On Wednesday, May 27, we hosted a powerful first call with the broader GTFO ICE national network.

At the gathering, we shared our new video, heard from Executive Director Mary Corcoran on the inspiration for GTFO ICE, and were visited by Workers Circle leaders Noelle Damico and Arianne Betancourt to learn how we can expand the Freedom Vigils effort that helped shut down Alligator Alcatraz.

YOUR MISSION, IF YOU CHOOSE TO ACCEPT IT

1️⃣ If you have not already, make sure to join the GTFO ICE rapid response network. Sign up at GTFOICE.org.

2️⃣ Attend or start a Freedom Vigil in your area. You can browse existing vigils here. If you don’t see one in your area, fill out this form to start one of your own. Don’t let the task intimidate you - Worker’s Circle provides one-on-one coaching for anyone trying to start a vigil!

LOCAL ACTIONS - COMING SOON!

We’re currently vetting organizers across the country to understand who is best leading the charge in each fight against prison camps. If there is a prison camp in your area, you will be hearing from us shortly with steps you can take and groups you can join.

MISSED THE CALL?

No worries. You can find it in its entirety at the top of this post.

Thank you for standing up for a just system, and your willingness to be a powerful ally for your neighbors. We’re proud to do this work with you.

/ /

Get more from Miles Taylor in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

Tonight, we cover the growing push by states to block residents from cashing in on Trump’s proposed “anti-weaponization fund,” including new efforts to fully tax payouts tied to January 6 defendants and fake electors.

Then we turn to a Justice Department increasingly focused on Trump’s critics, from E. Jean Carroll to anonymous …

Read more

The beating heart of DEFIANCE.org is our Weekly Mission Briefing. Every Wednesday, we take real action to counter Donald Trump’s abuses of power.

This week, we went inside the rot at the top of American law enforcement — and threw a lifeline to the patriots inside who are trying to stop it. If you only …

Read more

Donald Trump wants to treat all federal employees like he’s treated his victims: putting them under a gag order for the rest of their lives. And it’s creepier than you think.

For years, in a locked safe at American Media, Inc. in midtown Manhattan, the publisher of the National Enquirer reportedly kept a collection of stories he’d bought and never printed. The arrangement was simple. David Pecker, a friend of Donald Trump, would learn about a woman with a story to tell like Karen McDougal, the Playboy model who said she had had an affair with the candidate, or Stormy Daniels, the adult film actress with a similar account. Pecker would then buy the exclusive rights to her story (as if he was going to publish it) with the purpose of burying it.

The technical term, as a Manhattan jury would eventually learn, is “catch and kill.” You catch the story by purchasing it. You kill it by locking it in a safe. The witness is paid, a nondisclosure agreement (NDA) is signed, and the inconvenient truth simply ceases to exist as a matter of public record. The women may even think their story is about to be told to the world, only to realize it’s been taken away by someone who never intends to publish it and, indeed, who will sue them if they utter a word.

That’s the world Donald Trump comes from. As damning stories keep spilling out of his presidency, it’s clearly a world he misses. And on Tuesday, his Office of Personnel Management quietly posted a notice on the Federal Register proposing to extend that world to the entire civil service of the United States.

The proposal is a government-wide NDA that would apply to every existing and incoming federal employee at every agency that elects to adopt it — which, given how this administration operates, will eventually be all of them. The form would be filed in the employee’s permanent personnel folder, follow them across administrations and agencies for the rest of their careers, and bind them to silence on a category of information so broad it includes “any sensitive, pre-decisional or deliberative material” relating to internal agency operations.

In other words, federal workers would be forbidden from talking about almost anything they see or do on the job, including things Trump or his subordinates order them to do. If ever there was a sign that the Trump administration knows it’s engaging in illegal conduct — and wants to ensure no witness can ever testify to what really happened — it’s this.

OPM insists the agreement creates no “new” restrictions and merely documents existing law. This is the legal equivalent of a magician asking you to keep your eye on the wrong hand. The real mechanism in all of this is buried in Executive Order 14210, the DOGE workforce order Trump signed in February 2025, which directs OPM to make refusal to certify compliance with nondisclosure obligations a basis for firing federal employees on grounds of “suitability.” The form is “optional.” The refusal to sign it is not.

So this is a magic trick to fire people who don’t promise to keep Trump’s secrets.

I write this as someone the president has already attempted to silence. In fact, for telling the world about the wrongdoing I witnessed in the first Trump administration, the president signed an executive order directing the Justice Department, the Department of Homeland Security, and other federal agencies to investigate me, strip my security clearance, and hold me accountable for “treason,” in his words. The unfortunate problem for him is that I never signed a blanket NDA.

People like me who worked in the national security community are obligated to protect classified information, yes, but it’s not “classified” when the president says something stupid, orders you to do something illegal, or mismanages his job so spectacularly that you’re unable to do your own. Unfortunately for Trump, disclosing the stupidity of your boss is what we call First Amendment protected speech. And short of getting rid of the First Amendment altogether, he wants to find every way possible to keep federal employees from embarrassing him again.

By sheer volume, this revenge-and-intimidation campaign has consumed a large portion of the second Trump presidency. He’s stripped security clearances from dozens of former officials — Bolton, Brennan, Clapper, Blinken, Sullivan, Vindman, Cheney, Hill, Monaco, and even Mark Zaid, the whistleblower attorney whose only offense was representing the people Trump wanted silenced — and yanked taxpayer-funded protective details from Bolton, Pompeo, Milley, and Esper even amid credible Iranian threats, telling reporters they could hire their own security. That machinery then ground forward with prosecutions against Comey and Bolton, and with sprawling investigations underway against others who spoke out against him.

Should we assume it’s just a coincidence that fifteen former federal officials who’ve written books critical of Trump are all now either under investigation or have been threatened by Trump?

To clear the field of anyone else who might decide to sound the alarm in his second term, Trump already fired 17 inspectors general, decapitated the Office of Government Ethics, and removed the head of the Office of Special Counsel — the very agency tasked with protecting whistleblowers. Unsurprisingly, retaliation against whistleblowers has since surged, with documented cases from the Department of Energy to the EPA. At FEMA, employees who exposed life-or-death misconduct inside the administration were swiftly placed on administrative leave or fired. Meanwhile, the White House is quickly trying to strip protections from federal workers to forbid them from blowing the whistle in the first place.

