The destructive force that is DOGE still somehow manages to exist, despite it not being (depending on which claim is made and when) an official federal agency and/or overseen by anyone specifically identifiable as the head of DOGE.

Until recently, everyone — including Donald Trump — knew (and said as much in public) that DOGE was both a government agency and headed by Elon Musk. When the lawsuits started flying, the backtracking began by the administration, which apparently thought it could cover its tracks by walking backwards in its golf-cleated clown shows.

Trump’s love for DOGE has managed to undercut the protections DOGE hoped it would be able to avail itself of when the FOIA requests began pouring in and the discovery demands started hitting federal dockets.

The administration is now attempting a Hail Mary play, albeit one that hails Thomas and Alito (and possibly, Roberts), rather than the patron saint it’s named after. Given the makeup of this current court, it probably has a far better chance of success than simply hurling the ball into the air and hoping someone on their own team manages to come down with it. (And, indeed, it has already scored a temporary stay, thanks to an emergency order issued by Chief Justice John Roberts.)

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) has been suing DOGE ever since it rejected its FOIA requests for the agency’s operational documents. The Trump Administration is now fighting back, albeit with at least one hand inadvertently tied behind its back, as Josh Gerstein and Kyle Cheney report for Politico:

The Justice Department filed an emergency appeal Wednesday urging the high court to put a hold on a judge’s orders giving a watchdog group access to documents detailing firings, grant terminations and other actions proposed by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, which was overseen by Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk.

Solicitor General John Sauer is also asking the Supreme Court to block a deposition of the obscure official the Trump administration has identified as the leader of the budget-cutting drive: DOGE administrator Amy Gleason.

The crux of the administration’s opacity argument [PDF] is this: DOGE is nothing more than an advisory entity that lacks the power to make independent decisions. Obviously, everything about DOGE says otherwise, as it has propelled massive staffing and funding cuts across multiple agencies, participated in extremely careless (and possibly illegal) data exfiltration, and done pretty much whatever it wants since it materialized as the barely-sentient wet dream of a guy who insists on wearing a baseball cap to every Oval Office meeting.

But that has been undercut by Trump himself, who has stated the agency definitely can do everything the administration is now claiming in court it can’t do, as well as thrown someone under the DOGE bus to act as the recipient for the negative attention (and FOIA requests, and deposition demands) Trump managed to successfully shield his fascist-saluting man-child from since his return to the Oval Office.

This trouble has been brewing for a few months:

U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper found there were strong indications that DOGE was actually directing cuts and layoffs at numerous federal agencies. That substantive operational role suggests DOGE’s activities fall under the Freedom of Information Act, the judge wrote.

Now that a judge is saying stuff we’ve all been able to clearly observe since DOGE’s inception, the administration now wants the Supreme Court to declare that the public (and multiple litigants) shouldn’t be allowed to believe their own eyes.

Making matters worse for the administration’s anti-transparency efforts is the fact that it has finally decided to put someone’s name on the top of the department’s letterhead: DOGE administrator Amy Gleason. (From what’s known about Gleason, it seems clear she’s being used to catch bullets meant for Trump/Musk, rather than actually direct DOGE operations.)

While this will probably keep Musk and his mouth out of court, it does make it clear that DOGE not only acts on its own impulses (rather than just offer mass termination “guidance”) but that someone will ultimately have to answer questions about DOGE’s actions in court, should discovery requests manage to secure some depositions.

Obviously, the normal court processes and determinations in litigation against DOGE cannot be allowed to stand. That’s why the administration wants the judges it bought to give it a free pass on destroying the federal government while simultaneously preventing the public from learning anything more about the salt-the-earth tactics being spearheaded by DOGE. And it really doesn’t matter whose name is currently at the top of the org chart in terms of destruction. But it does matter when it comes to FOIA litigation and the administration’s insistence DOGE is limited to simply suggesting moves the administration might want to make.

There’s no telling how this desperation move will work out. The Supreme Court has played both sides of the encroaching fascism line in recent weeks, giving Trump some free passes while occasionally shutting down the administration’s efforts to vanish constitutional rights into the anti-immigration cornfield.

