare-fee-service-recovery-audit-program.

[13]Veritas Capital, Cotiviti Completes Recapitalization with KKR and Long-Standing Owner Veritas, October 7, 2024. https://www.veritascapital.com/cotiviti-completes-recapitalization-with-kkr-and-long-standing-owner-veritas/.

[14]Fierce Healthcare, Verscend Closes $4.9B Acquisition of Cotiviti, Adding to Veritas Capital’s Health IT Portfolio, August 27, 2018. https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/tech/veritas-capital-verscend-cotiviti-revenue-cycle-management-payment-integrity.

[15]Veritas Capital has previously owned Truven Health Analytics (acquired from Thomson Reuters for $1.25 billion, sold to IBM Watson for $2.6 billion in 2016), GE Healthcare’s Value-Based Care Division, Verscend Technologies, and athenahealth (acquired February 2019 for $5.7 billion through partnership with Evergreen Coast Capital). See Wikipedia, Veritas Capital. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veritas_Capital.

[16]SEC EDGAR, Performant Financial Corp., Form 8-K, Q3 2024 earnings. Healthcare revenues for Q3 2024 were $30.3 million, an increase of approximately 6% from the prior year. CEO Simeon Kohl noted continued scaling of the CMS RAC Region 2 contract. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0001550695/000155069524000094/ex093024991pressrelease.htm.

[17]Optum Health, a subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group, owns Health Management Associates, which in turn owns the Lewin Group. The Lewin Group serves as statistical contractor for both the Comprehensive Error Rate Testing (CERT) and Payment Error Rate Measurement (PERM) programs. See CMS Review Contractor Directory for current contractor listings. https://www.cms.gov/data-research/monitoring-programs/medicare-fee-service-compliance-programs/review-contractor-directory-interactive-map.

[18]StreamlineMD, Navigating CMS Audits: Understanding the Different Types, March 19, 2025. MACs administer TPE audits; providers are given up to three rounds before escalation to 100% prepayment review or RAC referral. https://streamlinemd.com/for-healthcare-providers-cms-audits-can-be-a-daunting-reality-whether-it-is-a-rac-audit-looking-for-overpayments-a-cert-audit-measuring-error-rates-or-a-upic-audit-investigating-fraud-understandi/.

[19]CMS.gov, WISeR (Wasteful and Inappropriate Service Reduction) Model, last updated January 28, 2026. WISeR operates January 1, 2026, through December 31, 2031, in Arizona, New Jersey, Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas, and Washington. https://www.cms.gov/priorities/innovation/innovation-models/wiser.

[20]BHM Healthcare Solutions, CMS Announces Vendor List for WISeR Model, November 9, 2025. Named participants include Cohere Health Inc., Humata Health Inc., and Innovaccer Inc. Each participant is assigned to a specific state and MAC jurisdiction. https://bhmpc.com/2025/11/wiser-model-vendor-list/.

[21]Zyter|TruCare, CMS WISeR Program, January 5, 2026. Zyter|TruCare will supply and maintain the prior authorization platform for the WISeR program in Arizona, partnering with MAC Noridian. https://www.zyter.com/learning/wiser/.

[22]Applied Policy, WISeR Model Signals Changes in CMS’s Approach to Prior Authorization, September 9, 2025. CMS will calculate savings using historical average payments for each service type; vendor payments are adjusted based on performance measures including timeliness and accuracy. https://www.appliedpolicy.com/wiser-model-signals-changes-in-cmss-approach-to-prior-authorization/.

[23]DLA Piper, CMS Launches WISeR Model: What Providers Need to Know, January 14, 2026. H.R. 6361—the Ban AI Denials in Medicare Act—was introduced December 2, 2025, and seeks to prohibit implementation of WISeR and any future Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI) model testing AI-driven prior authorization under traditional Medicare. https://www.dlapiper.com/en-us/insights/publications/2026/01/cms-wiser-model.

[24]CMS.gov, WISeR Model Frequently Asked Questions, January 13, 2026. “WISeR is the first Innovation Center model in which technology innovators are the only model participants.” CMS has framed the model as “a roadmap for incorporating more private sector innovations into CMS operations.” https://www.cms.gov/priorities/innovation/files/document/wiser-model-frequently-asked-questions.

[25]Morgan Lewis LLP, CMS Is Getting WISeR about Medicare Waste—But at What Cost to Providers?, July 3, 2025. CMS has not provided clear guidance on whether WISeR contractors must disclose the algorithmic logic underlying their decisions or provide meaningful explanations for denials. https://www.morganlewis.com/pubs/2025/07/cms-is-getting-wiser-about-medicare-waste-but-at-what-cost-to-providers.

[26]CMS.gov, Review Contractor Directory—Interactive Map, current as of April 2026. https://www.cms.gov/data-research/monitoring-programs/medicare-fee-service-compliance-programs/review-contractor-directory-interactive-map.

[27]Skilled Nursing News, CMS Tightens Audit Oversight as Improper Payments Rise and Nursing Homes Lead in Doc Errors, December 5, 2025. CMS reported a 6.55% improper payment rate in FY 2025, representing nearly $28.83 billion. UPICs allow between fifteen and thirty calendar days for record submissions; previous-level contractors typically allow forty-five days. https://skillednursingnews.com/2025/12/cms-tightens-audit-oversight-as-improper-payments-rise-and-nursing-homes-lead-in-doc-errors/.

[28]See Frier Levitt, CMS Audits, September 25, 2025; and MSN Healthcare Solutions, The What and How of Medicare Program Provider Audits, September 16, 2025.

[29]CMS.gov, WISeR (Wasteful and Inappropriate Service Reduction) Model, last updated January 28, 2026. https://www.cms.gov/priorities/innovation/innovation-models/wiser.

[30]Doctors Management, What to Expect from a UPIC Audit: Guidance for Clinics and Providers, February 5, 2026. UPICs collaborate with MACs, SMRC, and Medicare Drug Integrity Contractors. https://www.doctorsmanagement.com/blog/what-to-expect-from-a-upic-audit-guidance-for-clinics-and-providers/.

[31]See Morgan Lewis LLP, CMS Is Getting WISeR about Medicare Waste—But at What Cost to Providers?, July 3, 2025; and CMS.gov, WISeR Model Frequently Asked Questions, January 13, 2026.

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David Shuster is back with his weekly countdown of the internet’s sharpest comedic satire — and this week, the material practically wrote itself. One cabinet member quoted scripture that turned out to be... not scripture. Trump posted something so unhinged he had to pretend it was something else entirely. C-SPAN became accidentally hilarious just by stating facts. And the #1 clip? It came from the last country you’d expect, and it goes harder than anything produced in the United States this week. Five clips, ranked — and Shuster’s top pick is worth the wait.