Taken together, it’s the most systematic presidential effort in American history to punish dissent and bend the civil service to personal loyalty. And the message to anyone still inside government could not be clearer.

According to the Partnership for Public Service’s survey of more than eleven thousand federal employees, the percentage of government workers willing to report illegal activity has gone from 72 to 22 since Trump came back into power. That’s right. Only 22 percent of federal workers now feel confident they could report a violation of law or regulation without retaliation.

Max Stier, who runs the Partnership, put it plainly:

“We have every red light blinking across the federal government. Morale is as low as imaginable. This workforce has been fundamentally traumatized in the way that this leadership team said that they intended to do at the outset.”

Nearly four out of every five federal employees, by their own account, are already afraid to tell the truth. The administration’s response isn’t to ask why or to try to fix it. No, no, no. This was the whole point, and it’s working. They’re just trying to finish the job by demanding that everyone sign NDAs, especially that pesky one-fifth of federal employees who still have the guts to even think they can report illegal activity.

Donald Trump and his lieutenants want to “catch” every single story that federal workers might be able to tell the world about what they’ve seen. And they want to “kill” it. But first, they need to coerce those employees into signing something.

That’s why the catch-and-kill arrangement Trump perfected with David Pecker (in which a powerful man coerces witnesses into signing a contract in order to make the “seeing” of misconduct into a liability) is being reconstructed at federal scale. The powerful man is the same, of course. But now the witnesses are two million civil servants. And the safe is OPM’s Electronic Official Personnel Folder, where the signed agreement will sit for the duration of every federal employee’s career. Even if they quit and talk about something Trump or his team did that was wrong, they could be sued into oblivion.

So what’s left of “transparency” inside the federal government if this happens? What is left when you’ve investigated every former official who asked questions, fired the inspectors general, gagged the press, purged the dissenters, and now contractually bound every remaining federal employee to silence? I’ll tell you. What’s left is a shell of a republic. What’s left is an executive branch in which nothing illegal can ever be reported, because the people who would report it have signed a paper saying they will not, and the people who refused to sign have been removed for unsuitability.

The catch is assured. The kill is complete.

It’s been said before, but I think it bears repeating in light of this story. We’re witnessing the slow conversion of the United States government into the kind of organization Donald Trump has run his entire life. America is becoming a private business where the boss doesn’t get questioned, the witnesses are paid to disappear, and all the documents that might prove otherwise are locked away in a safe or shredded out of sight. We have a name for that kind of country, and it’s not the one we were raised to believe we lived in.

If you want to let the Trump administration know what you think about the proposed governmentwide NDA, the public comment period should open later today, here (click the blue button that says COMMENT). According to the announcement, you can also email SuitEA@opm.gov and let them know what you think.

But if you want to fight back even harder against this, then tune into DEFIANCE Daily at 5pm ET. Because we’re not going to fold our hands nicely on our lap while the president tries to place duct tape over the mouths of federal employees. Tonight, in fact, we will give them a megaphone.

Your friend, in defiance,

Miles Taylor

Special Announcements

• If you missed it, last week we announced we are PUTTING THE TRUMP-EPSTEIN FILES ON THE ROAD. Help us make it happen HERE.

P.S. Miss the most recent DEFIANCE Daily? Our most recent episode is below. Also, don’t forget you can list to DEFIANCE Daily on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts!

P.P.S. What’s coming up? We’re full-time focused on saving the republic. Join us for our next broadcast. Watch LIVE for free. Members get access to the replay.

• DEFIANCE DAILY — Every weeknight @ 5pm ET. Watch our hour-long podcast LIVE on our DEFIANCE.News page, YouTube, or X — and listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts!

• WEEKLY MISSION BRIEFING — Every Wednesday @ 5pm ET. Same ways to watch, above! Replays available afterwards.

• WEEKLY COFFEE — Every Friday @ 2pm ET. Join us on Substack or at DEFIANCE.News for Members-only coffee every Friday at 2p ET. Replays available afterwards.

• MONTHLY MEMBERS-ONLY MEETING — First Wednesday of every month @ 5pm ET. These are sent out the week of, via Zoom. Replays available afterwards.

P.P.P.S. Add us to your calendar. You can access the DEFIANCE.org Google Calendar here or add it to your Outlook/iCal/other calendars here. That way, you’ll never miss a meeting, event, or broadcast.

Then we examine how immigration courts are changing under DHS and DOJ, as critics warn a system built for due process is increasingly being built for speed instead.

And later, …

Read more

Donald Trump’s war, gas prices, and taxes on goods are conspiring to create a terrible recession. But it’s worse than people think. This one might be “permanent.”

CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin warned this weekend, on a rebroadcast of 60 Minutes, that an economic reckoning is coming. He said that Americans CEOs know how bad it is but “are very scared to speak out publicly about anything,” for fear of being targeted by Trump. “They are so nervous about criticizing anything that’s going on with this administration,” he said.

Anchor Lesley Stahl pressed Sorkin on whether it will be like 1929 at the start of the Great Depression, the topic of his recent book.

“The answer is, we will have a crash. I just can’t tell you when, and I can’t tell you how deep. But I can assure you, unfortunately, I wish I wasn’t saying this, we will have the crash.”

I can tell you what Andrew Ross Sorkin can’t tell you.

If nothing is done about the current situation, Trump’s looming recession could blow a deep hole in the economy. So deep that — if it happens before we’re ready — many folks may never be able to crawl back out. That’s because two explosions could hit the U.S. economy at the same time.

The first is a bomb of Trump’s own making. He built it, he lit the fuse, and he is, at this moment, holding it in his hands. The Iran war has done exactly what every serious economist warned it would. Oil prices have surged and Americans are paying for it at the pump. Worse still, the economic disruption has rippled so far across the global economy that, even if the war stopped this week, we’ll be paying higher prices across the board well into 2027 or beyond. Add to that the self-inflicted wound of Trump’s tariffs, and you’ve got a full-blown, manmade catastrophe.

Moody’s Mark Zandi has been pegging U.S. recession odds at anywhere between 40 and 50 percent (a coin flip). Signs across the Atlantic Ocean point to the same, with European industry sagging. Meanwhile, one of America’s top CEOs, Jamie Dimon, who’s not exactly a flame-thrower, warned a few weeks ago that economic disruption of the kind we’re seeing “can change sentiment rapidly and cause a flight to cash.” That’s bureaucratic speak for “economic panic.” Bankers don’t really like to talk about a run on banks, but here we are.