Let’s hope this will end up being one of the latter. What’s already known about DOGE and its operations is extremely disturbing. Perhaps the exposure of more internal information will help more people realize the government they chose to elect is actively trying to destroy many of the things they still hold dear and propel some opposition from citizens who never thought they’d be #NeverTrump. We can only hope.

The Supreme Court has delivered a clear rebuke to the Trump administration’s attempt to weaponize the Alien Enemies Act, issuing a slightly more detailed ruling that follows up on last month’s midnight emergency order. That emergency ruling came as the administration was literally loading detainees onto buses headed to airports, racing to deport them before courts could intervene.

Justice Alito filed a dissent to that ruling a couple of days later, whining about the procedural nature of it and (falsely, it turns out) claiming that there was no rush and that detainees weren’t going to be trafficked to a foreign gulag in the meantime.

Now the Supreme Court has come out with a more detailed ruling in the case, per curiam (meaning none of the Justices put their names directly to it) saying that the Government is simply wrong to use the Alien Enemies Act like this.

The ruling starts out by highlighting just how wrong Alito was in pretending that the government was in no rush to send the detained Venezuelans to a Salvadoran gulag, while noting the stance the Trump admin has taken in the Abrego Garcia case that once they’ve removed someone from the country the courts have no jurisdiction any more:

We understood the Government to assert the right to remove the detainees as soon as midnight central time on April 19. The Government addressed the detainees’ allegations on April 18 only at an evening hearing before the District Court for the District of Columbia, where the detainees had separately sought relief. The Government guaranteed that no putative class members would be removed that day. Tr. of Proceedings in J. G. G. v. Trump, No. 25−cv−766, ECF Doc. 93, p. 9. But it further represented that, in its view, removal of putative class members as soon as the next day “would be consistent with” its due process obligations, and it “reserve[d] the right” to take such action. Id., at 26; see id., at 16 (explanation by the court that “tomorrow . . . starts at 12:01 a.m.”). Evidence now in the record (although not all before us on April 18) suggests that the Government had in fact taken steps on the afternoon of April 18 toward removing detainees under the AEA—including transporting them from their detention facility to an airport and later returning them to the facility. See Supp. App. to Reply 1a−5a. Had the detainees been removed from the United States to the custody of a foreign sovereign on April 19, the Government may have argued, as it has previously argued, that no U. S. court had jurisdiction to order relief. See Application To Vacate Injunction in Noem v. Abrego Garcia, No. 24A949 (Apr. 7, 2025), pp. 11−20.

But, as the seven justices who signed on note, that’s not at all how this works, and it highlights that the administration’s posturing in other cases show how important this issue is, and why it’s fine for the Supreme Court to take it up so quickly:

The Government does not contest before this Court the applicants’ description of the notice afforded to AEA detainees in the Northern District of Texas, nor the assertion that the Government was poised to carry out removals imminently. The Government has represented elsewhere that it is unable to provide for the return of an individual deported in error to a prison in El Salvador, see Abrego Garcia v. Noem, No. 25−cv−951 (D Md.), ECF Docs. 74, 77, where it is alleged that detainees face indefinite detention, see Application for Injunction 11. The detainees’ interests at stake are accordingly particularly weighty.

And then, most importantly, the Supreme Court makes it clear that giving detainees just 24 hours to try to respond to a notice of removal is not actually due process:

Under these circumstances, notice roughly 24 hours before removal, devoid of information about how to exercise due process rights to contest that removal, surely does not pass muster.

That’s the key line in the latest ruling.

But, still, it believes the case should now move through a more proper process in the lower courts, but that requires the US government to allow for those cases to move properly, rather than just throwing these people on airplanes. Thus, it sends the case back to the lower courts while making it clear no one should be removed while those courts handle the detainees’ due process.

To be clear, we decide today only that the detainees are entitled to more notice than was given on April 18, and we grant temporary injunctive relief to preserve our jurisdiction while the question of what notice is due is adjudicated.