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By Eric Lullove, DPM, Blue Amp Media Medical Contributing Editor

Let me be direct with you. When I started pulling on this thread—what I expected to find was a bureaucratic procurement story about government contractors. What I found instead was something considerably more unsettling: a layered, interlocking surveillance architecture operating inside the US healthcare system that most clinicians, administrators, and even healthcare attorneys have never seen mapped in its entirety.

This piece is the first half of my attempt to do that mapping.

What follows examines how Palantir Technologies—a company born from Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) seed funding and best known for helping Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) track undocumented immigrants—has embedded itself at virtually every level of the federal health infrastructure: from hospital operating rooms to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to the immigration enforcement apparatus.

In Part 2, I will map the other side of this architecture: the Medicare audit contractor ecosystem—the Unified Program Integrity Contractor (UPIC), Recovery Audit Contractor (RAC), Targeted Probe and Educate (TPE), and Wasteful and Inappropriate Service Reduction (WISeR) programs that govern your billing compliance—and show how these two systems are converging into something none of us voted for.

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Photo by Brett Sayles / Pexels (free license). Server racks in a data center—the physical layer of the surveillance infrastructure described in this article.

How Deep Does It Go?

The question I set out to answer was deceptively simple: how extensively has Palantir Technologies penetrated US healthcare data systems? The answer, documented through federal procurement records and investigative reporting, is: comprehensively.

Start at the hospital level. Palantir has signed Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP) contracts with Cleveland Clinic, Tampa General Hospital, HCA Healthcare, and Option Care Health, deploying its AIP software for patient flow optimization, staffing, and supply chain management.[1] Healthcare now accounts for 15 percent of Palantir’s commercial revenue—a line of business that generated $702 million in 2024.[2] The company has been transparent about its strategy: create operational dependency. Multiyear contracts at institutions like Tampa General have progressed to AI-driven revenue cycle management, meaning hospitals are not simply purchasing software. They are restructuring their financial operations around Palantir’s infrastructure.

But the hospital-level presence is the visible layer. The federal layer is where this becomes structurally significant.

In 2022, HHS signed a five-year, $90 million blanket purchase agreement with Palantir—the SHARE contract (Solutioning with Holistic Analytics Restructured for the Enterprise)—making Palantir’s Foundry platform available to every HHS agency through a single procurement vehicle.[3] The National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and CMS can all access Foundry without separate competitive bidding. That is not a contract. That is infrastructure.

The downstream agency penetration is documented. NIH uses Foundry. CDC used it during the pandemic for data analytics. FDA has deployed it. And in June 2024, the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) awarded Palantir a separate $19 million, two-year contract to serve as its core data infrastructure—to “rapidly collect, synthesize, analyze, and make decisions from a range of data sources.”[4]

At CMS specifically, federal spending records show Palantir received awards for a “national provider directory—proof of concept,” positioning it as a potential backbone for a unified federal database of every healthcare provider in the United States. That project, formally the National Directory of Healthcare Providers and Services, has been in development for years. Palantir is now among the finalists for its architecture.[5]

The Cross-Program Data Fusion Problem

The most alarming documented concern in this space is not what Palantir does within any single agency. It is what happens at the seams between agencies.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has documented that ICE used Palantir’s ELITE tool to access Medicaid enrollment records from HHS.[6] Read that again carefully: the immigration enforcement apparatus used a healthcare data platform to identify and locate individuals enrolled in the Medicaid program. A healthcare safety-net database, collected for the explicit purpose of administering medical benefits to low-income patients, was operationalized as a deportation tool.

This is not an allegation. It is documented. Palantir has denied building this functionality explicitly, but the EFF’s findings and subsequent investigative reporting from The Intercept and leaked ICE procurement documents tell a consistent story:[7] Palantir’s software is architected to eliminate the walls between databases that were built to be separate. Medicaid data merging with immigration records. Tax returns merging with law enforcement databases. Passport data merging with cell phone location records.

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Photo by Brett Sayles / Pexels (free license). The technical infrastructure that enables cross-database queries across agencies.

Each individual dataset was collected legitimately, for a specific statutory purpose, with specific legal restrictions on its use. Palantir’s Foundry eliminates those restrictions operationally by making cross-database queries trivially executable. The legal walls remain. The technical walls do not.

In New York City, the Health and Hospitals Corporation paid Palantir nearly $4 million between 2023 and 2026 to improve billing efficiency for Medicaid and other public benefits—including automated scanning of patient clinical notes to “increase charges captured from missed opportunities.”[8] When this arrangement was publicly disclosed by The Intercept in February 2026, the hospital system’s CEO defended it by citing an “absolute firewall” between patient data and Palantir’s government customers. The contract was not renewed after community outcry.[9]

I want to dwell on what that NYC contract actually was: a clinical AI system reading physician notes and flagging underbilled services, operating inside a public hospital system that also has contractual relationships with a company whose software ICE uses to find people. Whether those data streams were actually connected is almost secondary. The architecture that would permit such a connection was in place.

That is the appropriate unit of analysis when evaluating surveillance infrastructure: not what data is flowing right now, but what data could flow given the systems that have been deployed.

This is the infrastructure layer. In Part 2, I will map the audit contractor ecosystem that sits on top of it—the UPIC, RAC, and WISeR programs, their private equity ownership chains, and the contingency-fee incentive structures that shape how your claims are reviewed. These are not separate stories. They are the same story. And the system is scaling.

Eric Lullove, DPM, is a podiatric physician and healthcare policy analyst. This article reflects independent research and analysis. Nothing in this article constitutes legal, compliance, or clinical advice. Providers facing active audits should retain qualified healthcare counsel.

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[1]Fierce Healthcare, JPM24: Option Care Health Taps Palantir’s AI for Nurse Scheduling, Supply Chain, January 8, 2024, https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/ai-and-machine-learning/jpm24-option-care-health-taps-palantirs-ai-nurse-scheduling-supply-chain.

[2]AInvest Research, Palantir’s AI-Powered Surge: Why Defense and Healthcare Contracts Signal Long-Term Dominance, July 15, 2025, https://www.ainvest.com/news/palantir-ai-powered-surge-defense-healthcare-contracts-signal-long-term-dominance-2507/.

[3]FedScoop, HHS Makes Palantir Data Analytics Platform Available to All Its Agencies, May 4, 2022. The five-year, $90 million blanket purchase agreement was designated the SHARE (Solutioning with Holistic Analytics Restructured for the Enterprise) contract. https://fedscoop.com/hhs-palantir-platform-bpa/.

[4]FedScoop, ARPA-H Enters $19M Contract with Palantir for Artificial Intelligence, Data Software, June 20, 2024, https://fedscoop.com/arpah-enters-data-ai-contract-with-palantir/.