Trump is conjuring up a recession that should’ve been avoidable, which is bad enough. But the second explosion that could hit the economy at the same time is a different kind of weapon entirely.

Think of this one as a ticking time bomb, buried under every single American workplace. I’ve been hearing it tick for the last three years, and wondering when it will go off (whether we’d have enough time to defuse the worst of it before it did). That weapon is the AI replacement of the American workforce. Unfortunately, Trump’s economy bomb might detonate this other one, years ahead of schedule.

Let me explain what’s happening. Almost every company in America has been dabbling in AI. They’re all running pilots or deploying automated AI agents for customer service, legal research, code review, sales leads, and more. All these trials are tentative because the technology is new and a lot of these CEOs are, for now, still cautious about the optics of mass replacement. But steadily they’re figuring out where they might able to replace their workers with machines.

A recession changes everything.

The instant the economy turns, the cautious AI pilots will become emergency AI rollouts. Corporate boards will start demanding cost cuts, and CFOs will start drafting reduction-in-force memos. Layoffs that would have been framed as long-term “restructuring” or “right-sizing” will become, by necessity, full-scale workforce replacement.

If you think I’m fear-mongering, then don’t take my word for it. Check out what the CEOs are saying not-so-quietly to pollsters. A report published days ago found that ninety-nine percent of CEOs surveyed expect AI-driven layoffs at their companies within the next two years. Ninety-nine percent. Ninety-nine. They all see what’s coming because they’re the ones planning for it. In the first quarter of this year alone, around 80,000 tech workers were laid off, with nearly half of those cuts directly attributed to AI replacement. Meanwhile, an MIT simulation estimated AI could already replace twelve percent of the entire U.S. workforce.

Again, if a Trump recession hits, all of that speeds up. And there’s no time for the economy to adapt. But that’s not even the worst part. The worst part is that this recession will be permanent.

Here’s the thing about AI agents that the labor market hasn’t fully reckoned with. Once a company replaces a human team with an automated AI system and runs it for a year — as they wait for Trump’s recession to end — they’ll realize they like the new setup a whole lot more than the old one. They’ll see the consistency, the higher productivity, the absence of healthcare costs and HR complaints, no one taking time off for vacations, and they’ll decide that they are never, ever hiring those workers back. Layoffs are usually framed as “cyclical,” but this one will be indefinite.

That’s what Trump is doing right now. He’s taking his bomb (the war, the tariffs, and the detonation of consumer confidence) and slamming it directly into the buried weapon under the American economy. He’s basically forcing the second explosion to go off years and years before we are fully ready for it.

This is what makes Trump’s looming recession different from all the others that came before it. The recessions of 1973, 1981, 1990, 2001, 2008, and during COVID were all similar. Markets panicked and people held back their money, the economy slowed down, and workers waited on the sidelines until the engine cranked back up. They were all painful, yes, but they were “cyclical.” The recession Trump is steering us into will arrive at the precise moment in history when, for the first time ever, wide swaths of the human workforce can be replaced instantly by software.

If Trump hadn’t meddled so furiously in the economy, we might have had more time to adapt. The workforce and our political institutions would have had room to respond to the building tension inside the system. That might mean reskilling programs, more human-machine teaming, changes to the welfare system, and eventually a new social contract to grapple with the AI future. Trump’s recession could steal those years from us.

What does a society with permanent ten, fifteen, or twenty percent unemployment look like? We don’t actually know. The United States has never experienced such sustained mass unemployment in a wealthy, networked, armed, politically polarized society. The closest historical analog is the Great Depression, which produced the New Deal here and fascism in Europe, but even that doesn’t compare in terms of the speed at which this could hit us and the permanence of the change. In the worst case, the political consequences could be measured in mass unrest, radicalization, and the corrosion of every institution that requires a baseline of public trust to function.

The part that should really make you angry is that we saw this coming. If you’d asked me on February 27, 2026 (the day before the Iran war started) what a major gas spike and an extended bout of inflation would do, layered on top of the corporate flirtation with AI automation, I would’ve told you exactly this. A recession itself is survivable, of course. But a recession arriving now, at this technological inflection point, with these incentives, won’t just be a downturn but a phase change.

There’s something you can do about it, though. Aside from making your elected representatives panic and put pressure on the White House to reverse course on Trump’s foolish war and stupid tariffs, which you should, you can make corporate CEOs feel the heat.

Remember what Andrew Ross Sorkin said at the top of this essay? CEOs know the double economic explosion is coming. But they’re too “scared” to say it out loud because they’re scared of the president. We need to do something about that.

The titans of American business are watching Trump light the fuse, and they are choosing to stay quiet. They will not speak for the workers about to lose their jobs or for the entry-level kids whose first rungs on the ladder are about to be sawed off. Hell, they won’t even speak for the country whose flag hangs in their corporate lobbies. Apparently, they’ve decided that being singled out in a Truth Social post is a worse fate than the country sliding into a permanent recession on their watch.

That’s just plain old cowardice. There’s no other word for it. And at this moment in time, it’s beyond unacceptable. It’s contemptible. The rest of us — the little guys — have had to face our fears of getting attacked by a retributive administration. We’ve stood up to them in cities where they deployed the national guard. We’ve stood up to them when they tried to censor our news and cancel our comedians. We’ve stood up to them in the streets of Minneapolis when they were executing citizens. We’ve stood up to them by the millions in the biggest nationwide protests in history.

And we’re going to let these CEOs sit safely in a quiet board room, waiting for the collapse that could consume us all, because they’re worried about mean tweets? Here’s what you can do about that.

These CEOs aren’t going to grow spines on their own. They’re going to grow spines when their inboxes fill up, when their customer service lines light up, when their social media mentions become unmanageable, and when their boards start asking why the brand is suddenly toxic. The American consumer has more power over the American executive than you think, and you’ve already made that happen in the past year with the cowardice at places like Disney. But it only works if you use it. So use it.

This week, think about finding a CEO. I don’t mean in person (stalking ain’t the name of the game), I just mean virtually. Find the CEO of the company whose products you buy, or the bank that holds your mortgage, or the company that manages your 401(k). You can find them on LinkedIn, their public comment line, or someone on their corporate communications team. And tell them, in whatever words feel most natural to you, that you are sick of the silence. If they won’t speak up out of patriotism, they can at least speak up out of fiduciary self-interest because, if Trump sparks a permanent recession, it will destroy their shareholders and companies, too.