Justice Alito, along with his sidekick Justice Thomas, unsurprisingly dissents. As per usual, they pretend that this is entirely about the procedural aspects of the case and that the Supreme Court has no jurisdiction over the case. Alito claims it’s unfair to expect a district court to respond so quickly and that he just doesn’t see what all the fuss and rush is about. The majority decision points out (in nicer terms) that he’s living in a fantasy world:

First, we reject the dissent’s characterization of the events that transpired on April 18, which lead it to question our jurisdiction. District courts should approach requests for preliminary relief with care and consideration, see post, at 3−4 (ALITO, J., dissenting), but exigent circumstances may impose practical constraints. Preliminary relief is “customarily granted on the basis of procedures that are less formal and evidence that is less complete than in a trial on the merits.” Lackey v. Stinnie, 604 U. S. ___, ___ (2025) (slip op., at 6) (quoting University of Tex. v. Camenisch, 451 U. S. 390, 395 (1981)). The purpose of such relief is “merely to preserve the relative positions of the parties” pending further proceedings. Lackey, 604 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 6) (quoting Camenisch, 451 U. S., at 395).

In this case, the record before the District Court, although limited, indicated that removals of putative class members were likely imminent. Contra, post, at 4−6 (ALITO, J., dissenting). The detainees attached four declarations to their emergency motion for a TRO. In one, for example, an attorney relayed a detainee’s report that immigration officers “had informed them that they will be deported either today or tomorrow.” ECF Doc. 30−1. In a second, a nonprofit director described conversations with family members of detainees and linked to a video of detainees holding notices of removal as evidence that detainees “were being removed.”

Importantly, the relevant question for purposes of our jurisdiction is whether, at the time this Court was called upon to intervene, the District Court’s inaction had the effect of refusing an injunction. In their application to this Court, the detainees represented that “[m]any individuals [had] already been loaded on to buses, presumably headed to the airport.” Application for Injunction 1. Shortly thereafter, the Government represented on the record in federal court that it reserved the right to remove detainees after midnight. We had the power to issue injunctive relief to prevent irreparable harm to the applicants and to preserve our jurisdiction over the matter

Perhaps most tellingly, Justice Kavanaugh’s concurrence cuts through the procedural dance, essentially acknowledging that the current system of emergency orders and circuit court ping-pong isn’t serving anyone. His suggestion that the Court should just take the case directly highlights both the urgency of the constitutional questions at stake and a growing institutional impatience with the administration’s tactics:

The circumstances call for a prompt and final resolution, which likely can be provided only by this Court. At this juncture, I would prefer not to remand to the lower courts and further put off this Court’s final resolution of the critical legal issues. Rather, consistent with the Executive Branch’s request for expedition—and as the detainees themselves urge—I would grant certiorari, order prompt briefing, hold oral argument soon thereafter, and then resolve the legal issues.

There’s still much more to go in this case, but it does appear that a clear majority of the Court is at least somewhat concerned about the way the Trump admin is rushing people onto planes to kick them out of the country without due process, and then you have Alito and Thomas whining in the corner that there’s no need to rush, even as detainees were being loaded into buses to take them to the airport.

From raucous Pride parades and festivals to intimate LGBTQ+ support groups and book clubs, there are dozens of ways to celebrate Pride Month this June (and July, and August) in Iowa. Browse more than 50 options below.

Iowa City area

Tuesday, June 10, 7 p.m., Pride at FilmScene: I Am My Own Woman, FilmScene

Satuday, June 14, 11 a.m., Let Love Fly, Centennial Park, North Liberty

Tuesday, June 17, 6:30 p.m., Pride at FilmScene: Castration Movie Anthology I: Traps, FilmScene

Wednesday, June 18, 10 p.m. Late Shift at the Grindhouse: Jubilee, FilmScene

Tuesday, June 24, 7 p.m., Pride at FilmScene: North By Current, FilmScene

Monday-Sunday, June 16-22, Pride Week at Millstream Brewing Co., Amana

Tuesday, June 17, 4 p.m., LGBTQ+ Meet & Greet, Press Coffee

Tuesday, June 17, 5 p.m., Big Gay Bar Crawl 2025, Studio 13

Wednesday, June 18, 5 p.m., Iowa City Pride Picnic & Pool Party, S.T. Morrison Park, Coralville