[5]FedScoop, CMS Signals Interest in Palantir for National Provider Directory Project, October 20, 2025. The contracts were listed as “national provider directory—proof of concept” on General Services Administration records; no further detail was publicly available at time of reporting. https://fedscoop.com/palantir-centers-for-medicare-medicaid-services-healthcare-directory-provider-prototype-hhs-cms/.

[6]Fed-Spend Research Team, Palantir Government Contracts: $13.7 Billion in Awards, Exposed, February 16, 2026. Citing Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) documentation of ICE use of Palantir ELITE tool to access HHS Medicaid enrollment records. https://fed-spend.com/blog/palantir-government-contracts-deep-dive.

[7]State of Surveillance, Palantir Surveillance 2025: $10B+ in Government Deals, November 17, 2025. Citing January 2026 leak of ICE internal documents and procurement contracts. https://stateofsurveillance.org/articles/surveillance/palantir-government-surveillance-ecosystem-billions/.

[8]The Intercept, Palantir Gets Millions of Dollars from New York City’s Public Hospitals, February 17, 2026. Reporting based on contract materials obtained by The Intercept showing automated scanning of patient notes to “increase charges captured from missed opportunities.” https://theintercept.com/2026/02/15/palantir-contract-new-york-city-health-hospitals/.

[9]The Intercept, Palantir Will No Longer Profit off of New Yorkers’ Health Data, March 24, 2026. NYC Health + Hospitals CEO Mitchell Katz testified at a March 16 City Council meeting that the contract would not be renewed. https://theintercept.com/2026/03/24/palantir-new-york-city-hospitals-contract/.

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Cliff's Note: Friends! It’s $1/week to subscribe to BAM, independent media that names names. We’ll stand up to death threats. But we can’t stand up without funds. We have no billionaires. We need you.

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Lev Parnas joins and David Shuster on AMPED UP today and drops a bomb: Trump is quietly positioning Ron DeSantis to replace Todd Blanche as attorney general after the midterms.

Parnas — who personally introduced Trump and DeSantis years ago and brokered the endorsement that launched DeSantis’s political career — lays out the timeline, the motivations, and DeSantis’s lifelong ambition to use every office as a stepping stone to the White House—and his little white booties as a stepping stone to pretending he’s taller and looking ridiculous.

Lev also reveals that Pam Bondi defied her congressional subpoena, Trump is laughing about it—and let’s face it, Trump’s closer each day to unhinged Joker, as his dictator pals get crushed, he threatens nuclear war, and perhaps chugs Drano..at least by the looks of things—and the DOJ has no intention of prosecuting her contempt.

Because accountability is a word this administration doesn’t recognize.

From there, the conversation goes where corporate media won’t. Parnas explains that Kushner and Witkoff aren’t representing the United States in the Iran negotiations — they’re representing Netanyahu and Putin, respectively, with MBS brokering the introductions that go back to 2017.

He connects the dots from Russian oligarch money flowing through Israeli back channels to Epstein’s death under Bill Barr’s direct supervision, detailing firsthand how Barr was selected as AG in a room with Rudy Giuliani, Victoria Toensing, and John Solomon. Parnas announces his congressional run in Florida’s 27th district, Blue Amp Media officially endorses him, and Cliff makes the case that Democrats need to run the Magyar playbook from Hungary — hit the predator class hard on corruption, inequality, and covered-up scandals — or get out of the way for people who will.

Cliff’s Note: Friends! It’s $1/week to subscribe to BAM, independent media that names names. We stand up to death threats. But can’t stand up without funds. We have no billionaires. We need you 🙏 🤜

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Cliff’s Note: This is what David Shuster does better than anyone — he takes the thing you felt in your gut and pins it to the wall with receipts. Trump threatened to wipe out a civilization, photoshopped himself into Jesus Christ, and then looked a reporter in the eye and said it was a Red Cross ad. And most of the corporate media moved on by lunch.

We didn’t. Blue Amp doesn’t move on.

We name it, frame it, and ensure you’ve got the words to explain to your uncle at Thanksgiving why this isn’t normal. If that’s worth something to you, subscribe. We’re building the media operation the left’s needed for 20 years, and without a single billionaire’s permission.

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By David Shuster

There was a time when the American presidency demanded at least a passing acquaintance with restraint, reality, and reverence. That time has passed. In its place sits the narcissistic lunatic Donald Trump. Within the span of one week, old man Orange threatened apocalyptic destruction, dabbled in self-righteous deification, and then insisted with a straight face, that what everyone plainly saw was something else.

Let’s begin with the obvious: no serious leader speaks casually about annihilating a “whole civilization.” But Donald Trump issued that threat on social media so nonchalantly it was as if the obliteration of millions of people would be no more consequential than a missed tee time.

And yet, as disturbing as that careless Trump rhetoric was, Trump eclipsed it a week later with something even more surreal. Trump circulated an image depicting himself as Jesus Christ.

Not metaphorically. Not symbolically. Literally styled in the iconography of Christianity’s central figure. It is difficult to overstate how grotesque this is.

For believers and non-believers alike, Jesus is not a branding opportunity or a punchline. But Trump’s vanity and ego have no bounds.

And when countless MAGA faithful expressed their anger and called Trump’s post “gross blasphemy,” Trump did not offer an apology or provide any reflection. Instead, he did what Trump always does. He lashed out and reframed reality.

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Asked by a reporter about the image, Trump declared, “I thought it was me as a doctor, and had to do with the Red Cross, as a Red Cross worker, which we support. In the photo, Trump’s clothing is reminiscent of clothing worn in Jesus’ time and is NOT an outfit a doctor would wear. There is no reference in the photo to the Red Cross.

Trump said “only the fake news” could suggest he was depicting himself as Jesus, ignoring the criticism he received from his own religious supporters.

Trump delivered the rhetorical equivalent of pointing at the sun and insisting it is the moon.. The Trump as Jesus image was unmistakable, the symbolism deliberate. To deny it after the fact is to engage in the kind of gaslighting that has been a hallmark of Trump’s public life. Truth is whatever serves him in the moment. Reality is negotiable. Accountability is for other people.

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What ties these episodes together—the threats, the messianic imagery, the absurd denials—is not just reckless jackassary. It is narcissism elevated to governing principle. Trump does not simply seek power; he seeks adoration. He does not merely want to lead; he wants to be worshipped. And when the world fails to comply, he rewrites the script until his most loyal followers nod along.

This would be troubling enough in a private citizen. In a U.S. President, it is insane. Democracies rely on a shared understanding of reality. They require leaders who can distinguish between truth and fantasy, between strength and spectacle. When those lines blur, institutions weaken, allies lose confidence, and adversaries take notice.