In other words, now’s the time to make our weak-spined CEOs less scared of speaking than they are of not speaking.

As Andrew Ross Sorkin said, a crash will come. But whether it’s temporary or “permanent” — whether the country crawls back out or stays in the hole for a generation — might depend on whether the most powerful people in American business find their voices and push back against this rogue president, or stay silent until there is nothing left worth saving.

Make them find their voices. You’ve done it before. And your defiance could be the deciding factor between two very different futures.

Your friend, in defiance,

Miles Taylor

Special Announcements

• If you missed it, earlier this week we announced we are PUTTING THE TRUMP-EPSTEIN FILES ON THE ROAD. Help us make it happen HERE.

P.S. Miss the most recent DEFIANCE Daily? Our most recent episode is below. Also, don’t forget you can list to DEFIANCE Daily on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts!

P.P.S. What’s coming up? We’re full-time focused on saving the republic. Join us for our next broadcast. Watch LIVE for free. Members get access to the replay.

• DEFIANCE DAILY — Every weeknight @ 5pm ET. Watch our hour-long podcast LIVE on our DEFIANCE.News page, YouTube, or X — and listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts!

• WEEKLY MISSION BRIEFING — Every Wednesday @ 5pm ET. Same ways to watch, above! Replays available afterwards.

• WEEKLY COFFEE — Every Friday @ 2pm ET. Join us on Substack or at DEFIANCE.News for Members-only coffee every Friday at 2p ET. Replays available afterwards.

• MONTHLY MEMBERS-ONLY MEETING — First Wednesday of every month @ 5pm ET. These are sent out the week of, via Zoom. Replays available afterwards.

P.P.P.S. Add us to your calendar. You can access the DEFIANCE.org Google Calendar here or add it to your Outlook/iCal/other calendars here. That way, you’ll never miss a meeting, event, or broadcast.

Get more from Miles Taylor in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

Read more

Get more from Miles Taylor in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

Read more

Donald Trump is going to lose the midterms. And when he does, the rest of the world is going to pay for it.

In an essay for the i Paper in London this week, I made a prediction a lot of Americans don’t want to hear. Trump will likely lose the midterms, yes, but that doesn’t mean he’ll be contained. It might even mean the opposite.

Let’s start with the good news. Trump appears headed for a bruising midterm election. His seemingly limitless corrupt acts — ballrooms and billion-dollar slush funds — are finally catching up to him and pissing off an electorate that’s struggling to put gas in the car. His approval in some polls has dipped down to 31 percent, which is a stunningly low figure, and his disapproval rating is closing in on two-thirds of the country. The generic ballot has Democrats up by an average of five to seven points, virtually identical to where it sat at this point in 2018, the cycle that produced a forty-one-seat Democratic rout.

As I wrote:

“The odds are now that he loses the US House. He may even lose the Senate. He will almost certainly be impeached and after the elections, Trump will be distracted, embattled and very probably humiliated.”

Most observers, looking at this picture, draw the natural conclusion that a humiliated Trump is a contained Trump. He’ll be a lame duck. A bloodied president boxed in by a hostile Congress, distracted by impeachment, and consumed by oversight fights is less dangerous and less consequential, right?

Well, that’s where I had to deliver the bad news:

“If history is any guide, he will respond angrily and set his sights abroad.”

I lived through it the last time this happened. I was stepping into the role of chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security in November 2018 when Democrats took back the House. I sat in the secret White House meetings where Trump’s political team was, briefly, in genuine panic. We were told to deny information requests, delay inquiries, prepare to defy subpoenas. If congressional Democrats wanted documents in their corruption probes, they were going to get the middle finger.

I resigned not long after. But not before it became clear what the man in the Oval Office intended to do once his domestic options narrowed. With his hands tied at home, he put his foot down abroad, buddying up with dictators and berating America’s allies in a burst of activity where he tried, unsuccessfully, to bulldoze the international system. He was only hamstrung in his attempt to lay waste to the world order by the outburst of COVID-19 and the distractions of reelection that followed.

This time, it will be far worse.

I won’t rehash all of my predictions. But the short version is that I expect the post-midterm period to result in Trump once again refocusing on foreign policy with a zeal heretofore unseen. I expect to see more foreign invasions, more efforts to sell out our vulnerable allies, sudden withdrawals from the institutions that have anchored the West since 1945, and a sustained campaign of interference in the elections of our democratic friends. In other words, an aggressive doubling down of what we’ve already seen in Trump’s catastrophic first year back in office.

The conventional wisdom about “lame duck” American presidents in their final two years is a comforting fiction we tell ourselves because the alternative is intolerable. We want to believe the system contains the man. Especially when it comes to Trump, we’re hopeful that a defeated executive is absorbed by Congress and by the courts, humble enough to recognize his lower station and accept it.

Yet that model presumes a president who recognizes democracy’s guardrails as legitimate. We know we don’t have anything close to that. Trump has spent ten years describing the constitutional order as his personal enemy and has a cabinet packed with eager vandals ready to spray-paint the republic as part of Trump’s ongoing corruption spree, vandalizing our institutions at his direction.

Make no mistake, I think Democrats retaking one or both chambers of Congress is urgently necessary. Trump will be checked by the political opposition assuming power on Capitol Hill. However, I know for a fact he won’t take it lightly. And, in part, he’ll redirect that angry energy into foreign policy in ways that will boomerang back against the American people.

For instance, Trump might try to leave or replace NATO… invade Mexico… take over Cuba… seize a portion or all of Greenland… sell out Ukraine to the Russians and Taiwan to the Chinese… or meddle in the elections of our closest friends to get MAGA-like leaders elected. Even if he only does some of these things, it will be extraordinarily damaging to our collective security and prosperity. At the end of a second Trump term, America will find itself poorer, less respected, and far less safe in the world.

While there’s only so much we can individually do to check Trump’s foreign policy follies after the midterms, there’s a whole lot our allies can do. From London, Paris, and Berlin to Kyiv and Taipei, we must send a message to our friends that they need to batten down the hatches. At best, they should prepare to sustain the free world without us. At worst, they must prepare to protect it from us.

