Top News of the Week: Wild Horse Meat, Selling Yosemite, Meta’s Lawsuit, US/CA Trade War, & Gary, IN
As of 8/30: Trump’s mail-voting order, a Texas voter purge, and the case for ignoring Trump’s Supreme Court “win” — this week on News from a Nobody, Faith breaks down why Republicans crying “election fraud” while controlling the House, Senate, White House, and Supreme Court makes exactly zero sense (thanks for the assist, Thomas Massie). She digs into the Supreme Court’s mail-in ballot ruling, Texas’s 1.2 million-voter “suspense list,” Tarrant County’s polling site cuts, and why Steve Bannon and Trump allies are already talking about ICE agents at polling locations this November. From there: wild horses, beef, and why “Are we eating horse meat?” briefly trended online — the real story is a BLM loophole quietly sending mustangs to slaughterhouses in Canada, and why the country-of-origin label on your steak disappeared back in 2015. Then it’s on to Yosemite, where a quiet Trump-era land deal with a private developer is testing just how far “privatize the national parks” can go — alongside a full breakdown of the eye-watering $2.24 billion Trump has personally profited off crypto, golf resorts, and lawsuit settlements since returning to office, plus Flock surveillance cameras now watching visitors at Yosemite’s gates. Immigration hits a new record this episode: ICE logged its highest monthly arrest total ever in July 2026, DHS has gone quiet under new leadership, and Faith tells the story of a U.S. Navy sailor’s father — a 19-year U.S. resident with a pending green card — detained despite serving his country. Plus: the U.S. is now deporting people to Liberia under a controversial third-country removal deal, and one Army unit found an unexpectedly effective reenlistment bonus (hint: it involves Grand Theft Auto). Then, a tribute: Dolly Parton passed away this week at 80, and Faith reflects on why the Deep South icon was one of the rare public figures beloved across the political aisle — her faith, her generosity, her Imagination Library, and her unmatched girl’s-girl energy. From there it’s straight into South Carolina politics, where Lindsey Graham’s sister Darline Graham just won the GOP Senate nomination — and stumbled badly on a basic national security question — setting up a race against Charleston pediatrician and Democratic nominee Annie Andrews. Good news, sort of: Meta just agreed to a historic $17 billion settlement over Instagram and Facebook’s harm to teens, with real usage limits finally on the table. But it’s followed by a genuinely unsettling one — a federal appeals court just ruled that AI-generated child sexual abuse material may be constitutionally protected under the First Amendment. And in accountability news, former Congressman Eric Swalwell had his devices seized by the FBI amid a sexual assault investigation. On the world stage: the CIA director made a rare, unannounced trip to Moscow amid fears Russia could test NATO’s resolve in the Baltics this fall — a callback to the exact playbook Russia ran before invading Ukraine in 2021. Meanwhile, the U.S. and Canada are in a full-blown trade war, with Trump and Ontario Premier Doug Ford trading real insults over tariffs. And overseas, Faith connects the dots between an Israeli-government-funded AI “think tank” secretly shaping chatbot answers about Gaza, a church-targeting propaganda campaign, the one-year anniversary of the Nasser Hospital strike that killed five journalists, and Israel’s new policy treating children’s kites as military threats. Finally: catastrophic floods in Nepal triggered by a Himalayan glacier collapse, and a deep dive into Gary, Indiana — where a historic Black city was left without power for two weeks after a derecho, and what that says about who gets prioritized in a disaster.