There is also a deeper, more corrosive effect. By trivializing both the threat of mass destruction and the sacred symbols of religion, Trump cheapens everything he touches. Words lose meaning. Images lose significance. Public discourse becomes a carnival of outrage and denial where nothing is too serious to be mocked and nothing too absurd to be defended.

There are already some Trump defenders who are dismissing the Jesus image as just another Trump controversy, another day ending in “y.”

That is precisely the problem. The normalization of Trump’s behavior accelerates our society’s decay. Each outlandish Trump statement, each brazen Trump falsehood, lowers the bar a little further, until what once would have been disqualifying becomes merely “on brand.”

But it should not be on brand for any American leader to flirt with annihilation, to cast himself in divine imagery, and then to lie about it with casual indifference. That is not strength. It is not authenticity. It is not even politics as usual. It is a profound failure of judgment and character.

The presidency demands more—more humility, more honesty, more respect for the gravity of the role. What Trump offers instead is a spectacle of ego and evasion, a performance in which truth is optional and responsibility is always someone else’s burden.

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If there is a lesson to be drawn, it may lie in the parables themselves. Jesus often warned of those who would come in impressive guises, who would speak loudly and draw crowds, but whose actions would not align with their words. “By their fruits you will know them,” he said—a call to judge not by appearances but by outcomes.

The outcome of the Trump era is clear.

The United States, under Trump, has become a good shepherd of a very particular flock: not the poor, the meek, or the forgotten, but the powerful and the wealthy.

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Trump’s policies and rhetoric have consistently elevated those already holding influence, offering tax cuts, deregulation, and political cover to the billionaire class and large corporations. Trump has tended a gilded pasture where the sheep are already well fed. Everybody else has to tighten their belts and budgets.

In the United States under Trump, morality and basic humanity are for losers. Whereas Jesus spoke of turning the other cheek, loving one’s enemies, and welcoming the stranger… Trump and his sycophants cast opponents not as neighbor to be understood but as threats to be defeated. Whereas Jesus preached mercy, Trump prizes dominance.

There is also the matter of truth. In the biblical narrative, truth is a cornerstone—“the truth shall set you free.” Trump’s relationship with truth is non-existent.

The most striking difference, though, involves the concept of sacrifice. Jesus’s story at its core is about self-sacrifice—giving up power, enduring suffering, and ultimately laying down his life for others.

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Trump’s narrative, by contrast, is about self-preservation and self-advancement. Trump’s public statements and actions consistently emphasize personal victory, personal grievance, and personal legacy.

In another age, Trump would have been confined to the margins, a sideshow curiosity barking at passersby from behind a canvas freak show tent. But in the U.S. under MAGA, the rotting old man who toys with visions of annihilation and crowns himself in counterfeit halos is not laughed off the stage but ushered back for an encore.

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It is tempting to treat all of this as mere Trump GOP buffoonery, the harmless capering of a man intoxicated by his own reflection. That temptation should be resisted. There is nothing harmless in a leader who toys with catastrophe, nothing amusing in a public figure who dissolves the boundary between truth and nonsense. The damage is real, even if the performance is absurd.

And the spectacle continues: the threats, the posturing, the ludicrous denials delivered with the confidence of a man who has never been meaningfully contradicted. The tragedy is not that Donald Trump behaves this way—that was always a given—but that a great many citizens have grown so accustomed to the act that they no longer recognize it for what it is: not strength, not leadership, but a gaudy, relentless assault on reason and faith itself.

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The Strongman Fell—As All Inevitably Do—And Autocrats Are Having Palpitations Worldwide

by Cliff Schecter

I’ll never forget taking a trip to Romania as a consultant for the United States Information Agency’s (State Department) democracy-promotion program in the mid-2000s. As part of my tour of Bucharest, we went to Revolution Square (Piața Revoluției) where bullet holes from the 1989 Romanian Revolution still scarred the visages of buildings around the square.

It served as a reminder of how quickly the end can come for hubristic sociopaths hiding behind the title of “leader.” Not that I was thinking of anyone specifically here. 😉

Nicolae Ceaușescu, the longtime Communist Dictator of Romania was executed Christmas day 1989. Just one week beforehand, he was (ironically, due to today’s headlines) on a state trip to Iran like all was normal. He was ousted in no small part because he’d lost the people with draconian policies, like food and energy rationing. He had a massive debt to contend with, as a shrinking GDP and his taste for the finer things in life—which, to be honest, isn’t very communist-y—had gotten him in trouble:

Ceaușescu became obsessed with building himself a palace of unprecedented proportions, along with an equally grandiose neighborhood, Centrul Civic to accompany it.

Yes, as people were starving, the elite predator had himself constructed the second largest building—in surface area—in the world. The first? The Pentagon. There may be a message in that reality, too. But Ceaușescu wasn’t satisfied with just one ridiculously lavish, enormous-arse palace, so he also built himself a whole neighborhood to surround it! Trump just put his name on the Kennedy Center so everyone could stop showing up and is constructing some little pissant ballroom.

Donald, I didn’t serve with Nicolae Ceaușescu. I didn’t know Nicolae Ceaușescu. Nicolae Ceaușescu was no friend of mine. And you’re no Nicolae Ceaușescu.

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In any case, why do I bring this up? Because here we have a man who thinks he’s a dictator, is just about the most openly corrupt leader ever seen, has pardoned and protected a pedophile in his ranks, and is wrecking the economy until jobs, food, and prices of essentials are all in the crapper.

Oh, wait, you thought I meant Donald Trump?! Actually, I was talking about Orban! And now you see why Donald Trump should be terrified:

…a scandal rocked Fidesz in early 2024. Hungary’s president at the time, Katalin Novák, pardoned a former official convicted of helping cover up abuse of underaged boys at a children’s home. The revelation of the pardon punctured a perception of Orbán’s government…as the defender of Christian and family values.

“The core of the self-definition of Fidesz is that they are conservative, family-friendly, and they protect children,” Péter Krekó, a political scientist who runs Political Capital, a think-tank in Budapest, told CNN. To many voters, the pardon scandal exposed the “hypocrisy” of the Orbán project, Krekó said…

In February 2024, Magyar gave an explosive video interview to Partizan, a Hungarian media outlet..to share information he gleaned from his proximity to government. “A few families own half the country,” he said in the interview, viewed nearly 3 million times, in a country of fewer than 10 million people.

While Orbán’s campaign this year revolved mostly around foreign policy and his relations with world leaders, Magyar’s was rigidly focused on domestic issues, such as the economy and corruption. Over the past two years, he worked to build a direct relationship with voters, visiting scores of towns and cities, and often staying for hours after his speeches to meet local people.

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I dunno, Democrats, but it seems Magyar won by being authentic with voters, targeting predatory billionaires who own everything and extract the rest from the people, and calling out pedophilia protection and corruption. Then he added the final blow, how those who engaged in this despicable behavior wrecked the economy for all, and the welfare of regular Hungarians.

