The Rogue Republic of Muskmerica

Cristina Balan takes the stand, human rights vanish from the record, and Elon Musk is finally under federal investigation, but only sort of.

Good morning! Cristina Balan is done being quiet. The former Tesla engineer whose initials were once engraved on battery packs is now poised to face Elon Musk in open court. After a decade of fighting both cancer and Tesla’s legal war machine, she just became the first person ever to beat Musk and his army of lawyers on appeal. Her crime? Emailing Elon about a brake defect tied to floor mats and refusing to help cover it up. She was forced into a backroom horror-film-style firing, threatened with deportation of her team, then smeared publicly as a thief years after she had already won her first wrongful termination case. Now she’s back. Not for money. For a jury, a judge, and the truth. And she’s got tapes. When asked what she wants most, she said: “Just to see him in front of a judge.”

Speaking of silence-as-policy, let’s take a quick tour of international dissenters being crushed by “friendly” authoritarian states. In Russia, 19-year-old Darya Kozyreva was sentenced to nearly three years in a penal colony for taping a line of poetry to a statue. Not a manifesto, mind you, a Ukrainian poem. A verse about rising up and watering freedom with tyrants’ blood. That was enough to be labeled dangerous by Putin’s regime. In the US, Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish journalism student, remains in pre-trial solitary confinement for reporting on war crimes. Both young women, two different countries, same story: if the facts make the regime look bad, the regime makes the facts go away.

Here in the United States, we still pretend we’re better. But a federal judge just had to remind the Trump administration that you cannot deport people to third countries without due process. It was one of two backhands delivered this week: the second came from the Supreme Court, which quietly ordered Trump’s DHS to stand down on deporting alleged Venezuelan gang members under the Alien Enemies Act, a law written in 1798 and revived to justify mass expulsions without trial. Thomas and Alito dissented, naturally. Charter buses were already idling outside the Texas detention center when the order hit. Because due process is for suckers.

Meanwhile, Senator Chris Van Hollen returned from El Salvador with a quiet bombshell: Kilmar Abrego Garcia is alive, now imprisoned in Santa Ana, still cut off from the world. Trump’s White House continues to falsely label him as MS-13, defying a 9-0 Supreme Court ruling. They even photoshopped a New York Times headline, crossed out “wrongly deported” and replaced it with “illegal alien,” writing over it: “He’s never coming back.” Government by meme, government by vendetta, government by narcissist. Also known as… government.

And how is that government doing elsewhere? Well, we’re on our fifth IRS commissioner of 2025. The latest, Michael Faulkender, replaced Gary Shapley, who lasted three days. Shapley had just replaced Melanie Krause, who replaced Douglas O’Donnell, who replaced Biden-nominated Danny Werfel who lasted until Inauguration Day. The only thing Trump is more committed to than firing people is using the tax code to punish his enemies.

That’s not just conjecture anymore. NPR revealed this week that the State Department’s annual human rights reports, required by law, have been stripped of references to prison abuse, political corruption, LGBTQ+ persecution, election suppression, and arbitrary detention. Gone. Deleted. Sanitized. Why? Because embarrassing Orbán, Bukele, or any other authoritarian Trump likes is bad for business. Even Marco Rubio, who once cited these reports as proof of American moral leadership, is now overseeing their hollowing-out as Secretary of State. Apparently “human rights” now only apply to the private property of campaign donors.

And then, in a moment that felt almost cinematic in its timing, Japanese lawmaker Shinji Aguma stood up in Parliament and told his government: don’t trust Trump. “He’s like an extortionist,” Aguma warned, “and the more you give, the more he demands.” He might as well have been reading directly from the syllabus of Professor Jeffrey Sachs, who spent this week demolishing Trump’s trade war logic in public. Sachs called Trump’s view of trade deficits “day two Econ 101” nonsense, mocked his fantasy of bilateral balance as “delusional,” and described the market crash triggered by Trump’s tariff tantrum as proof that this isn’t policy, it’s sabotage. “If he were my student, I’d fail him,” Sachs said. “He’s my president. Which is weirder.”

But Sachs didn’t stop at mocking. He warned that we’re already operating under one-man rule with Trump issuing emergency decrees, bypassing Congress, and using regulatory power to enrich himself and his allies. Sachs called the U.S. a “rogue nation.” The rest of the world, he urged, must refuse to follow it down “crazy lane.”

Which brings us to today’s breaking scandal: Elon Musk is now under multiple federal investigations. First, the SEC is suing him for failing to disclose his Twitter stock purchases in 2022, a delay that saved him $150 million while other investors sold in ignorance. Second, the GAO is probing DOGE’s influence in hollowing out the SEC itself. And third, the GAO is also auditing DOGE’s access to sensitive federal agency systems, Treasury, Labor, Education, noting that many operatives are tied directly to Musk’s companies and have zero public-sector experience. Meanwhile, Senator Jeanne Shaheen is pushing a bill to ban companies owned by “special government employees” like Musk from receiving federal contracts. But don’t expect accountability. As the commentary goes: in America, these days, the rules are more like requests.

Musk has defied judges, violated past SEC orders, publicly mocked regulators and still cashed the checks. Just like Trump. We have systems, but we no longer have enforcement. We have scandals, but no consequences.

And while the federal government burns, thousands of Americans will march today in Hands Off protests across the country, including right here in Coos Bay, where we’ll be grabbing video. And we’re grateful, truly. But the truth is, until these protests move to weekdays and start disrupting commerce they will remain symbolic. The system doesn’t respond to symbolism. It responds to profit loss.

See you in the streets. See you in the courts. See you in the footnotes of whatever human rights report still dares to name names.