Pay Up, Shut Up, and Don’t Ask Questions

Visa shakedowns, late-night purges, Epstein cover-ups, and the implosion of Trump’s sycophant circus, authoritarian grifting in full bloom.

Good morning, friends, your humble narrator is finally back among the living. Turns out when you take a few days off from running a fever you have a lot more energy.

Let’s begin at the border, where the Trump administration has decided the best way to make America welcoming again is to slap every foreign visitor with a $250 “visa integrity fee,” because nothing says “land of the free” like charging tourists extra to be interrogated by customs. This is a shakedown worthy of a third-world backwater, the kind of petty extortion scheme you’d expect from a tinpot regime that funds itself by shaking down backpackers at the border. And just like those regimes, America isn’t offering any guarantees of fairness: there’s no clear mechanism to actually get the money back. The administration’s big promise is that if you don’t overstay your visa or get caught working without permission, you might get a refund years later, assuming the bureaucracy feels generous and the paperwork hasn’t been lost in a swamp of red tape.

This new cash grab, tucked inside the Orwellian-named “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” piles hundreds of dollars in extra fees on top of existing visa costs, just in time for the 250th anniversary and the World Cup festivities, when foreign tourism is supposed to boom. Naturally, the administration also gutted funding for America’s tourism promotion agency, slashing Brand USA by 80 percent. So no, we won’t spend money inviting you here, but we’ll happily pick your pockets when you arrive and maybe throw in some TSA humiliation for free. Welcome to the American Experience™, please have your credit card ready at the checkpoint.

And while the government shakes down tourists, the corporate stooges are busy dismantling what’s left of free speech. CBS axed The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, despite seven consecutive seasons at number one, because Paramount Global is desperate to grease the wheels of its $28 billion Skydance merger. Officially, this was a “financial decision,” but as Max from UNFTR pointed out in his brutal takedown, that story falls apart faster than Trump on a treadmill. Paramount’s own earnings reports show its television division, the division Colbert literally carried, was the only part of the company actually making money. Streaming is bleeding cash, movies are barely breaking even, but TV was their cash cow… and they butchered it.

Why? Well, Colbert called Paramount’s $16 million hush-money payout to Trump a “big, fat bribe” just days before the ax fell. Max pulled the receipts: Paramount’s CEO had been meeting with Trump’s FCC about the merger right before Colbert was unceremoniously canned. This is tribute-paying, mafia-style, to curry favor with the regime. As Max put it, “This isn’t just firing a comedian, it’s dismantling the last remnants of dissent on mainstream television.”

Capitalism, baby. Where the only free speech that survives is whatever doesn’t offend the guy signing merger approvals. Shareholders over satire, bribes over broadcast integrity, and if you dare make fun of the mob boss-in-chief, don’t be surprised when the lights go out and the studio gets repurposed as a reality show soundstage. Welcome to America, where the jokes aren’t funny and the punchlines get blacklisted.

But wait, Trump isn’t done with his performative tantrums. Desperate to distract from fresh Epstein revelations, including that charming birthday card about “shared secrets”, he’s ordered Pam Bondi’s DOJ to “release all grand jury testimony” from the Epstein case. Legal experts were quick to point out that grand jury transcripts are mostly useless for uncovering the real dirt, like financial transactions or blackmail material. But Trump doesn’t want accountability, he wants headlines. This is a cheap Vegas magic trick, swapping subpoenas for soundbites while the real evidence remains sealed and the flight logs collect dust. The only “client list” getting released is the one that conveniently leaves Trump off the hook.

Meanwhile, in a rare glimpse of actual good news, ten Americans held hostage by Venezuela, including a windsurfer and a Navy SEAL, are finally home, swapped for over 250 Venezuelans who had been rotting in El Salvador’s counterterrorism prisons. It’s hard to argue against families getting their loved ones back, but it’s equally hard to ignore the political theater: the very same administration that boasts about deportations suddenly rediscovering humanity when the press is watching. It’s good news, yes, but it’s transactional, like everything else under Trumpism.

And finally, the grifter circus continues to collapse under its own stupidity. Mike Lindell, the MyPillow peddler turned election denial cultist, just lost a $2.3 million defamation case after accusing a Dominion employee of treason. His legal team then managed to humiliate themselves by submitting court briefs filled with AI-generated fake cases, earning sanctions and a permanent spot in the “how not to practice law” hall of fame. Lindell, who still faces billion-dollar suits from Dominion and Smartmatic, is learning the hard way that MAGA loyalty doesn’t pay, unless your dream is to go bankrupt peddling discount foam.

So there you have it: in Trump’s America, tourists are shaken down for pocket change, comedians are purged to please the regime, Epstein truths are hidden behind procedural smoke and mirrors, freedom is auctioned for merger approvals, and the MAGA sycophant army keeps circling the drain. But at least the fever’s broken, literally and figuratively, and we’ve still got enough energy to mock the absurdity of it all.