I think we just may’ve discovered a formula that beats fascist incumbents! (Psst: The one I’ve been screaming Democratic Leaders should adopt for a year now).

ORBAN’S TIMELY POLITICAL DEMISE

For 16 years, Viktor Orbán sold Hungarian elites—and much of the global right—a poisonous fantasy: that you could hollow out democracy, rig the media, enrich your cronies, flirt with Moscow, sneer at the European Union, even willingly spend time with the most unpleasant AI personality yet constructed, known as a “JD Vance.”

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And somehow call all this “the will of the people.”

Orban became Trumpism’s favorite export model, the patron saint of “illiberal democracy,” the guy every would-be autocrat in a suit and flag pin pointed to and said, see, this is how you do it. If that toad can pull it off, why not me? But now? He just got his clock cleaned. In a political earthquake, Péter Magyar’s Tisza party didn’t just beat Orbán—they routed him, with the kind of parliamentary majority—nearly 70%!—that may finally give Hungary the tools to undo the constitutional vandalism Orbán spent a decade and a half perfecting.

What makes this defeat monumental—and by that I mean gorgeous!—isn’t just the seat count. It’s that Orbán lost despite the authoritarian cheat codes he’d spent years installing like IEDs throughout this decaying democracy: media capture, gerrymandered districts, patronage networks, oligarch cash pipelines, and a political culture built on fear, grievance, and nationalist mumbo-jumbo.

This wasn’t some clean, level playing field where the voters merely changed their minds over an egg-white-omelet brunch.

This was the Hungarian people kicking down in walls of a house Orbán had spent years bolting shut from the inside. Record turnout—nearly 80%—tells the story better than any pundit ever could: people were done being ruled by a kleptocratic wannabe czar whose whole act had curdled into crony capitalism and Putin-smooching rot.

But here’s the best part: this is a flashing red warning light for the global predator class that has used Orbán as a test kitchen for democratic sabotage. Trumpworld adored him because he proved you could turn a democracy into a family office with better goulash and great grift. The far-right in Europe loved him because he weaponized culture war bile while quietly making his friends rich. Putin loved him because Orbán functioned as Moscow’s house ally inside the EU, blocking aid to Ukraine and muddying Europe’s response to authoritarian assholes like…Putin.

That entire axis of ego just took a major gut punch. Hungary choosing a pro-EU course under their new Prime Minister, Magyar doesn’t just change Budapest—it reverberates through Brussels, Moscow, Washington, and every billionaire-funded nationalist project that thought the future belonged to strongmen.

Somewhere Peter Thiel is very sweaty. Though, if you’ve seen him before, he’s a constantly fiddling overactive sweat gland on a good day—like cocaine come to life. So I’m not sure you could tell the difference.

The best part of all this? Orbán’s fall is a reminder that even systems built to protect power can crack when people stop accepting the lie that the strongman is inevitable. This is so important I’m tempted to repeat it.

There is not guaranteed fate except for one we willingly accept.

This is the lesson Democrats, pro-democracy coalitions, and frankly anyone fighting the billionaire predators running way-too-much of our world need tattooed on their frontal lobes: Like Ceaușescu, autocrats look invincible…til the day they don’t. The edifice always appears permanent right up til the moment the people start puncturing it with bullet holes.

Autocrats fall when people stop believing the myth of inevitability.

Viktor Orbán’s defeat is bigger than Hungary. It’s proof that billionaire-backed strongmen can be beaten, that oligarch cash and captured media don’t make a regime immortal, and that democracy still has fight left in it. Knowing this, somewhere tonight, every mini-Orbán from Moscow to Mumbai is suddenly sleeping a little less soundly.

Hungary’s shown us even polished autocratic machines lose to those willing to fight & risk it all for democracy.

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By Cliff Schecter — April 10, 2026

Is Donald Trump effectively paying Iran Protection Money in the Strait of Hormuz? Bowing down like he owns a jewelry or coat business on the corner of Delancey and Ridge and Meyer Lansky or John Gotti just came swashbuckling in to remind him how kerosene and fire interact?

Because, let’s face it, the man should beg for forgiveness--not to murderous Irani Mullahs. But dead U.S. soldiers, murdered Iranian schoolgirls, U.S. farmers, gas prices, good taste, those possessing an IQ in excess of 85, and probably most other people alive.

Because among a long list of just flat-out, head-buried-in-feces, stupid-arse things the untreated gonorrhea goon has done, this may just be the dumbest. How do you go from free shipping through the Strait of Hormuz to a giant toll like we’re stuck in Blazing Saddles? I give you the presidency of Donald J. Trump.

So as Iran now enacts tolls on global shipping via one of the world’s key oil chokepoints, this story just got a lot bigger: it’s no longer about just his warmongering or changing the subject from himself and his billionaire predator friends in the Epstein files. It’s about global leverage, oil prices, shipping extortion, and Trump’s unbelievable, pathetic, physical and intellectual febrility.

Imagine if someone told you a few weeks ago, when this mentally and morally blighted ignoramus started a war for no reason, that Iran would now be charging $2 million on ships passing thru the Strait of Hormuz? Effectively boosting its economy by 15%--which I’m sure won’t be used on enriching uranium as Trump tore up the agreement that was preventing that--as American consumers foot the bill?

We were doing just fine. But that’s when Trump always steps in to do what he does...what he’s done his whole life. Which is fuck everything up.

It’s sort of impressive how badly this dolt can screw things in no time. Like the man has a gift for ensuring everything crossing is his path is demonstrably worse than when he arrived. To quote, well, myself, from the show, “just a wholly absurd outcome for a wholly absurd president who engaged in a wholly unnecessary attack.”

The ultimate checkmate. For the man with the ultimate checkered history of failure as a lifestyle choice.

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CLIFF’S NOTE: Quick reality check—If satire is where you’re getting the clearest version of what’s happening… that’s a problem.

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by BAM Staff

It’s been a brutal week—war headlines, rising prices, and nonstop political chaos.

(And now Orban has gone down!).

So instead of another breakdown, BAM Editorial Director and former MSNBC Emmy-Award-Winning Anchor, David Shuster, does something a whole lot smarter (and more fun): he lets the comedians do the talking. And what are they saying?

It honestly hits harder—much harder—than anything most corporate “news” media can bring themselves to produce these days. Maybe because they’re all owned by the same incestuous group of predatory monopolists?

In any case, from the late-night-style-comic sketches to a world of AI-generated insanity, Shuster’s countdown builds up to a crescendo that is both equal parts hilarious and uncomfortable. The latter because the jokes land a little too close to home. You’ll laugh, you’ll wince, and by the end, you might just realize that satire is doing the heavy lifting as monopolists and fascists do their best to bury what is most important to our citizenry.