America’s democratic friends need to stand up to the bully, especially when Trump tries to coerce them into his self-enrichment machine. They should deepen their relationships with others democracies that still have the courage to defend free minds, free markets, and free people. And they should reassess ways to keep to keep the West’s autocratic adversaries from seizing the initiative while Trump swoons over their ability to carry out societal repression and tries to mimic it.

This won’t be forever. I do believe America will be back and, one day, will clean up the mess made by the most corrupt man to have ever wielded the powers of the presidency. But in the meantime, our closest friends will have to should more of the burden of preserving the Western world — and show us some tough love.

Your friend, in defiance,

Miles Taylor

Special Announcements

• If you missed it, earlier this week we announced we are PUTTING THE TRUMP-EPSTEIN FILES ON THE ROAD. Help us make it happen HERE.

P.S. Miss the most recent DEFIANCE Daily? Our most recent episode is below. Also, don’t forget you can list to DEFIANCE Daily on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts!

P.P.S. What’s coming up? We’re full-time focused on saving the republic. Join us for our next broadcast. Watch LIVE for free. Members get access to the replay.

• DEFIANCE DAILY — Every weeknight @ 5pm ET. Watch our hour-long podcast LIVE on our DEFIANCE.News page, YouTube, or X — and listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts!

• WEEKLY MISSION BRIEFING — Every Wednesday @ 5pm ET. Same ways to watch, above! Replays available afterwards.

• WEEKLY COFFEE — Every Friday @ 2pm ET. Join us on Substack or at DEFIANCE.News for Members-only coffee every Friday at 2p ET. Replays available afterwards.

• MONTHLY MEMBERS-ONLY MEETING — First Wednesday of every month @ 5pm ET. These are sent out the week of, via Zoom. Replays available afterwards.

P.P.P.S. Add us to your calendar. You can access the DEFIANCE.org Google Calendar here or add it to your Outlook/iCal/other calendars here. That way, you’ll never miss a meeting, event, or broadcast.

Get more from Miles Taylor in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

Read more

The beating heart of DEFIANCE.org is our Weekly Mission Briefing. Every Wednesday, we take real action to counter Donald Trump’s abuses of power.

This week, we demanded full accountability for Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse network — and the powerful men who enabled it. If you only have 30 seconds: we heard di…

Read more

Get more from Miles Taylor in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

Read more

Trump says Iran is “begging” for a deal while publicly threatening military action. But behind the rhetoric, Tehran’s demands remain largely unchanged.

Back at home, one of Trump’s biggest loyalty tests yet is playing out inside Republican …

Read more

Getting ready to go LIVE on DEFIANCE Daily at 5p ET… but first…

Many of you know that George Conway is running for Congress — with the explicit goal of getting elected to be the biggest bulldog in the U.S. House fighting against Donald Trump.

I know George. I admire George. And I’m thrilled to join this private, virtual conversation with him o…

Read more

Donald Trump refused to rule out sending ICE agents to the polls in November. So prosecutors across America are sending a message: FAFO.

Today, a coalition of locally elected district attorneys and prosecutors from across the United States have officially put the Trump administration on notice: any federal agent who shows up at a polling place in violation of state or federal law will be investigated and prosecuted under the laws of the jurisdiction in which they act. And they will be jailed, if needed.

The announcement, made by the Project for the Fight Against Federal Overreach — “FAFO” — was first reported by Politico and comes a week after President Trump refused to rule out deploying ICE officers to polling locations during the November elections. Legal scholars across the political spectrum had already warned that such a deployment would constitute unlawful voter intimidation under federal civil rights statutes and state election codes. This morning, the prosecutors who would actually have to bring those charges stepped forward to say they are prepared to do so.

FAFO’s founding membership reads as a map of jurisdictions that have already absorbed the brunt of federal overreach in the past year: Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Tucson, Austin, Dallas, Norfolk, Portsmouth, Fairfax, and Arlington, among others. More district attorneys are expected to sign on in the weeks ahead. The coalition was incubated by DEFIANCE.org and was spun off recently as an independent nonprofit organization at FederalOverreach.org.

The news was teased last week on an episode of DEFIANCE Daily, as prosecutors reminded listeners that the “FAFO” name itself was a pointed rejoinder to the Trump administration’s frequent threats to its perceived foes: “F**k Around, Find Out.”

Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, who joined the announcement, delivered the morning’s most pointed warning.

“Anyone — federal agent or otherwise — who shows up at a polling place in Philadelphia to intimidate voters is going to find out what ‘find out’ means,” Krasner said. “A federal badge is not a license to violate the Constitution, and it is not a shield from state criminal law. We have prosecuted police officers who broke the law. We have prosecuted public officials who broke the law. We will prosecute ICE agents who break the law. There is no category of American who gets to operate above it.”

Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty, whose office has already filed charges against federal agents in Minnesota and is currently litigating against the Department of Homeland Security over the administration’s deployment of federal forces in Minneapolis, said FAFO members are preparing now to ensure no ambiguity about what will follow a November deployment.

“The right to vote without fear of armed government agents at the polls is not negotiable, and it is not subject to the whims of a president,” Moriarty said. “Federal law makes voter intimidation a crime. Minnesota law makes voter intimidation a crime. If ICE officers are dispatched to polling places in Hennepin County to frighten voters away from the ballot box, my office will investigate, and we will charge. Every prosecutor in this coalition is preparing for that possibility now, before November, so there is no ambiguity about the consequences.”

The legal architecture behind the coalition’s threat is well established. Under federal law, 18 U.S.C. § 594 prohibits intimidation of voters at federal elections, and 52 U.S.C. § 20511 imposes criminal penalties for interference with voter registration and voting. State statutes in nearly every FAFO member jurisdiction independently criminalize voter intimidation, assault, false imprisonment, and abuse of authority — charges that can be brought against federal agents acting outside the scope of their lawful duties.

The announcement lands amid a documented escalation in the Trump administration’s use of federal law enforcement for domestic political purposes. ICE and other DHS components have been deployed to American cities over the objections of state and local officials. Earlier this year, state election records were seized in Georgia, and the president has publicly signaled the potential use of the Insurrection Act and other emergency authorities to exert federal control over states and even election administration.

Against that backdrop, FAFO represents the first organized effort by elected prosecutors to draw a line at the state level and to put the line in writing.

