Featured

Trump: Iran asked me to be Supreme Leader, but I said no thanks

Trump’s “Iran asked me to be Supreme Leader” joke at an NRCC fundraiser uses a real, deadly leadership crisis in Iran to normalize assassination-as-policy and blur what’s confirmed about the war and succession.

Mar 26, 2026

Featured

‘Men need to be perp-walked’ after Epstein files release, Massie tells BBC

A GOP lawmaker says the Epstein document releases are still falling short—because redactions and withheld material may be blocking accountability and survivor-centered justice.

Mar 25, 2026

Buried.News

The stories buried under the noise

Primary focus

Trump fires Kristi Noem as Homeland Security Secretary

A Cabinet secretary was forced out amid contracting and oversight scrutiny, signaling that executive control—not transparent accountability—can dictate leadership of the agency driving mass detention and deportation.

Mar 5, 2026

Featured

The Trump gold coin is not normal : Consider This from NPR

A federal design panel OK’d a Trump portrait for a commemorative gold coin, but the key question is whether Treasury can legally bypass long-standing limits meant to keep living politicians off U.S. money.

Mar 23, 2026

Featured

White House Confronted Over Huge Bets Made Minutes Before Trump’s Big War Move

A $580 million burst of oil-futures selling minutes before Trump’s Iran “talks” post raises a basic public-interest question: did anyone trade on advance knowledge of a market-moving national security decision?

Mar 24, 2026

Norms Impact

Gallup will no longer measure presidential approval after 88 years

Gallup’s exit from presidential approval polling removes a shared yardstick of executive accountability, weakening a long-standing public-feedback norm central to democratic scrutiny.

General

Feb 11, 2026

Sources

https://thehill.com/homenews/media/5733236-gallup-stops-presidential-approval-ratings-polls/amp/

Summary

Gallup is ending its publication of presidential approval and favorability ratings, a practice it maintained for more than 88 years. The change redirects a long-standing public benchmark away from individual political accountability toward broader issue and conditions research. The practical consequence is a thinner, less standardized public record of presidential performance that media and the public have relied on for decades.

Reality Check

When a dominant, long-running measure of presidential performance disappears, the vacuum gets filled by partisan, nontransparent metrics that weaken our ability to hold power to account in real time. Nothing here suggests a criminal act; ending a poll is not bribery, extortion, or election interference under federal law, and there is no conduct described that implicates statutes like 18 U.S.C. §§ 201 or 371. The damage is structural: we lose a standardized, widely recognized benchmark that helped anchor public debate in a consistent series rather than a rotating set of competing narratives.

Detail

Gallup confirmed Wednesday that it will no longer track and publish presidential approval ratings after more than eight decades. The company said that beginning this year it will stop releasing approval and favorability ratings for individual political figures.

In a statement, Gallup described the decision as “an evolution in how Gallup focuses its public research and thought leadership,” and said its work would concentrate on “long-term, methodologically sound research on issues and conditions that shape people’s lives.” Gallup said this research will continue through the Gallup Poll Social Series, the Gallup Quarterly Business Review, the World Poll, and its U.S. and global research portfolio.

The Washington Post first reported the change. Gallup’s presidential approval rating has long been one of the most frequently cited measures used by media outlets to describe public opinion of a president’s performance.

Norms Impact

DOJ quietly removes study showing right wing attacks ‘outpace’ those by left

By scrubbing government research on domestic extremist killings without explanation, the Justice Department normalizes executive-driven suppression of empirical records that citizens need to judge power and policy.

Executive

Sep 17, 2025

Sources

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5507682-doj-removes-far-right-extremism-study/

Summary

The Justice Department removed from its website a 2024 study concluding far-right extremists were responsible for the bulk of ideologically motivated killings and that such attacks “continue to outpace” other forms of domestic terrorism. The department’s public-facing information posture shifted toward executive-order-driven content control while declining to explain what orders required the deletion. The practical consequence is a degraded evidentiary baseline for policymakers and the public at the exact moment political leaders are disputing which ideologies drive the nation’s deadliest extremist violence.

Reality Check

When a law-enforcement agency quietly deletes empirical findings that contradict a sitting president’s public claims, it sets a precedent for politicized control of the factual record that weakens democratic accountability and our ability to defend our own rights. On the facts provided, the conduct is not clearly criminal: removing a public webpage and citing “recent Executive Orders” does not, by itself, meet elements of federal obstruction or falsification statutes like 18 U.S.C. § 1519 absent evidence of intent to destroy records to impede an investigation or proceeding. The threat is institutional: using opaque “review” rationales to curate government truth-telling invites weaponization of public information systems against inconvenient data, especially during a live national debate over domestic violent extremism.

Detail

The Justice Department removed a 2024 study from its website that analyzed National Institute of Justice data on ideologically motivated deaths. The study stated that “the number of far-right attacks continues to outpace all other types of terrorism and domestic violent extremism,” and reported that since 1990, far-right extremists committed 227 ideologically motivated homicide events causing more than 520 deaths, compared with 42 attacks and 78 deaths attributed to far-left extremists.

Daniel Malmer, a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Ph.D. student studying extremism, said the study was visible on the department’s site the day before and was removed by Sept. 13, days after the killing of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk. The removal was first reported by 404 Media. The Justice Department did not respond to requests for comment; the page now states the department is “reviewing its websites … in accordance with recent Executive Orders,” without specifying which orders. The Hill obtained the original study text.