So buckle up for some laughs and some truth, Shuster-style. It’s what we all need to finally end another Trump-infected week.

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by Lawrence Winnerman, Blue Amp Media COO

If you sat down with the most brilliant strategic minds in Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran—gave them unlimited funding, decades of planning, and a mandate to dismantle American global leadership from the inside—they could not have designed a more effective instrument of destruction than Donald Trump.

That is not hyperbole. It is an observation so plainly supported by the evidence that the only real question left is whether we are watching incompetence so total it mimics sabotage, or sabotage so brazen it hides behind incompetence.

Let’s talk about what just happened. Because what just happened should end careers, end presidencies, and—if we still had a functioning political culture—end the fantasy that this man has any business making decisions that affect the lives of 330 million Americans, let alone the stability of the global order.

No Plan. No Map. No Clue.

Six weeks ago, Donald Trump launched a full-scale war against Iran—with Israel as a co-belligerent, against a nation of 92 million people that sits on one side of the most strategically significant chokepoint on the planet. He did this with no defined objectives, no exit strategy, and no apparent understanding of what would happen next.

Anyone with a passing familiarity with Middle Eastern geopolitics—anyone who has glanced at a map—knows that Iran can shut the Strait of Hormuz. This is the single most discussed vulnerability in global energy security, written about in thousands of papers, war-gamed in hundreds of Pentagon exercises, understood by every defense analyst who has drawn a paycheck in the last forty years.

Nearly one-fifth of the world’s oil and natural gas transits through that strait. When Iran choked it off, gasoline prices skyrocketed worldwide. The global economy shuddered. And Trump—the man who launched the war that made this entirely predictable—stood at a podium acting as though the consequences were someone else’s fault.

He had no plan for this. None. He walked into the most foreseeable strategic trap in modern military history and then expressed surprise when the trap closed.

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“A Whole Civilization Will Die Tonight”

And then came the post.

On the morning of April 7, as the world waited to see whether the United States would escalate its assault on Iranian civilian infrastructure—power plants, bridges, the systems that keep a nation of 92 million people alive—Trump wrote on Truth Social: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”

Read that again. Slowly.

There is only one way to kill a civilization so that it is “never brought back again.” That is annihilation. That is the language of nuclear weapons. That is the rhetorical territory of extinction—a place no American president has ever gone publicly, not during the Cuban Missile Crisis, not during the Cold War, not during any moment when rational leaders understood that the power of these weapons lies in their restraint, not in the threat of their use against civilian populations.

Trump went there. He said it out loud, on social media, like a man threatening a neighbor’s dog.

The implications are staggering and irreversible. Every nation on earth that has been weighing whether to pursue nuclear weapons just received the clearest possible signal: the United States will threaten civilizational extinction on a Tuesday afternoon between Truth Social posts. The nonproliferation regime that American diplomats spent seventy years constructing—the careful architecture of treaties, assurances, and strategic ambiguity that kept the nuclear club small—was undermined more by that single post than by anything any adversary has ever done.

This is a genie that does not go back in the bottle. You cannot un-say that. You cannot walk it back with a ceasefire negotiated by Pakistan—a sentence that itself should make every American pause and consider how far we have fallen.

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The Desperation Deal

Because that is exactly what happened. Trump made a threat so monstrous, so disconnected from any achievable strategic objective, that he was left with only two options: follow through on civilizational annihilation, or back down.

He backed down. Of course TACO Trump backed down. But he backed down badly.

The ceasefire—announced ninety minutes before Trump’s own self-imposed deadline—was brokered by Pakistan. The United States of America, the nation that has styled itself as the indispensable power, the architect of the international order, needed Pakistan’s prime minister to call a timeout because our president had talked himself into a corner from which there was no dignified exit.

And the terms? Iran agreed to allow passage through the Strait of Hormuz—but only through coordination with its armed forces. Iran is now effectively asserting sovereign toll authority over the most important waterway in global commerce. Iranian state news has reported that Tehran and Oman would charge transit tolls for vessels passing through the strait. The Iranian Parliament speaker said publicly that the Strait of Hormuz will not return to its pre-war status.

Let that sink in. Before Trump’s war, ships transited the Strait of Hormuz freely. Now Iran controls the passage and is monetizing it. This is not a return to the status quo. This is a net strategic gain for Iran—extracted from a war that Trump started.

As David Shuster noted yesterday, some back of the envelope math shows this arrangement adding about $50 billion to Iran’s GDP of $350 billion annually. That’s nearly 15% GDP growth!

Other nations must be asking “How can we get a deal that good?!”

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Israel Says No

It gets worse.

Within hours of the ceasefire announcement, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared that the truce does not include Lebanon. Pakistan’s mediator had explicitly stated it did. Iran’s position was that the agreement covered all fronts. Trump and Netanyahu simply overruled reality.

Israel then launched its largest single-day attack of the entire war—more than one hundred strikes across Lebanon, killing at least 254 people and wounding more than 1,160, hitting residential buildings, mosques, medical centers, and cemeteries. Iran immediately accused Israel of violating the truce and threatened to withdraw from the agreement and shut the strait again.

So the ceasefire that Trump hailed as a “big day for world peace”—the deal he was forced into by his own reckless rhetoric—was functionally undermined by his closest ally within hours. And the United States either could not or would not stop it.

Vice President Vance, dispatched to explain the debacle, called it a “legitimate misunderstanding” and said it would be “dumb” for Iran to walk away over Lebanon. This is the diplomatic posture of the most powerful nation on earth: shrug emoji.

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What No Enemy Could Achieve

Now zoom out. Consider what Trump has accomplished in six weeks:

He launched an unprovoked war that legal experts have described as a violation of international law. He threatened to extinguish a civilization. He destabilized global energy markets so severely that oil prices remain above pre-war levels even with a ceasefire in place. He handed Iran a credible claim to toll authority over the Strait of Hormuz—a claim that did not exist before this war. He alienated European allies, who issued a joint statement demanding Lebanon’s inclusion in the ceasefire over the explicit objections of the United States and Israel. He demonstrated that the United States cannot control its own ally in the middle of a ceasefire it brokered. He needed Pakistan to save him from his own deadline. And he floated the idea of a “joint venture” with Iran to patrol the strait—a proposal so incoherent it would be funny if it weren’t terrifying.

The Soviet Union spent forty years and trillions of rubles trying to fracture Western alliances, undermine American credibility, and establish leverage over global energy flows. They failed. China has spent decades building alternative institutions and trade networks designed to reduce American influence. They have made progress, but the architecture of American-led order remained largely intact.

Donald Trump has done more to achieve these objectives—in six weeks—than either of those powers managed in generations.