DEFIANCE.org, which incubated the coalition before its spinoff, has positioned itself in the past year as one of the central organizing hubs of the pro-democracy “rapid response” to the second Trump administration. The organization has launched a series of campaigns aimed at federal accountability, including the FAFO project, efforts to support whistleblowers sounding the alarm about unlawful presidential orders, lawsuits against Trump’s unconstitutional actions, a nationwide response network to shut down ICE secret prisons, and more.

The coalition is expected to announce additional jurisdictions in the coming weeks, and members have indicated they will hold a joint briefing in Washington in advance of the November elections.

Whether the Trump administration follows through on its refusal to rule out an ICE deployment to polling places is, for now, an open question. What is no longer open is the question of what will happen if it does. The prosecutors in the FAFO coalition are telegraphing to Trump and his agency heads — in the only language that matters in a courtroom — that no one in this country is above the law, and that a uniform is not a hall pass to commit crimes against American voters.

Your friend, in defiance,

Miles Taylor

Special Announcements

• WEEKLY MISSION BRIEF SPECIAL TIME —Wednesday’s DEFIANCE Daily will start later than usual. 630pm ET. We have a special Weekly Mission Brief!

P.S. Miss the most recent DEFIANCE Daily? Our most recent episode is below. Also, don’t forget you can list to DEFIANCE Daily on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts!

P.P.S. What’s coming up? We’re full-time focused on saving the republic. Join us for our next broadcast. Watch LIVE for free. Members get access to the replay.

• DEFIANCE DAILY — Every weeknight @ 5pm ET. Watch our hour-long podcast LIVE on our DEFIANCE.News page, YouTube, or X — and listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts!

• WEEKLY MISSION BRIEFING — Every Wednesday @ 5pm ET. Same ways to watch, above! Replays available afterwards.

• WEEKLY COFFEE — Every Friday @ 2pm ET. Join us on Substack or at DEFIANCE.News for Members-only coffee every Friday at 2p ET. Replays available afterwards.

• MONTHLY MEMBERS-ONLY MEETING — First Wednesday of every month @ 5pm ET. These are sent out the week of, via Zoom. Replays available afterwards.

P.P.P.S. Add us to your calendar. You can access the DEFIANCE.org Google Calendar here or add it to your Outlook/iCal/other calendars here. That way, you’ll never miss a meeting, event, or broadcast.

In Minnesota, another ICE officer is now facing criminal charges after video blew apart the federal government’s version of a shooting tied to Operation Metro Surge.

Meanwhile in Washington, Senate Republicans are scrambling to protect taxpayer funding tied to Trump’s ballroom project after the Senat…

Read more

This week, the U.S. Senate will stage an argument so absurd it will be talked about for a thousand years.

There’s a story that the ancient historian Tacitus tells (half in disgust, half in awe) of how the Roman emperor, Nero, toured the rubble of his capital after a great fire swept Rome. Many thousands were without homes, and his own palace was burned. Nero shifted into “emergency response mode,” in a sense. As his people suffered and struggled to rebuild, he hastily drew up plans to build a new palace. For himself. And he increased taxes to make it happen.

I was thinking about that palace, the Domus Aurea or “Golden House,” this past weekend when I read the latest news about Trump’s ballroom. Of course, the current U.S. president has been compared too many times to cite to Nero. But now, it seems, the Senate has subordinated itself to Trump’s desires, as Republicans fight mightily to make sure the president gets his palace.

The U.S. Senate has been setting aside valuable time to bicker over the finer details of funding for Donald Trump’s ballroom. Not the ongoing war in Iran or a teetering economy, mind you, but the ballroom.

Let me walk you through what your senators have actually been doing with the time you pay them to spend, wandering their own marbled hallways carrying out the “people’s business.”

On Friday, the parliamentarian’s office, presided over by Elizabeth MacDonough, began hearing arguments from Republican and Democratic aides over whether hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer funding for Donald Trump’s 90,000-square-foot East Wing ballroom could be jammed through the budget reconciliation process. As The Hill reported, the dispute turned on what’s called the “Byrd Rule,” a parliamentary instrument designed in 1985 to prevent the Senate from smuggling unrelated policy into budget bills. Hours of senior staff time were spent on the question of whether Trump’s chandeliers qualified as a “budgetary” matter.

Meanwhile… gasoline prices in California crossed six dollars a gallon, with other states not far behind. The Bureau of Labor Statistics also released a red-alert inflation report, showing the largest annual increase in three years.

But in the U.S. Senate, Republicans were preparing for a fight. On Saturday, the Senate parliamentarian dealt the GOP its big blow. She determined that the ballroom money did, indeed, violate the Byrd Rule and could not pass with a simple majority. Senate Republicans lashed out, with Majority Leader John Thune’s team insisting they would “redraft,” “refine,” and “resubmit” until they got the money approved. Even budget hawk Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana proposed an amendment to offset the ballroom’s cost by trimming federal funds from other priorities to make sure President Trump could get what he wanted.

Meanwhile… the president threatened over the weekend that the “clock is ticking” in Iran, pledging harsher strikes as negotiations over its nuclear program have stalled. Economists have warned of economic catastrophe if the war drags into June, with the worst inflation increases yet to come.

But in the U.S. Senate, Republican leaders were focused on what mattered. On Sunday, they began gearing up to take the ballroom fight to the Senate Floor. Democrats planned to pressure them into a “vote-a-rama” session this week to vote — on the record — to keep the funding intact. Sen. Lindsey Graham, one of Trump’s top Senate allies, has stood by the president’s request as a “national security” matter, noting that the president constantly talks with the South Carolina senator about how important the ballroom is to him and the country.

Meanwhile… according to the Associated Press, the Trump administration began advancing preparations that might allow for the invasion of Cuba, including an indictment of the island’s leader, while the president suggested an aircraft carrier returning from the Iran theater could “stop about 100 yards offshore” of Cuba, hinting at coming action.

But in the U.S. Senate, GOP leaders this morning are busy considering whether to scrub the phrase “East Wing Modernization” from the legislative text entirely — to make the ballroom money look more like generic Secret Service funding. But there’s a complication. White House lawyers (who are currently defending the project in federal court against a lawsuit from the National Trust for Historic Preservation), need Congress to explicitly authorize the ballroom so they can argue in court that the legislative branch has blessed it.

So Republicans enter this week facing a truly monumental dilemma: what to name the ballroom money they give to Trump. And they are gearing up for a fight with Democrats so they can show the president they will stand by him, no matter what.