Saturday, June 21, 12 p.m., Iowa City Pride Parade & Festival, Downtown Iowa City

Saturday, June 21, 2:30 p.m., 5:30 p.m. & 10 p.m., Drag Shows, Studio 13

Saturday, June 21, 8 p.m., Pride Variety Show, IC Pride Fest Mainstage, downtown Iowa City

Saturday, June 21 at 9:45 p.m., Iowa City Pride After Party: Chillona, Sun Centauri, Englert Theatre

Thursday, June 26, 3 p.m., Pride Party, North Liberty Public Library

Des Moines area

Friday-Sunday, June 6-8, Capital City PrideFest, Downtown Des Moines

Tuesday, June 10, 7 p.m., Varsity Pride: The Birdcage, Varsity Cinema

Opens Thursday, June 12, Varsity Pride: Drop Dead Gorgeous, Varsity Cinema

Friday & Saturday, June 13 & 14, 7:30 p.m., Des Moines Gay Men’s Chorus presents: Proud ‘N Pink, Temple Theater

Saturday, June 14, 1 p.m., Common Love Clothing Pop-up, Park Fair Mall

Sunday, June 15, 12 p.m., Big Gay Rage Yoga, The Garden Restaurant and Show Lounge

Opens Thursday, June 19, Varsity Pride: But I’m a Cheerleader, Varsity Cinema

Friday, June 20, 6 p.m., 16th Annual One Iowa Gala, Vibrant Music Hall

Saturday, June 21, 4 p.m., Ankeny Pride Celebration, Southview Middle School, Ankeny

Sunday, June 22, 2 p.m., Pups With Pride, Paws and Pints Dog Park

Opens Sunday, June 22, Varsity Pride: Brokeback Mountain, Varsity Cinema

Tuesday, June 24 at 6 p.m., Meet the Author: Rahim Thawer, The Mental Health Guide for Cis and Trans Queer Guys, Beaverdale Books

Friday, June 27, 5 p.m., iCubs Pride Night & Tailgate, Principal Park

Sunday, June 29, 10 a.m., Pride Ride, SingleSpeed Brewing Co.

Sunday, June 29, 10 a.m., Valley Junction Pride, Historic Valley Junction

Saturday, July 26, 12 p.m., Pride in the Park 2025, West End Park, Marshalltown

Cedar Rapids area

Friday, June 6, 12 p.m. & Monday, June 16, 10 a.m., Pride Button Making, Marion Public Library

Friday, June 6, 6 p.m., Pride at the Park, Guthridge Park, Green Pavilion, Hiawatha

Saturday, June 7, 11 a.m., Pride Flash Event, Iron Lotus Tattoo & Piercing

Saturday, June 14, 11 a.m., Benton County Pride, Celebration Park, Vinton

Saturday, June 14, 3 p.m., Affirming Service, Cedar Rapids Public Library

Saturday, June 14, 7 p.m., Pride Month: Get Bendy with Your Beloved, Breathing Room Yoga

Monday, June 16, 6 p.m., Read with Pride: An LGBTQIA Book Club, Hiawatha Public Library

Friday, June 27, 8 p.m., Pride Night, Spare Time, Cedar Rapids

Friday, July 6, 12 p.m., Pride Ride, NewBo City Market

Saturday, July 12, 11 a.m., CR Pride Festival & Parade, NewBo City Market

Cedar Falls & Waterloo

Friday, June 13 at 8 p.m., Giggles for Good w/ headliner Jade Esteban Estrada, Octopus College Hill

Sunday, June 15, 2:30 p.m., Rainbow Pride Story Time!, Cedar Falls Public Library

Friday-Saturday, Aug. 22-23, Cedar Valley Pridefest, Downtown Waterloo

Wednesday, Aug. 24, 5:30-10 p.m., PrideRide Pint Night & Patio Party, SingleSpeed Brewing Co., Downtown Waterloo

Quad Cities

Friday-Saturday, June 6-7, Quad Cities Pride Festival, Schwiebert Riverfront Park, Rock Island

Sunday, June 8, 10:30 a.m., Somatic Session at Schwiebert, Schwiebert Riverfront Park Bandshell, Rock Island