Russia could not split the U.S. from its European allies on a matter of war and peace. Trump just did. China could not establish a rival power’s toll authority over the world’s most critical energy chokepoint. Trump just created the conditions for it. No adversary could get the United States to publicly threaten nuclear annihilation against a non-nuclear state on social media, shattering the credibility of the nonproliferation regime. Trump did it between breakfast and lunch.

If you were constructing a human being in a lab—engineering a single figure whose instincts, ignorance, and ego would combine to pull down the pillars of American power—you could not improve on this design.

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The Walls Are Coming Down

What we are witnessing is the active demolition of everything that made American leadership possible: credibility, restraint, alliance management, strategic patience, and the basic competence to not start wars you cannot finish.

Trump is not navigating a complex world badly. He is triggering a cascade of events that will permanently reshape the global order—and not in America’s favor. The Strait of Hormuz will never fully return to its pre-war status. The nonproliferation signal has been sent and received. The European allies who issued that joint statement are drawing conclusions about the reliability of the United States that will outlast this presidency. The nations watching Iran extract concessions from a desperate American president are learning lessons that no future administration can un-teach.

This moment is as real and consequential as the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the implosion of the Soviet Union. It is a reshaping—a demise—of the Post-World-War-II era in a way that will change the future, forever.

We are watching—in real time, with our eyes open—a man pull the walls of American influence and power down on top of our heads. And the rubble will not be cleared in our lifetimes.

The enemies of the United States could not have built a better instrument of American self-destruction. They didn’t have to. We elected one.

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Cliff’s Note

Today’s episode is why we do this. Where else can you get a nuclear-expert to explain how Trump’s makes the world more dangerous, then a former MAGA insider exposing how it works—in one show?

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Trump’s Iran “deal” is already falling apart—and the consequences could be nuclear. On today’s AMPED UP, and David Shuster break down how Trump’s threats of annihilation against Iran have backfired spectacularly.

Iran is now charging a $2 million toll on ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz, effectively boosting its own economy by 15% while American consumers foot the bill. That is, as Cliff said on the show, “just a wholly absurd outcome from a wholly absurd President and a wholly unnecessary attack.”

Then Dr. Rebecca Lubot, author of Keeping a Finger on the Button: Presidential Continuity in the Nuclear Age, joins Cliff and David to explain why Trump’s nuclear brinkmanship has crossed a threshold no modern leader of a nuclear state—not even Putin!—has crossed.

What he’s done is so ridiculous that China, Russia, and France are all now changing their nuclear doctrines in response to the irrational ravings of the Queens-bred, brainf*k. A man who somehow finds a way to do something more knuckleheaded each day than he did the last.

She also explained the context for the 25th Amendment, which was after JFK’s assassination. But the real context is that you could end up with a President who is lacking some marbles—perhaps the whole set like the current jack-in-the-box—and this amendment was of course put in place for specifically this purpose. But, then again, did anyone image we could make Minnie Mouse the Speaker of the House?

Which with him is quite the accomplishment.

In the second half of Amped Up, former MAGA activist Rich Logis tells a powerful story of escape. Of going from writing for Fox News and The Federalist, to beginning to doubt his path and reaching out for new information, to publicly breaking with the racist Munsters and founding Leaving MAGA. Logis shares all the dirty details in his new memoir, One Betrayal Too Many.

Leaving MAGA is a nonprofit that helps people escape this movement. A Trump campaign volunteer who once called Democrats “worse than Nazis,” Logis describes how diversifying his news sources brick by brick dismantled his worldview—and why the Uvalde shooting was his final breaking point on his road away from perdition. Rich’s message to those still in MAGA?

You’re not alone, and there’s a way out. This is essential viewing for anyone trying to understand how people get pulled down an extremist rabbit-hole, and how they can find their way back.

Combined, these two guests made this a helluva episode.

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Donald Trump And His Predator Pals Would Burn the World to Rule the Ashes

by Cliff Schecter

Donald Trump is an agent of chaos. His billionaire pals, too, are filled with sadistic pleasure at the mere thought of hurting others, which you can see in their behavior. Take a “man” like Elon Musk—who was three years behind me at Penn. Is it possible he cut SNAP so kids starve and eliminated USAID so kids die, because deep down he knows he’s garbage? That he leveraged mommy and daddy’s Apartheid emeralds into PayPal, whose profits he used to buy someone else’s idea and create Tesla?

Which then allowed him to buy an adult man’s jaw line and some extra hair?

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Definitely possible, folks.

In arguably the best movie of its genre, The Dark Knight (2008), Alfred Pennyworth tells Bruce Wayne a story about a bandit he encountered in Burma. This thief would steal their rubies and then just toss them, because, as has been said of Trump, “the cruelty was the point.” Or as Pennyworth (played brilliantly by Michael Kane) put it, "some men just want to watch the world burn."

Trump is a hybrid—wealth and power are Oedipal-obsessions—but lotsa fire non-Trumps. Buried beneath the discolored, demonstrably un-svelte, colic exterior is pure rage for how daddy never loved him. If his choice is letting others be happy while he whines, fails and blubbers, or ruining it for everyone, without a second thought (ok, it’s Trump, a first one) he’ll blow it all up to ensure we’re all as miserable him… all while staring acrimoniously into the cracked, golden mirror each morning.

The truth is, his ontological existence is to spread woe like a contagion. Even when he’s happy, others must be in torment.

Right now, Iran is embarrassing him. He’s losing the war. And the theocratic mullahs are rubbing it in because they understand psychological warfare better than most Democrats. Exhibit A: this was posted by Iran’s Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf just the other day:

After defeating Iran 37 times in a row, this brilliant no-strategy war they started has now been downgraded from ‘regime change’ to ‘Hey! Can anyone find our pilots? Please?’ Wow. What incredible progress. Absolute geniuses.

So Trump predictably, toddler-like as always, overreacted. And now we’re potentially—though Trump will likely chicken out, Thank God—on the brink of nuclear war.

The most maddening part is as as this demented dingus drags the world to the lip of nuclear conflict, he could be stopped at any moment by a handful of Republicans. As Trump treats human civilization with the care of The Trump Taj Mahal—something to loot, bankrupt, and leave smoldering—there is only one morally coherent response: remove him from office. Full stop.

It would take two-to-three House members. You have so-called reasonable ones who’ve taken multiple oaths to this country in retiring Rep. and former Brigadier General, Don Bacon, and former FBI agent, Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick. But, nope, no courage to be found. Bacon’s only good at tweeting shit he does nothing about:

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As for the Senate, do we expect frown-y Susan Collins, nepo-Lisa Murkowski or Thom Tillis—who’s great at yelling when it doesn’t matter—to do anything? Seriously, a few GOP House members and Senators, this is all over. And by “all,” I mean a helluva lot more than just the Iran crisis. But it’s mostly been this way for years, and these people clearly need a morality and courage implant and a self-importance enema.