You can see where I’m going with this.

It was bad enough that the Commander in Chief, during the bombing of another country, couldn’t seem to stop himself from drifting in press conferences to the question of drapes and what they’d look like in his new ballroom. It was bad enough that he carried the renderings to the back of Air Force One, on the return flight from West Palm Beach, and pulled them out like a child showing a fort to a parent, while reporters who had come prepared with questions about Tehran instead found themselves staring at architectural elevations of bulletproof glass and drone-proof ceilings. But at least that was just one deranged man, distracting only one branch of government.

Now, a second branch of the U.S. government — the most powerful country on earth — has redirected its focus to a ballroom, too. Senators are spending their evenings reading position papers on marble dance floors on the White House grounds. Senate parliamentarians are adjudicating whether golden chandeliers are eligible for an annual budget vote. And Senate aides are drafting and re-drafting legislative text in a desperate effort to make it all possible. Even the Secret Service Director has been hauled up to Capitol Hill to persuade any holdouts of how “important” this is.

English historian Edward Gibbon, surveying centering of Roman decline, identified the moment of the collapse. He pegged it at the point when leaders shifted from focusing on urgent civic matters to debating pomp and spectacle. Yes, the Roman Senate still met, he wrote, but its senators had quietly accepted that the work of their great empire was now the curation of the emperor’s taste. The state still seemed to function (bread was still distributed and the aqueducts still flowed), but underneath the surface the institutions were corroding.

About a hundred years after Nero was gone, a more noble statesman led the Roman Empire. Marcus Aurelius was known as the last “good emperor” and was clearly affected by the corruption of his predecessors. He probably had the gold palace in his head, the Domus Aurea, whenever he wrote about the importance of “ta koina,” or “the common things,” i.e. the things that belong to all. The state was a common thing, in his view, and it was his job to tend to protect it. So was citizenship and public spaces and nature itself. If these things were corrupted, Rome would be no more.

The ballroom is not a “common thing.” The ballroom is the president’s thing. It’s meant for him and his legacy. It’s also the donors’ thing, a way for big businesses and wealthy individuals to give money in search of special treatment from the Trump administration. And perhaps more than anything, it’s the sycophant’s thing. It’s the vanity project most cherished by the president and, accordingly, the one his staunchest defenders must take up as their own cause if they want to remain in his favor. In choosing to spend the third month of a war debating ballroom construction details, that’s how the U.S. Senate has told us what kind of body it’s become.

The ballroom is the perfect symbol — not just for the midterm elections but for this moment in American life — because the ballroom is an open confession of the powerful to the masses. It tells us, in hand-picked marble and bulletproof glass, what our government has been doing while we’re paying six dollars a gallon to drive our kid to school or to a grocery where we’ll fret about tradeoffs. It tells us what they think is important and what they’re willing to fight for, and incidentally, it also tells us who they’re willing to fight for.

This week, the U.S. Senate might complete a story that will be spoken of for a thousand years or more.

You see, Rome didn’t fall because Nero designed a Golden House for himself while his city was literally burning. The truth of the matter is that Rome fell because the Roman Senate let him do it, helped him, and then forgot that there’d ever been anything else worth doing than pleasing the emperor. The collapse came later, as it always does. In the meantime, the chandeliers were hung with pride.

Your friend, in defiance,

Miles Taylor

Special Announcements

• NEW SWAG —By popular demand, we now have STICKERS in the Swag Store. Grab one. Slap it on your laptop, car, wherever!

• WEEKLY MISSION BRIEF SPECIAL TIME —Wednesday’s DEFIANCE Daily will start later than usual. 630pm ET. We have a special Weekly Mission Brief that requires us to start a little later than usual.

P.S. Miss the most recent DEFIANCE Daily? Our most recent episode is below. Also, don’t forget you can list to DEFIANCE Daily on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts!

P.P.S. What’s coming up? We’re full-time focused on saving the republic. Join us for our next broadcast. Watch LIVE for free. Members get access to the replay.

• DEFIANCE DAILY — Every weeknight @ 5pm ET. Watch our hour-long podcast LIVE on our DEFIANCE.News page, YouTube, or X — and listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts!

• WEEKLY MISSION BRIEFING — Every Wednesday @ 5pm ET. Same ways to watch, above! Replays available afterwards.

• WEEKLY COFFEE — Every Friday @ 2pm ET. Join us on Substack or at DEFIANCE.News for Members-only coffee every Friday at 2p ET. Replays available afterwards.

• MONTHLY MEMBERS-ONLY MEETING — First Wednesday of every month @ 5pm ET. These are sent out the week of, via Zoom. Replays available afterwards.

P.P.P.S. Add us to your calendar. You can access the DEFIANCE.org Google Calendar here or add it to your Outlook/iCal/other calendars here. That way, you’ll never miss a meeting, event, or broadcast.

Tonight, we dig into the increasingly disturbing stories emerging around pardoned January 6 defendants as the Trump administration weighs compensation for those involved in the attack on the Capitol.

Then we turn to Pete Hegseth’s surreal AI-generated pitch for a $1.5…

Read more

Donald Trump is preparing to carry out one of the largest heists in U.S. history.

He is reportedly preparing to use nearly $2 billion in taxpayer money to pay off the criminals he pardoned, the allies who tried to overturn the 2020 election on his behalf, and — through a constellation of family-adjacent vehicles — quite possibly himself. The mechanism, reported last night by ABC News, is brazen beyond belief.

According to the report, the president is preparing to drop his $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service in exchange for the creation of a $1.7 billion slush fund to compensate his political allies, specifically, those who were prosecuted during the Biden administration for crimes. By design, Trump will personally control this fund. And the money will come straight out of the U.S. Treasury.

The beneficiaries are said to include Trump’s former staff and operatives who sought to help him overturn the 2020 election and were prosecuted for doing so, as well as the nearly 1,600 individuals charged in connection with the January 6 attack on the United States Capitol. These are, of course, the men and women who beat police officers with flagpoles, smeared feces on the walls of the building, and hunted the Vice President of the United States through the halls of Congress while chanting for his execution. Trump pardoned them on his first day back in office. Now he proposes to make some of these people into millionaires.