Thursday, June 12, 6:30 p.m., Pride Night with the River Bandits, Modern Woodman Park, Davenport

Friday, June 13–Sunday, June 22 at 2 & 7 p.m., Hairspray, Cedar Falls Community Theatre at Oster Regent

Saturday, June 14, 9 a.m., Annual Pride Party, The Atlas Collective, Moline

Saturday, June 14, 11 a.m., QC Unity Pride Parade, Downtown Davenport Riverfront

Thursday, June 19, 5:30 p.m., Pride Book Club, The Atlas Collective, Moline

Saturday, June 21 at 10 a.m., 3rd Annual Joy March, Vander Veer Park

Thursday, June 24, 5:30 p.m., Pride Book Club, The Atlas Collective, Moline

Saturday, June 28, 8 a.m., Pride 5k: Walk, Run, & Roll, Bass Street Landing, Rock Island

Saturday, June 28, 3 p.m., Pride Party, Bass Street Landing, Rock Island

Dubuque

Saturday, June 7, 12 p.m., Dubuque Pride Festival, Town Clock Plaza, Dubuque

Fort Madison, Ottumwa & Burlington

Saturday, June 7, 4-7 p.m., 5th Annual Ottumwa Pride Block Party, The Beach Ottumwa

Friday, June 13, 4 p.m., Lee County Pride Festival, Central Park, Fort Madison

Saturday, June 28, 8 a.m., Pride on the Riverfront, Burlington

News Mass Effect

Mass Effect TV Series Snags Star Trek Beyond Writer as Showrunner

Doug Jung’s previous credits also include The Cloverfield Paradox and Mindhunter.

By Vanessa Armstrong

|

Published on June 6, 2025

Credit: BioWare

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Credit: BioWare

The television adaptation of the video game Mass Effect is moving forward at Amazon MGM Studios.

Today, Deadline broke the news that Doug Jung—whose previous credits include writing 2016’s Star Trek Beyond, 2018’s The Cloverfield Paradox, and the upcoming Jason Momoa series, Chief of War—will serve as showrunner for the project. He joins writer Daniel Casey (F9: The Fast Saga), who has been working on Mass Effect for the past year or so.

Amazon’s TV adaptation efforts for the BioWare video game franchise have been in the works for years. We got news that it was finally moving forward in November 2024, and the addition of Jung suggests that if we hold our breath and cross our fingers, we might get to see it one day on Prime Video.

For those unfamiliar with the franchise (or who haven’t read the novelizations set in the Mass Effect world by N.K. Jemisin and Catherynne M. Valente), the first three games focus on Commander Shepard, a vet of the Systems Alliance Navy who finds themself tasked to fight against the Reapers, an AI alien species heading to the Milky Way with not-great-intentions for humanity.

We still don’t have any casting news or when the series will go into production, but with Jung on board, odds are better than they were before that we’ll be getting more details soon.[end-mark]

The post <i>Mass Effect</i> TV Series Snags <i>Star Trek Beyond</i> Writer as Showrunner appeared first on Reactor.

When NPR sued Donald Trump Tuesday, it had an easy argument to go with. Normally, in First Amendment retaliation cases against the government, you have to pull together a bunch of disparate strands to prove the retaliatory intent of the actions. But as NPR noted in its filing, and as Justice Scalia once wrote about obvious constitutional violations: “this wolf comes as a wolf.” Trump’s executive order cutting public media funding doesn’t even pretend to hide its retaliatory nature — it literally calls NPR and PBS “biased media” in the title.

Republicans have been gunning for public media for decades, but historically, every time Congress tries to cut funding, outcry from their constituents is so overwhelming that nothing ever happens. It turns out tons of people (including Republican voters) actually like NPR and PBS. But Trump skipped Congress entirely and simply declared that public media wouldn’t be receiving any more federal funding — because he thinks their coverage hurts his feelings.

Federal funding for public media is already a bit confusing because very little of it actually goes directly to NPR and PBS. The funding mostly goes to local affiliates, many of which then do use it to purchase syndicated programming from NPR and PBS.