Instead Trump, flanked by grinning cable-news action figure Pete Hegseth—if an action figures could keg stand Olde English 800—and a chorus line of defense-contractor ghouls, gets the same treatment he always gets from the coward class: handwringing, euphemisms, and another round of “well, let’s see how this plays out.”

How this plays out? We’re talking about the possibility of mushroom clouds, not whether the Fed should nudge interest rates.

And let’s talk about the real parasites in this equation—the monopolies and billionaire predators who always seem to uncover gold in the graveyard. Every war has its carrion birds: the oil profiteers, the weapons manufacturers, the hedge-fund vampires. They don’t care if Tehran, Tel Aviv, or half the global economy goes up in flames so long as the wires with the many zeroes keep coming in.

Nuclear brinkmanship to these people is just another earnings call. Human beings? Line items. Children vaporized in a conflict they helped lobby into existence? Unfortunate “collateral damage.” If evil needed a Bloomberg terminal, this is what it would look like.

The people paying the price of this war’s escalation are taxpayers, soldiers, civilians, and drivers at the pump; the people cashing checks are missile manufacturers and oil shareholders. Palantir, Peter Thiel’s spy-on-the-whole-world-data joint? Tens of billions in contracts. Satellite imagery? Elon gets to make a mint from that. The oil companies? Trump already slipped and said how it was good news for “us” that oil prices were up because we produce a lot of oil.

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The padded-wall Pringle considers “us” to be the CEOs of ExxonMobil, Chevron and Shell. And Uday and Qusay Trump—i.e. the bashed brain brothers, Don Jr. and Eric—magically invested in over-priced drones just before the war. Hegseth also tried to get in on the action allegedlly insider trading defense stocks, but couldn’t even do that right.

So I’m gonna go with White Goodman on this one:

Again, this isn’t difficult, Mike Johnson, if you’re not too busy monitoring your son’s porn to do your job. If a man starts marching us toward nuclear war, you remove him. Because the people preying on what’s left of our world right now—Trump, his media enablers, the war-profiteering corporate class—would rather rule over rubble than live in a democracy they can’t fully own.

And that, in the end, is the whole rotten story of our age, of these assholes I went to high school with and grew up around, who’ve gained control of our politics, media, and corporate board rooms: the predator class would rather risk ending the world than surrender one ounce of power.

They profit from fear. We fight with truth.

The billionaire predator class wants you numb, overwhelmed, and doom-scrolling while they monetize chaos and flirt with nuclear catastrophe.

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Cliff’s Note: Hegseth’s broker tried to bet millions on war stocks just before bombs dropped. He’s a predator. Dead Americans are profit.

That’s why BAM is fighting to build independent media, to expose and remove every last predatory sociopath from power.

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By David Shuster

There are many ways for a nation to disgrace itself, but none more efficient than allowing war makers to dabble in war profiteering. If the recent allegations against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth are even half true, our nation faces not merely a scandal, but a spectacle of epic proportions.

According to the Financial Times, Hegseth’s broker at Morgan Stanley allegedly explored a multimillion-dollar investment in a defense-focused ETF (Exchange Traded Fund) managed by BlackRock—just weeks before President Donald Trump launched a major military campaign against Iran.

In other words, a financial broker went sniffing around on Hegseth’s behalf, hoping to tuck a multi-million dollar sum into a basket of defense stocks, just before Donald Trump unleashed the dogs of war against Iran.

The deal, we are told, never came to pass. That’s because the Black Rock ETF was not available for Morgan Stanley clients.

The failure of the transaction is apparently exculpatory, at least in the Trump administration.

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A Hegseth spokesman at the Pentagon insists the whole affair is “entirely false and fabricated.” Sure.

The reporting at the Financial Times was led by Paul Murphy, the news organization’s investigations editor. Murphy is considered one of the finest investigative journalists in financial news. He attributed his reporting on Hegseth to three separate sources.

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Meanwhile, a handful of democratic senators—Elizabeth Warren, Tammy Duckworth, Richard Blumenthal, Gary Peters, and Jeff Merkley—are demanding a Congressional investigation. They have taken the quaint position that a Secretary of Defense should not behave like a man browsing a racing sheet before placing a bet.

They warn of “conflicts of interest,” which is a polite way of saying that the fellow entrusted with overseeing bombs and missiles targeting Iran should not also be seeking pre-war purchases of stocks in the U.S. companies manufacturing bombs and missiles.

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Civilian control of the military depends on trust. Citizens should be able to trust that decisions on war and peace are made solely based on national security—not personal enrichment. Soldiers must believe their commanders are sending them into danger for legitimate reasons, not because someone in Washington saw a favorable position in a defense ETF.

Even the perception of insider advantage erodes that trust. It feeds a long-standing and dangerous suspicion: that war benefits the powerful while ordinary Americans bear the cost. History offers too many examples of conflicts entangled with profit motives. That is precisely why strict ethics rules exist for officials like the Defense Secretary—and why any hint of violation must be treated with urgency.

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Hegseth supporters are already arguing that no investment was ultimately made, and thus no harm occurred. That is an unacceptably low bar. Ethical leadership is not about avoiding technical violations. It is about avoiding conflicts altogether—real or perceived. Attempting to position oneself for potential financial gain tied to military action is incompatible with the responsibilities of the office.

If Hegseth has nothing to hide, he should welcome a full, independent inquiry. Release communications. Provide financial disclosures. Testify under oath and have the Morgan Stanley broker also testify under oath. Allow investigators to examine whether any discussions occurred and whether they intersected with classified or privileged Iran attack information.

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Transparency is not a burden—it is the only path to restoring credibility.

If Mr. Hegseth is innocent, then an investigation will do him the immense favor of proving it. If he is not, then no quantity of official indignation will suffice to rescue him. In either case, the public is entitled to something more substantial than a curt dismissal.

The truth, as always, is likely to be less cut and dry than the blockbuster headlines or the shrieking denials. But until the truth is dragged into the light, we have every reason to suspect that the line between statesman and speculator has grown perilously thin and possibly criminally corrupt.

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This is bigger than one official. It is about the principle that public service is a trust, not transaction.

It is also about the Trump administration. From the President to his family, cabinet secretaries, friends, and insiders, the priority always seems to be to make a killing. And it is seldom confined to the battlefield.

Hegseth’s broker went shopping for war stocks, and corporate media will move on by tomorrow. Not us.We’ll follow the money, name names, hold the bastards accountable. It’s what Blue Amp Media does.

But we can do it with your support. Become a paid subscriber, and allow us to keep fighting for democracy.

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— Cliff

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