While the settlement language is expected to bar the president from receiving payments personally on three of his existing claims, it doesn’t bar the constellation of companies, trusts, and family vehicles that orbit the Trump name from filing their own. But we may never know how he spends the cash. Because, by the explicit design of the arrangement, there will be almost no public accounting of where $1.7 billion in American taxpayer money goes.

Under the proposed terms, the commission would not be required to disclose its procedures, its deliberations, or the identities of those it chooses to enrich. While a five-member group will reportedly be appointed to distribute the money, Trump will have the authority to remove those commissioners without cause, making him the de facto overseer. Any leftover cash will be “returned” to the Treasury shortly before Trump leaves office (a detail that tells you everything about who this fund is for and how long the window stays open).

I need to do little editorializing here. This is — by its size, scope, and sheer audacity — one of the most corrupt acts in American history. Full stop.

Trump himself acknowledged the obvious problem in October of last year.

“It’s interesting because I’m the one that makes a decision, right, and, you know, that decision would have to go across my desk,” he told reporters in the Oval Office. “It’s awfully strange to make a decision where I’m paying myself.”

Do we need more of a confession than that?

Even Trump himself, a man with a famously elastic relationship to the concept of conflict of interest, could see that suing his own government and collecting from his own Treasury looked, in his own words, “sort of looks bad.” So his lawyers found a workaround. He will not collect personally, at least not at first. He’ll simply control the spigot; the spigot will pour onto whomever he chooses; and those people will know, forever, who gave them the money and to whom they owe it.

Without a doubt, this will be a foundation for impeachment articles against Donald Trump. But the scale of the corruption is so much bigger than just one man. By doing this, he’s creating a sort of “break-the-law, get-paid” system the likes of which we’ve only seen in the worst, self-serving autocracies.

The American Founders feared this, deeply. The entire architecture of the appropriations power in Article I (the requirement that Congress, not the executive, decide how public money is spent) exists precisely to prevent a president from doing what Donald Trump is about to do. It was to prevent the president from becoming a profligate king and using taxpayer funds to build ballrooms and self deal and direct federal contracts into friendly pockets.

James Madison wrote in Federalist 58 that the power of the purse was “the most complete and effectual weapon” against executive tyranny. Well, Trump is now taking that weapon, pointing it at the Treasury, and telling the guards to open the vault. He’s taking the bags of cash and planning to give them to his fellow criminals. He is — in Madison’s construct — creating tyranny right before our eyes.

As part of this scheme, the people who will get rich from our taxpayer dollars are not whistleblowers, jailed journalists, or Americans whose civil liberties were trampled. They are not protesters who were shot in the streets by DHS agents. No, no. They are people who were prosecuted because they committed crimes. The Jan. 6 defendants were not victims of a “politicized” Department of Justice. They were defendants because they assaulted police officers on live television in front of the entire world.

And now, you, me — anyone who pays taxes — will be paying them for it.

Consider the precedent that this sets. A future president of either party will now have a blueprint to steal billions from the Treasury. Sue the government, settle the suit on your own terms, and stand up a “commission” whose members you can fire at will. But it’s even worse than that. This deal reportedly allows billions of dollars to be handed out in untraceable, undisclosed transactions! Once the U.S. government vaults have been opened for this purpose, they can be opened again and again. The constitutional dam will have been breached.

Put another way, this is the moral architecture of a protection racket. You pay tribute to the boss. The boss makes your problems go away and signs a check. If you cross him, the money stops. But if you stay loyal, the money flows. Every Jan. 6 defendant who pockets a check from this fund will know who signed it, as will every former Trump official he rewards for having been willing to break the law for him and torch the U.S. Constitution in a quixotic quest to remain in power.

Might Trump also use this fund to persuade people to keep breaking the law for him? We’ll see. I know what these offers sound like, because I've gotten one. In early 2019, in a meeting at the U.S. Southern Border, Trump turned to me and other officials and told us to take actions that would have been illegal. We reminded him that we couldn’t do what he was asking. He told us to break the law anyway.

“If you go to jail for it, I’ll pardon you.”

That’s what Trump said to us. We declined. But now he’s adding an incentive plan to such offers. Break the law for me, and I won’t just pardon you — I’ll make you filthy rich!

The Founders gave us a republic, and they warned us, repeatedly, what would end it. Once again, I’ll take us back to the Federalist Papers. Hamilton, in Federalist 65, described the impeachment power as the remedy for “the abuse or violation of some public trust” for offenses “which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust.” There is no clearer abuse of public trust than the conversion of the Treasury into a personal patronage fund in order to enrich his allies and potentially himself.

We’ve crossed a great many lines in the last seventeen months, friends. This one is different. This one is the line between a republic that still pretends to operate on rules and a republic that has openly accepted that the rules are whatever the hell the man at the top says they are. The slush fund is the proof.

We didn’t need any more reasons to throw the bums out this November in the midterm elections. But now we have the biggest one yet, at least in dollars. If Congress does not stop this — which the cowardly and spineless moral contortionists of the MAGA right almost certainly will not — then we need a brand new Congress. The U.S. Treasury is not the president’s personal wallet. And if he makes it one, our representatives should be ready to impeach and remove him.

In the meantime, pay attention to who takes the money. Pay attention to whether anyone declines Trump’s payoffs. History keeps a ledger, and so do we.

Your friend, in defiance,

Miles Taylor

P.S. Miss the most recent DEFIANCE Daily? Our most recent episode is below. Also, don’t forget you can list to DEFIANCE Daily on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts!

P.P.S. What’s coming up? We’re full-time focused on saving the republic. Join us for our next broadcast. Watch LIVE for free. Members get access to the replay.

• DEFIANCE DAILY — Every weeknight @ 5pm ET. Watch our hour-long podcast LIVE on our DEFIANCE.News page, YouTube, or X — and listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts!

• WEEKLY MISSION BRIEFING — Every Wednesday @ 5pm ET. Same ways to watch, above! Replays available afterwards.

• WEEKLY COFFEE — Every Friday @ 2pm ET. Join us on Substack or at DEFIANCE.News for Members-only coffee every Friday at 2p ET. Replays available afterwards.

• MONTHLY MEMBERS-ONLY MEETING — First Wednesday of every month @ 5pm ET. These are sent out the week of, via Zoom. Replays available afterwards.

P.P.P.S. Add us to your calendar. You can access the DEFIANCE.org Google Calendar here or add it to your Outlook/iCal/other calendars here. That way, you’ll never miss a meeting, event, or broadcast.