NPR’s complaint is refreshingly straightforward: this is textbook viewpoint discrimination that violates the First Amendment, separation of powers, and due process. As the lawsuit notes, the Supreme Court made clear just last year (in the Moody v. NetChoice case) that “it is no job for government to decide what counts as the right balance of private expression — to ‘un-bias’ what it thinks biased.”

“If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox” in matters of politics or opinion. West Va. State Bd. of Educ. v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624, 642 (1943). As the Supreme Court reiterated just last year, “it is no job for government to decide what counts as the right balance of private expression— to ‘un-bias’ what it thinks biased, rather than to leave such judgments to speakers and their audiences.” Moody v. NetChoice, LLC, 603 U.S. 707, 719 (2024). These fundamental First Amendment principles apply in full force in the context of public media and doom Executive Order 14290, which expressly aims to punish and control Plaintiffs’ news coverage and other speech the Administration deems “biased.” The Order also violates due process, the Separation of Powers and the Spending Clause of the Constitution. See U.S. Const. Art. I, § 8, cl. 1. It cannot stand.

What makes this case so obvious is that Trump hasn’t even tried to hide the retaliatory motive (because he doesn’t realize it’s unconstitutional and doesn’t much care about that). The executive order and accompanying materials openly attack NPR’s editorial choices:

On May 1, 2025, President Trump issued Executive Order 14290, entitled “Ending Taxpayer Subsidization of Biased Media” (the Order), 90 Fed. Reg. 19415, which contradicts these statutory precepts and violates the Constitution. Contrary to Congress’s intent to support an independent public radio and television system, and statutory requirements that expressly shield the Corporation and entities like Plaintiffs from governmental interference, the Order directs federal agencies as well as the Corporation to withhold all federal funding from NPR and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). The Order further directs the Corporation to “cease indirect funding to NPR and PBS” by mandating that local radio and television stations that receive grants from CPB, like the Local Member Stations, not use those federal funds to acquire NPR or PBS programming, and by revising existing grant agreements to prohibit grantees “from funding NPR or PBS.”…

It is not always obvious when the government has acted with a retaliatory purpose in violation of the First Amendment. “But this wolf comes as a wolf.” Morrison v. Olson, 487 U.S. 654, 699 (1988) (Scalia, J., dissenting). The Order targets NPR and PBS expressly because, in the President’s view, their news and other content is not “fair, accurate, or unbiased.” Order § 1. And the “Fact Sheet” and press release accompanying the Order, which echo prior statements by President Trump and members of his Administration, only drive home the Order’s overt retaliatory purpose. They deride NPR’s content as “left-wing propaganda,” and underline the President’s antipathy toward NPR’s news coverage and its editorial choices. See “Fact Sheet: President Donald J. Trump Ends Taxpayer Subsidization of Biased Media” (May 1, 2025) (asserting that NPR published articles “insist[ing] COVID-19 did not originate in a lab” and “refused to cover the Hunter Biden laptop story”); 1 Press Release, “President Trump Finally Ends the Madness of NPR, PBS” (May 2, 2025) (asserting that NPR “apologized for calling illegal immigrants ‘illegal’”).

It’s a bit surprising that PBS and NPR aren’t suing together, though the news side of NPR reports that PBS is looking into suing:

PBS is not a party to the lawsuit. The television network issued a statement Tuesday morning saying, “PBS is considering every option, including taking legal action, to allow our organization to continue to provide essential programming and services to member stations and all Americans.”

NPR also notes that the case has been assigned to the same judge, Randolph Moss, who is handling a different, but similar lawsuit, in which the Corporation for Public Broadcasting had sued Trump after he tried to fire a bunch of its board members.

Look, you can argue the federal government shouldn’t fund any media (though that would devastate rural communities that rely on public broadcasting). But even if that’s your position, such decisions belong to Congress, not a president with hurt feelings. And they absolutely cannot be made based on viewpoint discrimination.

Trump managed to violate both principles simultaneously — casually torching separation of powers while engaging in the kind of obvious retaliation against media that would be more fitting in authoritarian countries with dictators Trump admires. NPR’s lawsuit should be a slam dunk, assuming we still have courts willing to enforce the Constitution when it’s inconvenient for presidents.

This is delicious. Republican lawmakers in Oklahoma have tried to bend the education system to their will. And now they’re finding out it won’t be bent quite as easy as they thought.

First, let’s take a look at the backstory here, which is steeped in the sort of stupidity we’ve come to expect from the performative mooks currently serving terms as Republican politicians. Here’s what the state’s Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters (R) mandated for the 2025-26 school year:

The new curriculum includes a section that requires students to “analyze contemporary turning points of 21st-century American society.” That requirement includes the following:

Identify discrepancies in 2020 elections results by looking at graphs and other information, including the sudden halting of ballot-counting in select cities in key battleground states, the security risks of mail-in balloting, sudden batch dumps, an unforeseen record number of voters, and the unprecedented contradiction of “bellwether county” trends.

According to Walters, it’s essential to dump Republican conspiracy theories into students’ heads because doing otherwise would force them to be “spoon-fed left-wing propaganda.” Walters’ proposal goes the other way, dumping right-wing propaganda into students by the shovelful to ensure they are properly instructed about “legitimate concerns” raised during the 2020 election.

The problem, of course, is that there are no “legitimate concerns,” which means students will purposefully be made stupider by idiots who are heavily reliant on an ignorant voter base to remain in office. $33 million is being spent to indoctrinate students, which is apparently fine with state Republicans who don’t mind indoctrination, so long as it’s their indoctrination.

Here’s what makes this new development really fun. The Republicans pushed through a bill that allows parents to opt their kids out of any “learning material or activity” a parent felt was “harmful” to their children. That law went into effect this year, and was crafted specifically to allow parents to prevent their kids from being subjected to anything they considered to be “woke.”

In a truly hilarious twist, parents who don’t want their kids to be subjected to pro-Trump propaganda are using the Republican’s anti-woke law to opt out of the newly mandated conspiracy theory “instruction.” Here’s Judd Legum, reporting for Popular Information:

A group called “We’re Oklahoma Education,” or WOKE, is distributing a form letter that allows parents to opt-out of aspects of the new curriculum, including lessons on “discrepancies in 2020 elections results” and “Judeo-Christian concepts of ethics and government as the basis for American civilization.” The letter also allows parents to opt their children out of instruction created by right-wing groups, such as PragerU and Hillsdale College. Parents can also request that their child not have “[a]ny interaction with State Superintendent Ryan Walters in any capacity, including viewing any video or audio recording of Mr. Walters.”

WOKE Director Erica Watkins says the group created the opt-out form because they consider some lessons in the new curriculum “propaganda” that is not “appropriate to be taught in school.”

Love it. Lawmakers who engage in performative legislating always forget the laws they enact to give them ways to do the stupid stuff they want to do can be utilized by their political opponents. Expanding power just because you’re currently in power seems like a great idea right up until the other party has the majority. Crafting laws designed to be abused by people with certain “conservative beliefs” can prove to be just as useful to people opposed to these beliefs.

That’s how it’s going here: the state superintendent is watching two mandates he supported being utilized to prevent students from being subjected to debunked conspiracy theories and “judeo-christian ethics” that are seemingly present in the people seeking to shove these particular ethics down other people’s throats.

Don’t put in the papers that Superintendent Walters is mad.

In response, Walters said that it was “concerning that parents would opt their kids out of understanding American history.” Walters also said that the waiver created by WOKE was “absolutely not enforceable” in part because it was created by “a hyper-partisan organization.” Walters claimed that a “parent would need to provide his or her own form, or, in some cases, the individual school district might have a form that they use.”

Hmm. Seems like there are several ways to get around these restrictions on opt-out forms. Not that you’ll need them because…

Nothing in the law prevents parents from using a form created by a third party.

Suck it up, Superintendent. You’ve been beaten at your own game by people who aren’t so blinded by their partisan hackery that they’re incapable of seeing the bigger picture. Take the loss like a big boy and get back to your day-to-day business of proving you’re unworthy of the public’s trust or respect. I look forward to further reporting during the upcoming school year, hopefully detailing the dispensing of state-mandated conspiracy theory propaganda to room after room of empty desks.